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Record W4416219441 · doi:10.1093/polsoc/puaf002

Kicked cans and poison pills: third generation policy advisory system studies and the management of quality political advice

2025· article· en· W4416219441 on OpenAlexaff
Andrea Migone, Michael Howlett

Bibliographic record

VenuePolicy and Society · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPolicy Transfer and Learning
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPoliticsBlameGovernment (linguistics)Advice (programming)Quality (philosophy)Process (computing)Political system

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract The decision-making process in government is influenced by a complex system of policy advice, which affects both the kinds of advice solicited and how it is received. Previous first and second generation studies of these policy advisory systems (PAS) focused primarily on identifying the structures and dynamics of advisory relationships in different contexts and jurisdictions. However, managing these systems to inform policy (in)action is now a major area of interest. This “3rd generation” of inquiry looks at system quality and how to measure and manage it. This includes how to manage political risk and inform strategies to address political concerns, such as deferring responsibility to future governments (“kicking the can down the road”) or leaving them unfunded mandates (“poison pills”). Third generation studies of policy advice systems need to consider how advice on such strategies is created and transmitted and not focus exclusively upon advice on management issues concerned with program efficacy and efficiency. That is, a high-quality PAS must manage both technical and political risks and deal with calculations of political blame and credit advice just as they have looked at the costs and benefits of alternate policy arrangements in the past.

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.876
Threshold uncertainty score0.933

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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 head0.051
GPT teacher head0.405
Teacher spread0.353 · 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 teacher head, 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

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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