Perhaps the day is coming when we can hang up our gloves and just concentrate on telling people about fun things in political science, rather than being mean to pundits and journalists who make silly arguments. When journalists start to take up this cause, they can do it better than most academics can. Jonathan Chait “demonstrates his comparative advantage in snark”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/75670/noonan-york.
bq. Political science is not a perfect field. But there are a few things the field has a pretty good grasp on, and one of them is that there is a strong relationship between economic conditions and presidential approval rating. … pundits tend to be fairly unaware of political science, and prefer to explain events in terms of narrative and broad assertions about the character of politicians and the public that cannot survive empirical scrutiny. Noonan is especially egregious. … Toward the end of the first paragraph, Noonan wanders toward the basic reality of the situation — people liked Clinton because the economy was booming — before returning to the familiar embrace of mysticism (Americans get “nervous” when the president appears “snakebit.”) Rather than seeing this as demonstrating a basic correlation, she calls this the “Mysteries of Leadership.” It reminds me of a classic Saturday Night Live skit, “Theodoric of York,” in which Steve Martin plays a medieval barber practicing superstitious methods like bleeding in the name of science. After killing yet another patient, Martin’s character announces:
erhaps I’ve been wrong to blindly follow the medical traditions and superstitions of past centuries. Maybe we barbers should test these assumptions analytically, through experimentation and a “scientific method”. Maybe this scientific method could be extended to other fields of learning: the natural sciences, art, architecture, navigation. Perhaps I could lead the way to a new age, an age of rebirth, a Renaissance! [ thinks for a moment] Naaah.