[EM] Post-Autistic Electoral Analysis?

[David L Wetzell]

As you may know, at the beginning of this century, French and English
economics graduate students challenged the dominance of uber-mathematically
analytical approaches to Economics in what became the Post-Autistic
Economics movement.   <http://www.paecon.net/HistoryPAE.htm>A lot of their
critiques apply similarly to rational choice models in political science
and might be worth pondering for electoral analytics.

I myself consider my diffidence to jockeying for what's the best
single-winner alternative to FPTP as blissfully ignoring how joe average
voter(or habitual non-voter) is a creature of habit and won't respond to
being given umpteen more choices in the way policy-wonkish electoral
analysts would.This sort of behavioralist approach to voters is not unlike
as shown by neurologists looking into the political
brain<http://www.thepoliticalbrain.com/videos.php>.


But I do believe that many more folks can learn to vote more rationally and
that third parties and caucuses within major parties are the right groups
for them to learn how to do that, but that's why I'm so enthusiastic about
the strategic use of PR in "more local" elections, which ideally would by
giving activists more exit threat would lead to the use of more caucuses
like what is used by the Democrat-Farm-Labor party in
MN.<http://dfl.org/about/caucuses-conventions>

So I'm not saying don't do electoral analytics, but don't lose sight of the
ambiguities involved in relating utopic, abstract models back to real life.

dlw
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