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Record W4409880552 · doi:10.3138/jcs-2025-0212

Political Trust and Democracy: Canada in Comparative Perspective

2025· article· en· W4409880552 on OpenAlexaffvenueabout
Andrew Dawson

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Canadian Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPolitical Systems and Governance
Canadian institutionsYork University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPoliticsDemocracyPerspective (graphical)Political scienceSociologyPolitical economyPublic administrationLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Rising polarization, disinformation, and populist anti-system movements have contributed to a state of uncertainty for democracy. Some scholars suggest that many countries are experiencing democratic backsliding and declining public support for democracy, while others argue these trends are overstated or mismeasured. Alongside this debate, political trust is being examined with increasing concern, with cross-national research among democracies signaling a trend of declining trust in partisan political institutions yet stability in less partisan institutions. This paper examines these issues in the Canadian context, analyzing data on democratic backsliding and political trust. Findings suggest that, unlike many other countries, Canada has not experienced democratic erosion, with its democracy score showing a slight increase over the past decade. Political trust levels remain relatively high, though trends in trust, particularly in the police, warrant further scrutiny. While Canada appears resilient, trends in polarization and populism raise questions about whether its stability will persist in the long term.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.008
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.109
Threshold uncertainty score0.788

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.008
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0060.020
Science and technology studies0.0080.003
Scholarly communication0.0050.002
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.042
GPT teacher head0.363
Teacher spread0.321 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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