Prove It: How Party Organizations Justify Economic Ideologies

• In Event: Organizational Politics and the American Political Economy

Abstract

How to handle the economy, inequality, and corporate regulation has long been an important cleavage between the American political parties, and partisans on both sides regularly claim that there is a plethora of evidence to justify their perspectives. Advances in data availability, computing power, and statistical analysis have facilitated increasingly sophisticated techniques for assessing the effectiveness of various economic policies. In what ways, if at all, do parties use systematic evidence to justify their ideological perspectives on the economy? In this paper, I analyze the last 50 years of national party platforms to assess when, how, and why the two parties invoke evidence on behalf of their economic strategies and policy proposals in their national party platforms. To do so, I build on prior work that distinguishes between two categories for describing usage of evidence in partisan rhetoric: justification—citing evidence to corroborate the logic of an existing policy preference—and solicitation—advertising interest in having more information to make a future policy decision (or even re-evaluate an existing one). I expect to find stark partisan differences in the way in which the parties use evidence when they discuss the economy. This work builds on existing scholarship that finds an asymmetry in style and purpose of the Democratic and Republican parties. I also expect to offer further evidence that—despite the emphasis on supposedly objective evidence-based policy making—the creation and invocation of evidence is, itself, a political act, and one that partisans employ strategically to further their political goals. This line of research speaks to the tools partisans use for agenda setting regarding the economy and the intersection between research and the American political economy.

Author

• Sarah Elizabeth James, Gonzaga University