Counterfactuals, Consequences, and Election Importance - Matt Glassman
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My graduate school adviser, David Mayhew, had an article over the weekend in the Washington Post — entitled Which Was The Most Important U.S. Election? — that I’d recommend reading. The basic premise is that all elections are billed as the “most important,” and while that obviously can’t be true, some elections are more important than others. Mayhew then goes on to nicely discuss a variety of criteria by which to judge past elections — the importance at the time, durable policy shifts that resulted, durable political cleavages that resulted, the independent effect of the campaign, and of course the most fascinating to think about, what if the other guy had won? Well worth reading.
It’s this last point, the counterfactual point, that I want to take up briefly. Because I think it’s the one that bedevils most of this sort of analysis. At one level, the counterfactuals are impossible to figure, because we don’t have any grip on the path-dependence; as Mayhew notes, if Polk loses to Clay in 1844, the Mexican War may never happen, meaning the southwest might not have become part of the U.S. in time to create the territorial slavery crisis of the 1850?s, which might have dramatically altered the trajectory of anti-slavery in the North and perhaps the entire structure of the demise (or not) of southern slavery. Who the hell knows? Same thing in 1968. If Humphrey had wound down the war by the end of 1970 and didn’t resign in the face of impeachment over criminal political activity, it’s not clear how the nation would be different today, but reasonable to think it would be. Consequently, we only have the vaguest notion of the alternative realities against which we compare the known outcomes.
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