I come to the London Review of Books for the interesting essays on history and literature; I stay for the prospect of overeducated people saying silly things . . .
Here’s a letter from Janet Malcolm:
Jackson Lears wants to ‘complicate the explanation for Gore’s loss, beyond a simple demonisation of Nader’, but the complications he cites – fraud by Republicans preventing 8000 people from voting and the Supreme Court decision halting the recount – would, in the first case, not have mattered, and in the second not have taken place, if Nader hadn’t run Nader received 97,488 votes in Florida.
Just to spell things out . . . if Nader hadn’t run, the campaign would’ve gone differently. 97,488 votes is chicken feed (albeit, approximately 97,488 votes more than I would’ve received had I been running). It was a close election, and it’s meaningless to try to pick out one factor as being the cause of Gore receiving more votes than Bush (or of Bush being ruled the winner).
I know it’s not the responsibility of the authors of articles or letters in the London Review of Books to think quantitatively about U.S. politics; still, given my own interests, I can’t help noticing these things.
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As far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with thinking quantitatively but has everything to do with not being naive about monocausality (as you state in the title of the post).
Piss-poor monocausal social science
The best journal name ever. Please start it.
A similar peeve of mine: when the electoral-vote winner is not the popular-vote winner, and supporters of the latter claim to be the real winner.
A) The voting landscape could be quite different if state-by-state winner-takes-all elections were replaced by a national direct popular vote, and
B) often, neither candidate has secured a majority, so in reality no one won.
We should understand that for many folks, it’s not just a question of political science, but of actual politics – and who is to blame for the Bush ascendancy. Malcolm obviously thinks that keeping spoilers like Nader out of the race is the simplest answer. Lears offers a more sophisticated response – good political science, perhaps – but wrong on the politics as he is (apparently) not willing to hold Gore responsible for his own failings. I suspect the folks who read and write to the LRB tend to be the sorts of Democrats who care passionately but are not active outside their checkbook. My own piss-poor monocausal view is that Gore ran a crap campaign, and should have won regardless of the various contingencies Lears and Malcolm cite. The political scientist in me knows that’s the wrong way to look at the question, but the guy who spent four months of his life waving signs in Florida thinks it’s the only way to look at it.
I think you’re being a bit harsh here. Kyle’s example above is an apt contrast: it’s silly to say that Gore would have been president had we had a popular-vote system, since the campaign would have been dramatically different. However, had Nader not run, it’s hard to argue that anything of substance would have changed in the Bush-Gore race (strategy, money, media coverage, mobilization, etc.). In fact, it probably would have been a very similar contest.
Also, you say that, in a close race, it’s silly to isolate a single causal factor. But I think the purpose was more to discuss the implications of one “swing” factor (just one of many, obviously) that could have single-handedly given Bush the election, other things equal — which is very different from saying that it explains a lot of the variation in the outcome. I wouldn’t publish that in a poli sci journal — but I think it makes its narrow point fairly effectively.
MH: To give credit where due, the phrase comes from Daniel Drezner.
Whoever created the phrase is secondary. I just want it in my CV.
Janet Malcolm is right; seems a simple enough point.
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