The Perils and Promise of Political Science Oversimplifications

The rather epic fail by a regular at the top of this thread is amusing, but I actually think there’s an important lesson to be extracted from the wreckage. Political science blogs have had the salutary effect of convincing some politically aware readers — either directly or indirectly through some journalists who have been introduced to the evidence — that in presidential elections the media has tended to overrate the importance of campaign minutia and underrate the importance of fundamental factors like the state of the economy and incumbency. If you were forced to reduce presidential elections to a single factor, you’d certainly choose “economic fundamentals” rather than Politico-style emphasis on campaign trivia and long-forgotten minor political squabbles.

There is a danger here, however, of an oversimplified conventional wisdom that goes too far in the other direction. Johnathan Bernstein sums it up very effectively here:

So, again: there are campaign effects and fundamentals. Campaign effects themselves include various things — issue positions, ads, the candidates, GOTV and other mobilization efforts, and more. Fundamentals include political context stuff and performance stuff, of which the economy has turned out to date to be by far the biggest. The overall finding has been that fundamentals matter more than campaign effects, but that campaign effects are real — but given that overall campaign effects are of limited (but real!) importance, it’s going to be very hard for any specific campaign action, an ad or a debate quip or an issue, to do all that much.

In an election like 2008, the “fundamentals determine elections” shorthand works well enough at least in accounting for the result; given minimal competence by the Obama campaign McCain was drawing dead no matter what tactics he chose. But in a closer election, campaigns certainly do matter. And the 2000 election is an excellent case in point. The fundamentals favored Gore — less than you might expect, as voters gave him less credit than they would an actual incumbent president, but enough that ceteris paribus Gore would have won by a margin that the combined efforts of Katherine Harris, Antonin Scalia, and Ralph Nader could not have outweighed. But all things weren’t equal, because campaigns are not entirely irrelevant. The perception of the electorate that Bush was closer to the center than Gore mostly negated Gore’s edge in fundamentals, producing an election close enough that a bunch of factors that would normally be irrelevant to the outcome — media coverage, the Supreme Court, third party vanity campaigns — ended up swinging the result.

I would say something similar, incidentally, about political science and the Supreme Court. I’m glad that the attitudinal model is getting attention from journalists, because if the public was going to absorb one oversimplification about the Supreme Court I’d much rather it be “Ruth Bader Ginsburg votes the way she does because she’s a liberal Democrat, and John Roberts votes the way he does because he’s a conservative Republican” than “Supreme Court justices merely apply the law, humble umpires just calling balls and strikes.” But the reality is more complex than either simplification, and sometimes these complexities become relevant to the most interesting and important cases.