GOVT-130 FA3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Reagan Democrat
21 Oct 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
How can you do political science if you can never know why the doer does what the doer does: funnel of causality. X: for any behavior x" there are explanations that are close to the answer and far from the answer (distance refers to accuracy, you must move further away from the vote to understand why. Won"t necessarily work in another election when people have different likes and dislikes about the candidates. But the more you know about all the individuals the harder it is to understand the groups. Harder to come up with a theory that you can generalize: can"t predict the behaviors of individuals, but they can generalize and predict the behaviors of larger populations, historically, the best predictor of party voting is religion. If you belong to a majority religion, you are more likely to vote for a conservative/right wing candidate. If you have two systems, compare their common variables.
