The New Republic article Ten Things Political Scientists Know That You Don’t by Jonathan Bernstein promotes the article of the same name by Hans Noel of Georgetown University.

This is great article for political junkies who read this blog on a regular basis. If you are a political scientist, you probably know about all this already. After thinking about it for a while, I thought So that’s what political science is all about.

The article itself is published in The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, Vol. 8 (2010) / Issue 3. From here, you can download the 21 page article.

The New Republic paraphrases item 3 as Elections don’t necessarily do what we want them to do.. I found the explanation of the item to be the clearest and most succinct description of the problem of finding a voting method that does do what we want it to do.

You may or may not agree with some of the ten items, but you may also learn something in thinking about why you do or don’t agree.  For instance,  the scatter diagram of figure 1 in the article could just as easily be used to make the opposite point of much of the text for this item.