How we think about the political stances of others: evidence on projection from Canada, Germany, and the UK
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What leads people to assume that others are more or less similar to them ideologically? To answer this question, this article uses original data from three multi-party democracies to analyse respondents’ assumptions about the ideological proximity of hypothetical voters. In doing so, it focusses on an underexamined psychological mechanism in political science research – projection onto in-group members – with the aim of extending our understanding of the factors shaping second-order political beliefs. The article empirically assesses the impact of this mechanism, using an original survey experiment fielded in Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom to examine the effect of shared partisanship and overlapping demographic markers on presumed ideological similarity. Results suggest that in all three countries, shared group membership plays an important role in shaping second-order political beliefs, though the effect of socio-demographic similarity is only robust in the absence of a clear partisan affiliation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".