Do citizens benchmark democracy?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abundant research in social science supports the proposition that individuals are sensitive to comparative assessments and use benchmark for evaluation. However, little is known about whether citizens’ political attitudes involve benchmarking against the democratic situation of their neighboring country. The events of January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol Building, which marked the end phase of the Trump administration, provide us with an opportunity to investigate whether citizens’ political attitudes are affected by this type of highly salient event. We suggest that democratic backsliding in a neighboring country can serve as a reference point for citizens to evaluate their own country’s democratic performance. When citizens are aware that the democratic regime of the neighboring country is under threat, we expect they shall see the status quo of their domestic country’s democracy in a comparatively more favorable light. We test this expectation by embedding a factorial experiment in a cross-sectional survey collected in Canada’s 2021 Democracy Checkup gathered by the Consortium on Electoral Democracy, in which respondents are primed to consider a moment of democratic backsliding in the U.S.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.044 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".