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Record W4412362696 · doi:10.1080/25741292.2025.2529624

Beyond evidentiary uncertainty: mitigating political risks in policy designs

2025· article· en· W4412362696 on OpenAlexaff
Michael Howlett, Andrea Migone

Bibliographic record

VenuePolicy Design and Practice · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPolitical and Economic history of UK and US
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPoliticsLaw and economicsRisk analysis (engineering)Political scienceBusinessEconomicsLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Policy designs occur within complex environments where multiple actors, conflicting goals and multi-layered opportunity-cost calculations must be accounted for before, during and after a decision is made. Here we propose a useful framework to employ in managing the political and administrative uncertainties accompanying these activities and identifying what kind of design is desirable in any given circumstance. This brings together two dimensions or attributes of the decisional context: the administrative capacity of the organization and the political desirability of a specific choice and especially the distribution of blame and credit that any choice is likely to carry. The article outlines each of these dimensions and how the risks and uncertainties attached to each can be mitigated through the design process.

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)0.149
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.264
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.149
Threshold uncertainty score0.786

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.1490.264
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.002
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.002
Bibliometrics0.0050.003
Science and technology studies0.0090.039
Scholarly communication0.0230.025
Open science0.0040.016
Research integrity0.0110.012
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

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 head0.125
GPT teacher head0.436
Teacher spread0.311 · 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 designTheoretical or conceptual
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

Citations4
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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