Conclusion: "Valitania's long-standing practice of paying high salaries to its elected politicians has had a disastrous effect on the level of integrity among politicians in that country."
Why? "the wrong people must have been attracted into Valitanian politics who are more interested in making money than in serving the needs of the nation."
Our correct answer will weaken the argument.
Answer choice (C) does nothing to the argument. Whether or not more people compete for elected office when officeholders are paid well as opposed to when they are paid poorly has no effect on the argument.
Even if the same number of people compete when officeholders are paid well or when they are paid poorly does not weaken the argument that the practice of paying high salaries attracts those more interested in making money than in serving the needs of the nation.
Let's think about it this way: When salaries are high, 20 people who care more about money compete for the positions. When salaries are low, 20 different people who care more about serving the needs of the nation compete for the positions. Here answer choice (C) is true, and yet we have not weakened the argument.
Answer choice (E), on the other hand, weakens the argument by showing that those who are currently politicians could have obtained better-paid work outside of politics, thus they were not necessarily attracted to the positions because of their interest in making money over their interest in serving the needs of the nation.
Hope that clears things up! Please let us know if you have any other questions.
AlisonWAugust 19, 2015
Thanks Naz!
knoxygirlMay 14, 2017
Yes, it definitely does
May 28, 2020
I don't know if I misunderstood something in the explanation above but I'm left with the following problem: For this explanation to be correct, it accepts the possibility that there is ever a case where less people who are primarily interested in helping the community choose to compete for a position when the salary is higher when compared to when the salary is lower. If no more people compete for a position when the salary is higher compared to when the salary is lower, and we assume that the same people who's primary interest is in helping the community compete for positions independently of salary, then there are no people who are more interested in money than helping the community who run for office where comparing high salaries to low salaries. I guess it could be true that people who are more interested in helping the community run for office less when salaries for positions are higher, but does that really make sense? If they really cared more about the community than money than their decision to run for office would be truly independent of salary. I suppose the argument says nothing as to whether or not this is true but I think its a bad premise.
I suppose if we accept the possibility that people who care about the community will not compete for higher paying positions even though they would compete for the same positions if it were to pay lower then it is true that answer C is incorrect, but why wouldn’t they? It would be more beneficial to the community if they had the higher paying position even if they had a problem with the level of pay because they would potentially have the power to change salary levels. It would be uncaring of them to NOT run for office. Maybe I’m being stubborn and not accepting this within the rest of my argument.
I agree that answer choice E clearly weakens the argument but the above ran through my mind when I saw answer choice C.
Brett-LindsaySeptember 1, 2020
I looked at (C) for quite a while too, but the argument seems to be more focused on attracting "the wrong people" rather than the absolute number of people, as in (C). It may even be possible that there is a finite number of allowed candidates, regardless of the number of people who would like to compete for office. If that were true, then (C) would not weaken the argument - it would have no effect on the argument. (E), however, clearly shows that money is not the prime reason that these people compete, because they could have made more money in the private sector, so if money was their only concern, they would not compete.
