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Ten Lessons from Political Science — (TITLE SUGGESTIONS WELCOME) Ten Lessons From Political Science | (TITLE SUGGESTIONS WELCOME) Hans Noel Associate Professor Georgetown University [email protected] Department of Government Intercultural Center 681 Washington, D.C. 20057 DRAFT: PLEASE CONSULT THE AUTHOR BEFORE CITING. May 5, 2017 Table of Contents 1. It's the Fundamentals, Stupid The most important things in determining election outcomes are the fundamentals (state of the economy, partisan breakdown of the constituency, foreign policy success). Political scientists don't think that campaigns don't matter at all, but they mostly matter in close elections and through mobilizing partisan sentiment. 2. You Don't Know WHAT The People Want It's harder than many believe to figure out exactly what people are thinking. 3. You Don't Know What THE PEOPLE Want We may not be able to aggregate preferences coherently anyway. 4. The President is Not Green Lantern. Congress is Not From Schoolhouse Rock. People think the president can just get his way if he has enough \willpower," but in fact, he is actually institutionally very weak. While Schoolhouse Rock's \I'm Just a Bill," is not outright inaccurate, it leaves out all the elements that make politics difficult. 5. Collective Action Problems Even if everyone in the group wants something, it can be very hard for them to coordi- nate to get it. 6. Polarization It's not obvious that polarization is bad, partly because it's not obvious what \polarization" means. 7. There Ain't No Party Like a Political Party Political parties are incredibly important to politics. They are also much less of a reason why bad things happen in a democracy than many Americans think. 8. Duverger. It's the Law The primary reason we have two parties in the United States is our electoral rules, although this relationship is not simple. It's also not obvious that we want more than two parties, although there would be advantages. 9. TBD 10. We Don't Know What You Think You Know Social Science is about asking questions. Sometimes, we get at answers. Sometimes we open up more questions. A lot of the time, we confirm things we think we know but didn't know for sure. 3 Chapter Summaries 1. It's the Fundamentals, Stupid The most important things in determining election outcomes are the fundamentals (state of the economy, partisan breakdown of the constituency, foreign policy success). Political scientists don't think that campaigns don't matter at all, but they mostly matter in close elections and through mobilizing partisan sentiment. 2. You Don't Know What \The People" Want Surveys work, but it's harder than many believe to figure out exactly what people are thinking. 3. You Don't Know What \The People" Want II • Arrow's Theorem and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem suggest that institutions that aggregate preferences are never straightforward. The choice of institutions is subject to trade-offs. • The house (especially with districting), the senate, and the Electoral College are all ways of aggregating preferences, and they can get us to particularly perverse places. Different rules would give us different solutions. Some may be better, none are perfect. • All that taken together, this and the previous chapter imply that there is not obviously a \mandate" for anything, but politicians will assert that there is. NOTE: These last two chapters were originally one, but now they aren't. Could recombine 4. The President is Not Green Lantern. Congress is Not From Schoolhouse Rock. • People think the president can just get his way if he has enough \willpower," but in fact, he is actually institutionally very weak. Similarly, the minority party in the Congress can't get what they want just by trying hard. • While Schoolhouse Rock's \I'm Just a Bill," is not outright inaccurate, it leaves out all the elements that make politics difficult. • The theme of this chapter is institions matter, but also they aren't the only thing that matters. For the presidency, emphasis on the problems with the \Green Lantern" theory of the presidency (that if only the president had more willpower, all would be better.). For the Congress, emphasis on how parties, interest groups, and policy advocates shape the agenda, orchestrate logrolls and everything else. NOTE: Perhaps this is two different chapters? I think a lot of these points overlap, but it may make sense to break it apart 4 5. Collective Action Problems Even if everyone in the group wants something, it can be very hard for them to coordi- nate to get it. NOTE: Perhaps this can be folded into the Parties chapter? 6. Polarization It's not obvious that polarization is bad, partly because it's not obvi- ous what \polarization" means. Polarization might mean as many as five different things. • Increasing extremism • Fewer moderates (but without any more extremism) • Increased constraint • Increased sorting (by ideology and party, for example) • Increased hostility toward the other side (affective polarization or negative parti- sanship) Evidence for these things is tricky to find and sometimes hard to distinguish. But the best evidence is for constraint, sorting and hostility, especially among the more politically sophisticated. • Do we think constraint is bad? Not necessarily. It might mean more ideologically consistent thinking • Do we think sorting is bad? It can make compromise bad, but it also makes evaluating candidates easier. See for instance the APSA commission report on political parties? • Do we think hostility is bad? Probably. Bonus: What causes polarization? We don't agree, but it's probably not gerrymandering. 7. There Ain't No Party Like a Political Party Because a Political Party Don't Stop Political parties are much more important to politics than most people think. They are also much less of a reason why bad things happen in a democracy than many Americans think. This chapter will include treatment of parties as coalitions, and thus party realignment. The chapter will also discuss the relationship between ideology and parties, and the differences between intra-party and inter-party democracy 8. Duverger. It's the Law. The primary reason we have two parties in the United States is our electoral rules, although this relationship is not simple. It's also not obvious that we want more than two parties, although there would be advantages. 9. TO BE DETERMINED. Candidates include: • Breaking Green Lantern/Schoolhouse Rock into two pieces 5 • Elites: Important political decisions are made by politically engaged people, which political scientists call \elites." • Federalism: Modern federalism is a recipe or a marble cake or something you might eat. • Grass-roots activism is never spontaneous. • House districting, the Senate and the Electoral College give us particular outcomes that aren't necessarily representative. We can identify the bias (take this out of chapter 3). • Money in politics. Does it buy influence? • Other suggestions? 10. We Don't Know What You Think You Know Social Science is about asking questions. Sometimes, we get at answers (just like climate change and evolution), but we also aren't sure about some things. 6 Introduction I decided to write this book when I realized I was no longer watching the news. I used to be a political news junkie. I'd watch the nightly news and read a daily newspaper. In fact I once worked for a daily newspaper. I still keep up with the news, I suppose, but I find I need to read between the lines a lot more than I used to. Probably I should have been doing that before, too. The facts might be right, but political news so often focuses on the wrong facts. Take coverage of campaigns. Political campaigns are the spectacle of electoral politics, but not everything that happens in them matters in the same way. One staple of campaign coverage is the gaffe story. A candidate says something that, to at least someone, comes off as insensitive or malicious or even stupid. In 2008, then candidate for the Democratic nomination Barack Obama said that many rural voters \cling to guns or religion." In 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney said his campaign shouldn't worry about appealing to the \47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what." In 2016, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton said \you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables." The media turned all of these lines into big stories. But it's unlikely that they mattered all that much. This is because most voters come to the political news with predispositions about the candidates. Democratic voters are inclined to believe the worst about Republicans and to give Democrats a pass. Republican voters do the reverse. Voters without prior loyalties don't 1 tend to pay much attention to the campaign, and would likely miss the story altogether. The net effect is that very few who hear about a gaffe will be influenced by it, and very few who might be influenced about it hear about it. It's not even clear that partisans are wrong to do this. In context, the Obama and Clinton gaffes were really efforts to get their audience to empathize with the people they appeared to denigrate.1 Romney was trying to persuade his audience to shift their attention to winnable voters. All three were in effect saying, \yes, there are voters with whom we really disagree, but there are others we shouldn't write off.” Almost literally the opposite of the spin. Partisans who want to can easily forgive them for inartful phrasing. This doesn't mean the gaffes didn't reveal anything. Liberals and conservatives differ on what causes people to have problems.
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