Representation at the margins: Partisan politics and public money in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This doctoral dissertation is a study of how political parties inï¬uence budgetary policy in Canada. It includes three empirical chapters that look at different aspects of partisan representation. Taken together, these chapters shed light on the role of parties and institutions in policy. In the ï¬rst manuscript, we provide a comprehensive classiï¬cation of ridings that identiï¬es electoral strongholds and battlegrounds. We show how party support stability can be explained by the presence of certain socio-economic characteristics. This ï¬rst piece ï¬lls a gap in the literature on electoral politics by focusing exclusively on meso-level representation of voters' interests. Building on what is found in this ï¬rst manuscript and the literature on the role of parties in budgetary politics, the second manuscript tests empirically for the existence of partisan effects in budgetary policy between governing parties and across party systems at the federal level. The results suggest that governing parties show partisan differences in spending that are consistent with their electoral incentives. This second piece also makes an important methodological contribution to the discipline, offering a robust and versatile model speciï¬cation that is exportable to other parliamentary systems. It is impossible to fully understand the impact of federalism on public spending if one looks only at the federal government since part of the budgetary story occurs at the provincial level. The third manuscript complements the ï¬ndings of the second by looking at provincial budgetary policy. We ï¬rst measure the magnitude of policy convergence between provinces in taxing and spending. Then we test for the presence of a partisan effect despite policy convergence. We ï¬nd evidence in support of both effects.There is a fertile literature in political science that argues that parties do not matter as much as they should in Canada. This dissertation provides an in-depth analysis of partisan representation that contradicts this position. It shows that parties play a signiï¬cant role in budgetary policy, if only at the margins.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".