Whenever a major political scandal erupts before an election and voters blame the scandal on all parties about equall...

hannahnaylor5 September 6, 2019

I have the same question. Could you please clarify?

jjk3 March 24, 2020

Follow up, could someone please explain why A is not the correct answer?

Edward-Wang April 26, 2020

^following up

Matthew April 28, 2020

Following up!!

jordanbirnholtz May 10, 2020

Hello @ijk3 and @EdwardWang! When you see this problem on the exam, you rightly recognize it is about a Principle. The first thing you should do is try to clearly identify the action that the principle will be used to justify. There is a lot of information in this stimulus, and the wording of the question stem is more ambiguous than it seems at first glance. It says we should justify the "contrast in reactions". In a very busy and information rich stimulus like this, your next thought should come as a reflex: "What does that actually mean?" What is the salient reaction?

Here's what I would say, after re-reading the stimulus: if your party screwed up and the other party didn't, I am going to hurt your party by voting for the person who doesn't belong to your party.

The salient action that we must justify is about how voters express their feelings about the party by voting for their own representatives. With that clearly in mind, let's look at the answer choices. I would strongly encourage you to actually write that down, as an additional layer of processing, and so that any uncertainty you experience while evaluating the answer choices don't cause you to retroactively change your identified action in need of a principle without your realizing it. You are vulnerable and fallible right now because you are under pressure!

Now let's evaluate the answers.

A) This answer is about the responsibility of incumbents for a scandal. But we just told ourselves that the principle we seek is about the responsibility of the party, and how the voters will use the incumbents as hate sponges/punching bags. This is tempting but it's fundamentally about the wrong thing.

B) This is about the quality of judgment of the voters which I think is irrelevant

C) Nothing in this passage is about whether incumbents are responsible. It's about how we treat incumbents to hold a part responsible. This answer is extra tempting for the perplexed because it superficially addresses an interesting discrepancy in the passage, between seeking and obtaining re-election. But that isn't salient information, you wrote down what actually matters, and that isn't it. This is wrong!

D) Another tempting incorrect answer. We know that voters sometimes do and sometimes don't kick out incumbents, and this answers seems to speak to that. But it's wrong for the same reason that all of the other answers are. This answer is about a principle that doesn't apply to the circumstances and action we know we are interested in. This is about how incumbents are personally responsible for scandals, and that's not the action we need a principle to justify.

E) This answer is the only one that concerns the action we are interested in justifying. It is about how voters express their feelings about a party's behavior by doing things to incumbents – how voters decide to punish them. This is the correct answer!

I'm not an instructor so if they want to jump in to say my approach is wrong I would be super happy to hear it. Since we haven't got an answer on this in a while, I thought it would be helpful for someone to try to clarify. If you tag me (@jordanbirnholtz) I'll come back and answer any more questions you have!

parikhnj September 29, 2020

could formal logic have been used