How we think about the political stances of others: evidence on projection from Canada, Germany, and the UK
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
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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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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