Canada’s Shadow Workforce: The Effects of Military Privatization on Political Behaviour and Authority within Liberal-Democratic States, and their Implications for International Security
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study looks at the effects of military privatization on political behaviour and authority within liberal-democratic states. In particular, amid a global growth in the private military industry, it examines how private contractors are perceived by the public, the mechanisms involved, and whether hiring them for military operations truly lowers political risks and masks state authority. These latter effects are often stated benefits of contracting out, but they are understudied in a Canadian context, despite having significant implications for democratic systems and the exercise of state power. To bridge this gap, this study develops a novel "symbolic capital typology" divided along three key dimensions – soldier/contractor, domestic/foreign, and combat/non-combat – to describe the expected relationships between different foreign policy actors and how they might be perceived by the public. It hypothesizes that contractors will be viewed differently than soldiers; this will stem from negative contractor perceptions and a lack of transparency, which reduce their "symbolic capital" relative to other foreign policy actors; and these differences will distort subsequent preferences and political outcomes by separating the public from the true costs or burdens of foreign policy decisions – an effect that lowers political risks and masks state authority. In testing these hypotheses, this study conducts a nationwide survey of almost 5,000 Canadians to examine actor perceptions and levels of transparency while also gauging their effects on foreign policy preferences, political risks, and state authority. It finds that while a simple soldier/contractor dichotomy is insufficient to account for the times in which the "symbolic weight" of these actors overlaps, generally contractors are still viewed far more negatively than soldiers. Actor-type, therefore, matters in public perceptions of foreign policy and in preference articulation, but this has limits. When controlling for transparency, negative contractor perceptions only have an effect on issues of contract spending and support for war, but this is not overly pronounced. Instead, if contractors lower political risks, this seems to stem less from negative perceptions of them being "guns for hire" and more from institutional factors that reduce their visibility and "symbolic weight" relative to soldiers, which has implications for both Canada and abroad.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".