(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
I regularly read the Orgtheory blog which has interesting perspectives from sociologists. Today I saw this, from Sean Safford:
I [Safford] actually hold to the idea that the winning candidate for President is always the one who has a clearer view of the challenges and opportunities facing the country and articulates a viable roadmap for how to navigate them.
I disagree entirely. I think Safford’s view is naive and it is based on the idea that the outcome of the election is determined by the candidates and the campaign. In contrast, I believe the political science research that says that economic conditions are the most important factor determining the election outcome. You could go through election after election and be hard-pressed to make the case that the winning candidate had a clearer view of the challenges etc. Sure, you can find some examples: arguably Reagan had a clearer view than Carter, and Obama had a clearer view than McCain, and . . . ummmm, maybe that’s about it. Or maybe not. You could make a pretty good argument for either candidate in most elections, from 1948 onward.
Also Safford should really really watch out about that “always.” In the postwar period, there have been three elections that were essentially ties: 1960, 1968, and 2000. Even if you want to make the case (a case that I completely disagree with) that presidential elections are won by candidates expressing a clearer view and a more viable roadmap, still, you can’t hope to think that this will work every time, not given that some elections are basically coin flips.
The above fallacies—the idea that elections are determined by candidates and campaigns, and the idea that there is some key by which the election outcome can be known deterministically—appear a lot in political journalism, and my colleagues and I spend a bit of time at the sister blog explaining why they’re wrong. I don’t usually see academic researchers making these errors, though.
I looked up Safford and he’s done a lot of qualitative work on labor and social networks. This is important stuff, and I expect that if I started opining on the effects of labor union strategies, I’d be about as confused as Safford is when writing about electoral politics. So I’d like to emphasize that I’m not trying to slam the guy for making this mistake. We all make mistakes, and what’s a blog for, if not to put some of our more casual speculations out for general criticism. (In contrast, I was more annoyed a few years ago when political theorist David Runciman had the BBC as his platform for spreading pundit-level errors about U.S. public opinion.) So, no hard feelings, it’s just interesting to see an academic make a mistake that I usually associate with pundits.
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