If you’re trying to understand US Presidential election results, you can explain a lot of variance if you just assume that about 40% of voters will favor the Republican, 40% favor the Democrat, and the rest tend towards the incumbent but will shift their vote depending on how things are going in the country. Which is what you might expect in a country with a two-party system and voters who don’t follow politics very closely. Mapping out political arguments over specific issues in detail can have some value, but it’s probably not going to do much to explain election results.
I’m trying to understand them in a rational context. Most years, that pattern made some kind of sense—the major candidates were both lizards, neither one obviously better or worse than the other.
Continuing to vote along party lines after 3 years of experience with Bush, however, is a different beast. Either people were simply unaware of many of the key points (or possibly were aware of positive points unknown to anyone that I talked to), or else they were using an entirely different process for evaluating presidential fitness. In the former case, we have a problem; in the latter, something worthy of study.
I think your method works better as an attempt to engage in politics without having your mind killed (avoiding the mistakes that are typical of the political world) than as a way to explain real-world political outcomes. If you want more a detailed explanation of a particular election than the structural account in my last comment, I’d offer something like this:
In 2004, the campaign involved a lot of noise and harsh criticisms of both candidates, and it wasn’t easy to filter out the accurate, damning criticisms of Bush from the rest. This would be especially hard for voters who were inclined to trust Bush over Kerry, and the post-9/11 rally-around-the-flag effect (along with the tendency for Republicans to be more trusted on national defense and patriotism) meant that a lot of voters at least started out with an inclination to trust Bush, especially on the salient issue of national defense. Plus, many of the bad things about Bush also cast the country in a bad light, which meant that voters’ natural defensiveness would kick in.
The focus is on voters’ perceptions, trying to analyze them like a social scientist, rather than more rigorously evaluating the content of political arguments.
That’s actually my main goal, at least now—to be able to make rational decisions about political issues. This necessarily involves achieving some understanding of the methods by which voter perceptions are manipulated, but that is a means to an end.
In 2004, I thought it entirely possible that I was simply highly biased in some hitherto unnoticed way, and I wanted to come to some understanding of why half the country apparently thought Bush worthy of being in office at all, never mind thinking that he was a better choice than Kerry.
I was prepared to find that there were certain values which I did not share but could at least respect. What I found was… quite incredible: a large part of the population seems to implicitly believe that it’s more important for someone (or some small group) to have power than it is for that person or group to have the first clue about how to use that power.
Outright lies are apparently an acceptable method for reinforcing that power, as long as they work. Claiming the Constitution as the basis for your actions, while subtly working to undermine every protection it provides, is also acceptable. Displays of “strength” and power are more important than displays of intelligence or judgment.
While a large segment of the population does not follow these values, the very existence of these values unfortunately warps the whole dialogue to the point where they are seen as a reasonable position—even though they obviously are not—and the best “compromise” is therefore perceived as being somewhere about halfway between rationality and utter insanity.
This is obviously a problem.
What I am trying to do now is find a process by which non-privileged citizens can make the “best” possible policy decisions—where I propose “best possible policy decisions” should mean something like “decisions which cause the least individual harm while maximizing society’s overall progress towards whatever goals we can all agree are acceptable”—and be able to do so even in the face of the disinformation presented by the insane viewpoint described above (and to avoid the temptation of the “fallacy of moderation” in negotiating with it).
This process is presumed to be rational in nature—perhaps by definition, since rationality is essentially “best practices in the area of thinking”.
but it’s probably not going to do much to explain election results.
If I understand correctly, that’s not the goal in the first place. The goal is to map out issues, evidence, arguments, values, etc. in a way that is much more rigorous than most voters’ thought processes, so as to help participants improve their own clarity on such issues. Clearly that won’t be a good way to model the mind of a typical voter or average voter behaviour, but I would doubt anyone would suggest using it for that.
If you’re trying to understand US Presidential election results, you can explain a lot of variance if you just assume that about 40% of voters will favor the Republican, 40% favor the Democrat, and the rest tend towards the incumbent but will shift their vote depending on how things are going in the country. Which is what you might expect in a country with a two-party system and voters who don’t follow politics very closely. Mapping out political arguments over specific issues in detail can have some value, but it’s probably not going to do much to explain election results.
I’m trying to understand them in a rational context. Most years, that pattern made some kind of sense—the major candidates were both lizards, neither one obviously better or worse than the other.
Continuing to vote along party lines after 3 years of experience with Bush, however, is a different beast. Either people were simply unaware of many of the key points (or possibly were aware of positive points unknown to anyone that I talked to), or else they were using an entirely different process for evaluating presidential fitness. In the former case, we have a problem; in the latter, something worthy of study.
I think your method works better as an attempt to engage in politics without having your mind killed (avoiding the mistakes that are typical of the political world) than as a way to explain real-world political outcomes. If you want more a detailed explanation of a particular election than the structural account in my last comment, I’d offer something like this:
In 2004, the campaign involved a lot of noise and harsh criticisms of both candidates, and it wasn’t easy to filter out the accurate, damning criticisms of Bush from the rest. This would be especially hard for voters who were inclined to trust Bush over Kerry, and the post-9/11 rally-around-the-flag effect (along with the tendency for Republicans to be more trusted on national defense and patriotism) meant that a lot of voters at least started out with an inclination to trust Bush, especially on the salient issue of national defense. Plus, many of the bad things about Bush also cast the country in a bad light, which meant that voters’ natural defensiveness would kick in.
The focus is on voters’ perceptions, trying to analyze them like a social scientist, rather than more rigorously evaluating the content of political arguments.
That’s actually my main goal, at least now—to be able to make rational decisions about political issues. This necessarily involves achieving some understanding of the methods by which voter perceptions are manipulated, but that is a means to an end.
In 2004, I thought it entirely possible that I was simply highly biased in some hitherto unnoticed way, and I wanted to come to some understanding of why half the country apparently thought Bush worthy of being in office at all, never mind thinking that he was a better choice than Kerry.
I was prepared to find that there were certain values which I did not share but could at least respect. What I found was… quite incredible: a large part of the population seems to implicitly believe that it’s more important for someone (or some small group) to have power than it is for that person or group to have the first clue about how to use that power.
Outright lies are apparently an acceptable method for reinforcing that power, as long as they work. Claiming the Constitution as the basis for your actions, while subtly working to undermine every protection it provides, is also acceptable. Displays of “strength” and power are more important than displays of intelligence or judgment.
While a large segment of the population does not follow these values, the very existence of these values unfortunately warps the whole dialogue to the point where they are seen as a reasonable position—even though they obviously are not—and the best “compromise” is therefore perceived as being somewhere about halfway between rationality and utter insanity.
This is obviously a problem.
What I am trying to do now is find a process by which non-privileged citizens can make the “best” possible policy decisions—where I propose “best possible policy decisions” should mean something like “decisions which cause the least individual harm while maximizing society’s overall progress towards whatever goals we can all agree are acceptable”—and be able to do so even in the face of the disinformation presented by the insane viewpoint described above (and to avoid the temptation of the “fallacy of moderation” in negotiating with it).
This process is presumed to be rational in nature—perhaps by definition, since rationality is essentially “best practices in the area of thinking”.
If I understand correctly, that’s not the goal in the first place. The goal is to map out issues, evidence, arguments, values, etc. in a way that is much more rigorous than most voters’ thought processes, so as to help participants improve their own clarity on such issues. Clearly that won’t be a good way to model the mind of a typical voter or average voter behaviour, but I would doubt anyone would suggest using it for that.