The Economist reports:
OF ALL the theories to explain the unexpected success of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, this, surely, is the most novel. Forget about a disaffected working class buffeted by globalisation and automation, pent-up racial resentments finding an outlet or the advent of the 24-hour news cycle. No: in the assessment of Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, it’s the political scientists who are to blame.
Although clearly tongue-in-cheek, this hypothesis sounds less absurd now than it would have done before 2008, the year that four American academics brought out a book called “The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform” (TPD). The book’s main thesis is that political parties have formidable power to influence voters in presidential primaries.
There's more:
The first panic bells went off after his dominating performance in the New Hampshire primaries, which occurred in tandem with Bernie Sanders’s trouncing of Hillary Clinton, the establishment favourite. (“Bad Night for ‘The Party Decides’,” Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker tweeted as the polls were closing.) Mr Trump’s thumping win in South Carolina forced Jeb Bush, the original leader in the Republican “endorsement primary”, out of the race, setting off a new wave of sober predictions that the party would now clear the field for Marco Rubio to eviscerate Mr Trump one-on-one. Then came Mr Trump’s 22-percentage-point win in Nevada, his victories in seven of the 11 Super Tuesday states and the continuing division of his opposition. Since late February the very Republican governors and senators who previously swore he had to be stopped have begun to offer him their endorsements. There isn’t much time left for TPD to be proved right.
Is political science scientific?
For data journalists, however, the stakes are higher. Mainstream audiences will not be satisfied with excuses or technicalities: the best and the brightest said that Mr Trump could never win, and it looks as if they were wrong. One crucial corrective would be to actually read the original versions of academic political-science texts rather than relying on caveat-free summaries: a close reading of TPD applied to the 2016 Republican race might have been entitled “The Party Hasn’t Decided, So Anything Goes”. Another would be to take a nibble of humble pie and recall that there is a reason “political science” sounds like an oxymoron: there are no iron laws in politics. There is only so much a study of ten primary campaigns between 1980 and 2004 can tell people about a new set of circumstances and candidates in 2016.
Do you really want to rely on 10 campaigns for statistical significance?
