Q21 - Whenever a major political scandal

[jrany12]

Could someone please explain why E is the answer please?

[giladedelman]

Thanks for posting.

This is a pretty wacky question, but we're basically looking for a principle that explains why incumbents generally are reelected when voters blame a scandal on all parties equally, while incumbents from a particular party usually are defeated when voters blame that party specifically for the scandal.

Looking at this one, I found the correct answer to be less than fully satisfying, but I knew I'd gotten it because I made sure to work from wrong to right. Let's see if we can definitively get rid of four wrong answers.

(A) is out of scope. We care about what happens when a political party is blamed for a scandal, not about what happens if two individual incumbents are equally to blame for something.

(B) is likewise out of scope. Accuracy of judgments has nothing to do with the stimulus, and this answer choice doesn't explain why voters vote the way they do.

(C) is out because the stimulus never touches on whether incumbents should seek reelection; further, the statements are about when a party, not an individual, is blamed.

(D) is out because the statements never suggest that the identity of the challenger is significant.

So that leaves us with (E). It may look a little funky, but it gets us where we need to go: when major political scandals are blamed on a particular party, that party must be penalized, i.e., its incumbents must suffer. This explains the voter behavior outlined in the stimulus.

Does that answer your question?

#OfficialExplanation

[jrany12]

Yes it does, thank you for the clear explanation!!

[lorrainebaer]

I still can't understand why D is incorrect. I was very confident on this one too.

You said that it is out because the argument has nothing to do with incumbents' challengers. But isn't there an assumption that if the voters are blaming only the incumbent's party, the challenger is a member of an innocent party and thus is more desirable/electable? Doesn't that make sense with the premises?

If the voters are blaming all parties equally, the incumbent is to blame but the incumbent's challenger is equally to blame. So it's up in the air if s/he should be voted out - they are both equally lousy. But if they are blaming ONLY the incumbent's party (and thus the incumbent) wouldn't the challenger automatically be a better choice?

E seems to go on a tangent about whose responsibility the scandal is WITHIN the party (the party as a whole vs. the incumbent) which seems to drift too far from the argument core.

[Shiggins]

I still can't understand why D is incorrect. I was very confident on this one too.

You said that it is out because the argument has nothing to do with incumbents' challengers. But isn't there an assumption that if the voters are blaming only the incumbent's party, the challenger is a member of an innocent party and thus is more desirable/electable? Doesn't that make sense with the premises?

If the voters are blaming all parties equally, the incumbent is to blame but the incumbent's challenger is equally to blame. So it's up in the air if s/he should be voted out - they are both equally lousy. But if they are blaming ONLY the incumbent's party (and thus the incumbent) wouldn't the challenger automatically be a better choice?

E seems to go on a tangent about whose responsibility the scandal is WITHIN the party (the party as a whole vs. the incumbent) which seems to drift too far from the argument core.

I hope I can help.

I see what you are saying that makes the challengers more electable/ likeable. But this goes more with choice E

If you have party X and Y. And lets say the incumbent is from X

If both X and Y get blamed, then the voters perceive who is better and vote for that person in. Your right its up in the air, but the explanation for the incumbent winning could be he did a good job so lets not fix what is not broken.

If Party X is blamed and has the incumbent, then people choose the challenger, moreover E says that the incumbent party must suffer consequences (not winning).
So its not really dependent on the challenger being electable/likeable, it is how the parties are perceived is what they depend on.
Choice E says that even when the incumbent is less to blame than the party needs to suffer.

I hope I helped and if anyone can add or correct much appreciated.

[MayMay]

I agree that E is the best answer, but I'm still unsure of why it is the right answer.
E speaks to the second sentence clearly, i agree.
but, with regards to the first sentence, namely what happens when all the parties are blamed equally, choice E doesn't tell me what happens.

What do you guys think?

And the last sentence was just --dare I say it-- irrelevant?

[zainrizvi]

I don't understand how E applies to those 2 conditions in the question at all.

