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While I don't think the study is particularly strong by itself, your criticisms are kind of strange. I find that hard to believe that defining a roster of "Dem

While I don't think the study is particularly strong by itself, your criticisms are kind of strange. I find that hard to believe that defining a roster of "Democrat elites" materially changes the survey responses and analysis. The only way this critique is relevant is if you reject the premise of the paper, but you don't seem to be doing that? Is that a critique of all correlative studies? What specifically is this paper doing that you think bridges on phrenology (or all that other brain-size hokum)? Why must this paper do that? There's a whole field of political science and opinion polling devoted to effective messaging, and they produce studies like this all the time. Maybe you find focus-group-shaped messaging "insulting", but that seems orthogonal to the goals of this paper. But maybe you can crack that nut and then we can purge like half of Twitter and most political talking heads ;)

TameAntelope 5y ago
I expect a paper to at least facially address potential confounding aspects, which the paper does, just not this (to me obvious) one. The issue as I see it is that this supposes there's a selective group of people setting an arbitrary agenda, whereas the reality is closer to the idea that the majority of Americans are expressing this point of view and these specific politicians are repeating it. They're committing the very sin they're trying to study, dividing the point of view into a class-based one, by claiming it's the "elites" holding the viewpoint, and not the people themselves. I would scrub the word "elite" from the paper, it creates needless tension and isn't accurate (or at the very least, define the term specifically). Additionally, I'd directly address the idea that these results could be confounded by latent racism, and I'd probably do that by introducing the concept in the introduction, and refer back to it in the conclusion. In other words, "Future research should investigate the causal mechanisms behind this." is not enough. Maybe end with this, but do more.

TameAntelope 5y ago

I expect a paper to at least facially address potential confounding aspects, which the paper does, just not this (to me obvious) one. The issue as I see it is that this supposes there's a selective group of people setting an arbitrary agenda, whereas the reality is closer to the idea that the majority of Americans are expressing this point of view and these specific politicians are repeating it. They're committing the very sin they're trying to study, dividing the point of view into a class-based one, by claiming it's the "elites" holding the viewpoint, and not the people themselves. I would scrub the word "elite" from the paper, it creates needless tension and isn't accurate (or at the very least, define the term specifically). Additionally, I'd directly address the idea that these results could be confounded by latent racism, and I'd probably do that by introducing the concept in the introduction, and refer back to it in the conclusion. In other words, "Future research should investigate the causal mechanisms behind this." is not enough. Maybe end with this, but do more.