Political Scientists in Presidential Campaigns

Extract

Following is a list of words and terms that the political scientist who finds himself or herself in a presidential campaign should never use:

epistemic concepts of democracy

multivariate logistic models

exogeneity

hegemony

macropartisanship

collective rationality

philosophical dialectic valuably

These terms and others like them may or may not have meaning in a presidential campaign—the point however, is that presidential campaigns are not exercises in theory or in scholarship, they are exercises in communicating to the lowest common denominator in the American public. Because of this they develop a culture and a set of norms that are as anti-intellectual as those found in any reputable truck stop in America (not to mention a vocabulary of four letter words that would put most truckers to shame).