Political Support and Participation in Canada: Digging Deeper into the Drivers of Unconventional Participation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For the past 40 years, scholars have been concerned with the decreasing electoral turnout in established democracies such as Canada. Around the same time, political participation occurring outside of state-sanctioned avenues – otherwise called unconventional forms of political participation – appeared to be increasing. As citizen participation is a core ingredient of democracy, it is important that we strive to understand how Canadians participate and why. Yet, the literature offers no consensus about what is driving Canadians to what forms of unconventional political participation, nor what that could mean for Canadian democracy. This thesis asks what unconventional political participation looks like in Canada, what drives it, and what the implications of those findings are. Using Easton’s Systems Theory as a framework, this study contextualizes unconventional political participation as a consequence of the larger political system’s outputs to explore the role of political support in the various forms of political participation. The survey data used in the analysis is from the Political Communities Survey Project 2017 dataset. By conducting analyses that consider both voters and nonvoters separately, this thesis demonstrates that Canada is not facing a shift away from electoral participation, but rather a broadening of the repertoire of actions used by citizens who already participate electorally. It also concludes that political support plays a different role in electoral participation than unconventional participation, but that in both cases, increased support generally leads to increased participation. In sum, unconventional participation in Canada is more so evidence of an engaged citizenry than a dissented one.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".