Politcal Reporting: Parody that Transcends Parody, or, Beyond the Standard Model

[womzilla]

Courtesy of The Poor Man:

Anyone with any understanding of the political process understands instinctively that things like positions on issues, policy proposals, and voting records are entirely superfluous to any serious analysis. Candidates are, according to the Standard Model of Political Science, completely described as stable groupings of 3 characteristics or anti-characteristics, analogous to the "three-quark" model of baryons. These so-called "candidatons" are:

S: Southern, or nS: non-Southern
V: Veteran, or nV: non-Veteran
O: Outsider, or nO: non-Outsider

And on from there. Thanks to agrumer for the link, which fried my synapses.

Comments

[peake.livejournal.com]

Many thanks for the link. That stuff does blow the mind - and it's so convincing. It sure explains a hell of a lot about America's otherwise inexplicable primary system.

I've been trying to think how such a system might apply in British politics, and the model would have to be very different. The regions, even given the nationalist votes in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, actually affect people's notions of political affiliation very little. Vet or non-vet has absolutely no sway here (and probably didn't even during, say, the late-40s when vets were likely to be coming into the political process). And given our political system being an outside is generally enough to condemn any potential candidate, except in very rare instances such as Martin Bell in Tatton.

I think the measure of a politician here would have to be a scale from Populist to Idealist on a number of key policy areas:
A: Response to the Outsider (ie how to deal with Johnny Foreigner, asylum seekers, etc)
B: Response to our money (ie tax and spend or cut services to cut taxes)
C: Response to our infrastructure (ie hospitals, schools, transport — being populist in C usually involves a flat contradiction with being populist in B, but British politics has rarely had much room for logic)

The problem with this model is that unlike the candidatons of the US model, this arrangement can never be stable.