Citizens and the public perception of lobbying: do regulation and trust in political institutions make a difference?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In political studies, lobbying is portrayed as a vital process of political participation, contributing information, policy capacities, and political capital to policymaking, but also as a potential source of representation biases, undue influence, and policy capture. Given such Janus-faced nature of lobbying within democracy, the primary aim of this article is to investigate which perception prevails among citizens empirically. By analysing the primary data of two surveys of 4000 Canadian and 1600 Swiss citizens, it investigates the public perception of lobbying across countries with contrasting institutional and regulatory frameworks and different levels of trust in political institutions. Results show that citizens' perception of lobbying differs in the two contexts, being predominantly negative in Switzerland and positive in Canada. Additionally, Swiss citizens are significantly more likely than Canadians to view lobbying as inadequately regulated. Both trust in political institutions and the perception that lobbying is properly regulated have a significant and positive impact on the perception of lobbying. Interestingly, despite Switzerland's higher levels of trust in political institutions than Canada, this trust does not translate into a more positive perception of lobbying, suggesting that robust regulations may play a more decisive role than institutional trust in shaping public perceptions.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it