#7 - Political advocate: Campaigns for elective office

[jiyounglee]

Hello powerscore,

can you elaborate on answer choice c?
Also, why a and e are wrong?

[Adam Tyson]

I'm going to bounce this back to you as we did with another question you recently posted. Tell us more about why you are considering answers A and E, what your concern is about C, and anything else you can to help us understand your analysis and your approach. That should always be your approach in this forum - start by sharing your thought process, how you looked at the question, what techniques you applied, what you prephrased, etc. We can always do more to help if we know more about where you are coming from.

Looking forward to hearing more about your thoughts on this one!

[jiyounglee]

Hello Adam,

Thanks for letting me know
I will put my analysis from now on with questions!
So, I will go through the analysis with Stephanie's questions from last post.

1. Describe your approach to the stimulus. Did you understand the argument, if any, from a structural standpoint? What is the conclusion, and what evidence is the author using in support of that conclusion?

Political Advocate:

Premise 1: this would allow politicians to devote less time to fund-raising

Intermediate conclusion 1: giving campaigning incumbents more time to serve the public

Premise 2: subsidies would make it possible to set caps on individual campaign contributions

Intermediate conclusion 2: reducing the likelihood that elected officials will be working for the benefit not of the public but of individual large contributors

Conclusion: Campaigns for elective office should be subsidized with public funds

Critic:

Premise 1: the more the caps constrain conributions, the more time candidates have to spend funding more small contributors

Conclusion: Political advocate's argument is problematic (I understand this as critic thinks campaign for elective office should be subsidized with public funds to be problematic)

2. Did you prephrase an answer to the question in the stem? If so, what was your prephrase?

I could not prephrase an answer as I was not able to find a flaw in critic's argument

3. What exactly made the other answer choices particularly attractive? Did you use any question type-specific test (e.g. Assumption Negation Technique) to differentiate between them?

This is flaw in reasoning question.

A and E seemed attractive because they would weaken the critic's argument.
I do understand that we are not trying to weaken critic's argument but I didn't know what was the flaw.

[Jonathan Evans]

Hi, Young,

Perhaps some of the difficulty you're having on this question stems from a misunderstanding of the question stem. You state that your task is to weaken the critic's argument when in fact the question asks you to describe how the critic addresses a flaw in the advocate's argument.

Thus, your task here is to ascertain the manner in which the critic objects to the advocate's reasoning. You are correct to note that the critic concludes that the advocate's argument that "campaigns for elective office should be subsidized with public funds" is problematic.

You have done an admirable job breaking down the mechanics of these arguments, but an apparent misunderstanding of the question stem undermines your good work.

The critic notes that with caps on contributions, officials may still not have more time to serve the public because they will need to spend more time finding small contributors. Abstractly, one of the arguments in favor of subsidizing campaigns for elective office undermines another argument in favor of subsidies. This prephrasing matches answer choice (C).

[jiyounglee]

Thank you Jonathan!

[dshen123]

I feel like one of the projected results kind of depend on the other one: the decision of whether to spend more time is dependent on if funds raised are capped? Those two reasons are interdependent upon each other? Why is B wrong?

[Amber Thomas]

Hi Dshen123!

Let's take a look at answer choice B:
"One of the projected results cited in support of the proposal made is entailed by the other, and therefore does not constitute independent support of the proposal."

What does this mean? To understand it a bit better, let's break down the two projected results cited in support of the proposal:
Proposal: Campaigns for elected office should be subsidized with public funds
Result 1: If campaigns were publicly funded, politicians could spend less time fund raising, and more time serving the public
Result 2: If campaigns were publicly funded, caps could be set on individual campaign contributions, meaning politicians would be more likely to serve the public, rather than any individual person or company who made a large contribution to their campaign

What answer choice B is saying is that one of these results follows from the other, meaning either:
1. Result 1 (politicians spending less time fundraising and more time serving the public) leads to Result 2 (setting caps on campaign funding, and making it more likely that politicians serve the public over individual contributors), or;
2. Result 2 (setting caps on campaign funding, and making it more likely that politicians serve the public over individual contributors) leads to Result 1 (politicians spending less time fundraising and more time serving the public)

We have no real basis to conclude that one of these results will entail the other, therefore we can rule out answer choice B.

I hope this helps!

Regards,
Amber