You mean quantitatively? When it comes to quantitative political research, you're really only dealing in probabilities. So many things influence these outcomes that you don't really deal in direct causation. You're numbers may show a relationship, say one between strict gun laws and increases in crime, but people will always view the results through their own political lens. There are plausible explanations for why those results are misleading like a data problem, or an unmeasured factor that's influencing the result. Now attempt the same thing in an economic system where the change of one law can set off effects across the world... Yeah... you see the problem.BulletMagnet wrote:does either have the data to back up its assertions, or is it all theoretical at this point?
Which is the reason why I think it's silly to blame the current economic problems on deregulation or a result of libertarian economic philosophy. If someone ran a model that showed an act of deregulation, say the repealed regulation concerning commercial and investment banks, appeared to cause, in other words had a substantial statistical effect on, the current economic downturn I would say that's crap because you're not accounting for the government social policy that pushed banks to loan to people, the government backed actions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the actions of the federal reserve etc... There are a lot of hoops to jump through to "prove" something in empirical political and economic research. Even then, no political scientist outright comes out in a paper and says "Look what I proved" because you're not proving something per se, you're showing evidence of an effect.
