Things Political Scientists Know (2010) [pdf]

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/hcn4/Downloads/Noel_Forum.PDF

by bane • 12 years ago

31 62 12 years ago

faculty.georgetown.edu

soneca• 12 years ago

And the clickbait-title virus contaminates academic papers.

tboyd475• 12 years ago

"People would probably be better off if they knew more than they do about a lot of things (or at least, I am assuming so, though there is research on this sort of thing). Politics might, however, be the last thing on that list... and yet, politics is the one area in which we get irritated when other people are apathetic or ignorant."

In America, anyway -- I don't know about other democratic countries -- this is so true. And as an apathetic person, let me say that it's so satisfying to hear a voice in political science say it.

People seem to have this superstitious obsession with the democratic ritual. The act of filling in a circle in a ballot box is so important to them that they just cannot accept the fact that someone would choose not to participate.

This way of thinking makes less sense to me than someone who's fanatic about a sports team. If you tell a fan of a football team that you don't watch football, at least he'll respect this about you. Try telling some party activist that you don't vote and see if they ever let it go.

Edit: my post is being downvoted to oblivion anyway, but removed some hyperbolic language that wasn't helping my case.

JoeAltmaier2• 12 years ago

"Completely symbolic and pointless"? I call cynicism.

innguest6• 12 years ago

It's symbolic because you can only choose who to vote on out of the options presented to you.

It's pointless because (at least in the US) the government has too much power and it sells that power to lobbyists.

erehweb• 12 years ago

Are you apathetic to: - whether your fellow countrymen go to war? - who gets to marry? - abortion rights?

If you are, then that's your right, but please don't act surprised when people who care about these things get irritated.

tboyd475• 12 years ago

What I am apathetic to is which liar gets elected into office, the red liar or the blue liar? What surprises me is that people seem to have an irrational trust in these political figures.

innguest6• 12 years ago

I'm not the OP but what do those issues have to do with voting as voting currently works?

And why do you think it's warranted to be deciding how other people live their lives? What is "to get married" and why is it that a decision between two people needs to be chosen by you through "voting"?

Regarding war, why do you think anyone has the right to force young men to engage in a war they didn't start? Don't those young men own their own lives?

And so on and so forth. I'm not apathetic to any of those things but they're not solved (as can be seen in reality: they haven't been solved) by "voting".

pitt19807• 12 years ago

here's what bothers me about this

as a voter I such a microscopically small degree of contol of any of those questions (functionally 0), that they don't seem productive to even care about

if I care about them, then I have to get upset when things don't go my way, I have to either get into arguments with people I know or actively try to avoid arguments

where is the net positive?

bcoates• 12 years ago

You realize that two out of three of those issues are archtype culture war distraction issues, right? Political types call them 'squirrels'. They're a great way to get people to watch your network, vote for your candidate, or kill an inconvenient web browser.

MarkPNeyer• 12 years ago

politics is the primary mechanism by which society regulates its emotion. people get emotional when you say that you don't follow politics because that is how the 'politics' mechanism operates. people express anger outwards - at the out groups who are seen as 'not helping' - and upwards, where it is packaged and managed by people who are capable of handling intensely powerful emotions - many of them are sociopaths, who simply don't care.

try watching house of cards with the 'politics as emotional transfer mechanism' model running. see how many decisions are made on the basis of creating or moving jobs. having a job makes people calm. not having a job makes them worried.

you can start to view the capital building as the 'central emotional processor' of the nation, where emotions are packed up in intense chunks and moved around between people who believe they are just trying to get more power, but are effectively reducing emotional tension.

tboyd475• 12 years ago

Nice analysis.

aestra3• 12 years ago

People tend to think the things they really care about should be universal. You see it all the time here with the "everyone should learn how to program" camp.

jobu2• 12 years ago

"Is the Tea Party a “real” movement, or is it “astroturf”? The speed at which this debate is bouncing around partisan circles is shocking, considering how silly the question is. If a movement is astroturf if some outside force is organizing it, then all movements are astroturf."