[rpcuhk]

Can I say D is incorrect for the same reason that A is incorrect?
(D) says "scandals can practically always be blamed on incumbents", while the stimulus blames the scandal on the parties.

[zip]

I agree that E is the best answer, but I'm still unsure of why it is the right answer.
E speaks to the second sentence clearly, i agree.
but, with regards to the first sentence, namely what happens when all the parties are blamed equally, choice E doesn't tell me what happens.

What do you guys think?

And the last sentence was just --dare I say it-- irrelevant?

I think Gilad was on point: It's rightness consists largely in the other ones being clearly wrong. It does not strike me as obvious, as most of this type do, but it does the trick in that it focuses on voter behavior when they blame a party. Nothing in the stimulus gives us warrant to assess incumbent v incumbent or incumbents without respect to party, which all the other answer choices do.

[etwcho]

Let me give it a try at explaining E.


The stimulus gives us two phenomena:
1. If voters blame all parties --> Nearly all incumbents return
2. If voters blame only one party --> challenger likely wins

Lets say that there are 3 parties X, Y and Z

In case #2, if voter blame only party Z, people would penalize Party Z by voting challengers from X and Y, hence, knocking of incumbent Z.

In case #1, which is a little harder to see, if voters blame all 3 parties equally, voters can't legitimately penalize all 3 by picking the challengers. If the voters replaced all 3 incumbents from X, Y, and Z to equally penalize them, then they would still end up with 3 challengers that would represent X, Y, and Z. Basically, whoever they vote for would be a member of one of the blamed parties! Hence, the voters wouldn't go out of their way to punish all 3 parties, but would most likely end up voting for the poor incumbents again (who apparently were less responsible of the scandal stated by E).

[WaltGrace1983]

These really early PT's are seriously frustrating. It seems that on newer PT's the logic is more clean cut and on older one's it is just about trying to confuse you rather than test your logically ability , I digress.

So (E) is saying that when scandals revolve around the whole party then that party must be penalized. The stimulus gives us two situations:

(1) Scandal is blamed on all parties → Returned to Office
(2) Scandal is blamed on one party → ~Returned to Office

(E) never says anything about the involvement of other parties. (E) could be true and give rise to situation #1 or #2. The problem is that (1), when analyzed from the premise that (E) is true, contradicts (E) by still showing no penalty to the party - the party still returned to office. It works with (2) only if you assume that (E) is referring to only one party.

I chose (C). It seemed like the best answer but, like (E), it doesn't give us enough information about the other parties' involved.

[brainwvs]

Text says that parties are to blame not incumbents. This leaves out D that states:"political scandals can be blamed on incumbents" E states correctly that it is the party that is to be blamed.

[Mab6q]

Let me tackle this one. Process our elimination if our best friend when we get to the hardest questions.

When voters blame all parties equally  incumbents from both parties get reelected.
When voters only blame one party  incumbents from that party are likely to be defeated by opponents in the other parties.

A. This simply tells us that the consequences for both are the same if found responsible. However, if does not explain why all incumbents are kept when both parties are responsible.

B. We are not at all concerned with accuracy. Does this explain the differences in voting patterns?? NO!

C. Looks good for a situation where one party is blamed, but is contrary to what we are told about both parties being blamed - all incumbents return. .

D. This would not explain either occurrence. Here we should not focus on the candidates alone, but should focus on who they are facing. But how does that explain the discrepancy in voting patterns???

E. Is not great, but it the best answer we have. When the scandal is not the responsibility of the incumbent but of the party instead, whatever party that was responsible must penalized WHEN POSSIBLE. When possible is the key here.

In the second situation, this would work perfectly as one party would be penalized by losing all of its incumbents.

In the first situation, things get trickier, but here's one way to look at it: Because all parties are blamed equally, voters would not choose new candidates to replace the incumbents because the new candidates would presumably be with the parties that are blamed as well. So, this would fall under the situation where it is not possible, which is consistent with E.

The best thing here is to work from wrong to right. There's a better argument for why A-D are wrong than why E is right.