How do Elites View Public Opinion on International Aid?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This preregistration outlines a cross-national study on how politicians perceive public opinion on foreign aid. The study will be part of the 2025 POLPOP 3 survey and will be administered to both politicians (“the elite sample”) and members of the general public (“the citizen sample”) across Israel, Canada, Germany, UK, Australia, Belgium, Norway, and Switzerland. Our central goal is to measure: 1. The actual distribution of public preferences regarding foreign aid (via citizen surveys). 2. Politicians’ beliefs about these public preferences— both their current beliefs and their beliefs five years from now. 3. The role of politicians’ foreign policy engagement on their estimates of public opinion. 4. The extent to which politicians’ own policy preferences influence their estimates of public opinion (i.e., projection bias) and whether this relationship differs between the foreign policy domain and the domestic policy domain. By comparing the extent to which politicians’ personal opinions predict their estimates of public sentiment in both a foreign policy issue (foreign aid) and domestic policy issues, our study will assess whether the underlying cognitive processes differ between the two domains. For domestic issues, politicians tend to have a close connection to everyday concerns, making it more likely that they assume the public shares their own views—a phenomenon known as projection bias. In contrast, foreign policy matters are more abstract and specialized; as a result, politicians may be less inclined to directly project their personal opinions and instead rely on broader assumptions or stereotypes (i.e., believing that the public is more inward-looking). This comparative approach will help us determine if misperceptions in foreign policy are driven more by these generalized assumptions rather than by a straightforward reflection of politicians’ own views.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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.
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".