This seems like a non-sequitur. Grassroots vs astroturf movements differ based on what's in the best self-interest of the majority of it's members. Or in some cases, astroturf means they actually have no members - only PR specialists bombarding politicians and newspapers with letters from supposedly "real people".

randallsquared• 12 years ago

Grassroots vs astroturf movements differ based on what's in the best self-interest of the majority of it's members.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. It sounds like you plan to calculate the "best self-interest" of members of a group, and then distinguish by whether the group's aims appear to further the result of your assessment. Is that right?

jobu2• 12 years ago

The article is probably right about it being difficult to define what is in the best interests of a large group, but it seems pretty obvious that civil-rights movements are by definition in the best self-interest of the majority of their members. (Think the women's suffrage movement of the early 1900's, the racial equality movement in the 1960s, or the current marriage rights movement for LGBT couples.)

The Tea Party seems a little harder to tell. Some are obviously in it for fiscal self-interest (upper and middle class people that want lower taxes). However, there are some in the Tea Party because they fear government intervention even though they obviously benefit from Social Security, Medicare, etc. (At least some of that is caused by fear mongering and twisted truths from Tea Party leaders.)

Millennium• 12 years ago

But who defines the self-interest of the majority of the membership? Tea Party proponents and opponents, when taken as groups, seem to have very different visions of what constitutes the self-interest of Tea Party members.

the_af• 12 years ago

The article is arguing that it's legitimate to be concerned about who the organizers are, their motives and their tactics. The only silly question is asking whether there are "outside force" organizers, because that's always true for every movement and protest (regardless of whether the organizers want to operate secretly or openly).

It also argues (in this and other points) that it's very difficult to ascertain what the "best interests" of the majority are, and whether there is a cohesive majority at all. For example, it argues that within many anti-war movements there are subgroups with different opinions on tactics and even end goals.

IMO, the problem with the Tea Party (which I'm less familiar with) and some so-called "spontaneus and apolitical" movements in my own country, is precisely that they claim to be apolitical, spontaneus (as if ordinary working people one day woke up and decided to start a movement) and outside the political establishment, when in fact the ringleaders and organizers are often the same old politicians operating less openly. They seek the legitimacy they cannot get through votes by pretending it's not them who are organizing the movement/protest, but "the people", and that they just merely support it.

indymike• 12 years ago

As soon as a group starts having members, there's really no difference between an "astroturf" movement and a "grass roots" movement. Membership is determined by the same exact factors: member support for the movement, effectiveness of the movement in organizing and relative success in getting the message out. It's the difference between a tomato and a tomatoe.

Most grass roots movements start with a some funds and a few interested people who get members to join and support their movement so they can afford the PR people and lobbyists they need...

TeMPOraL4• 12 years ago

I have a simple distinction - grassroots = made by people who genuinly care, astroturf = made by liars and cheats. I find it to be a harmful practice with huge externalities - namely deteriorating people's trust in grassroot movements and communities.

frequentflyeru• 12 years ago

I'll just wait for the buzzfeed version.

asgard10242• 12 years ago

This seems to me as a "standard" intelectual-elitist paper which tries to insinuate that democracy, where people really decide the issues, cannot work. I haven't read it very deeply but the fact that he quotes Walter Lippmann says that lot.

Also, I think he misrepresents Arrow's theorem. First of all, it applies only to ordering of preferences; if you allow preferences to be number from interval, such as range voting does, there is no problem. Second, the non-dictatorship criterion is a bit disingenuous, because who is dictator depends on their own preferences - just like majority vote is not "dictatorship of the majority".

jarin• 12 years ago

I gotta say, I'm impressed by how you've turned "intelectual" into a pejorative.

asgard10242• 12 years ago

I really didn't - I wrote "intelectual-elitist". It's their choice to have disgusting opinions. Perhaps I am too cynical, I have been reading too much Chomsky lately. :-)

Edit: Let me give you a Chomsky quote:

"Actually, I should say, the term "manufacturing consent" is not mine, I took it from Walter Lippmann, the leading public intellectual and leading media figure of the twentieth century, who thought it was a great idea. He said we should manufacture consent, that's the way democracies should work. There should be a small group of powerful people, and the rest of the population should be spectators, and you should force them to consent by controlling, regimenting their minds. That's the leading idea of democratic theorists, and the public relations industry and so on, so I'm not making it up. In fact, I'm just borrowing their conception, and telling other people what they think."

This is what the paper appears to be advocating, as well.

diziet• 12 years ago

According to game theory in a two party system the two candidates will tend to converge in the middle (assuming single issue distribution).

Things Political Scientists Know (2010) [pdf]

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