A political argument is an instance of a logical argument applied to politics. Political arguments are used by academics, media pundits, candidates for political office and government officials. Political arguments are also used by citizens in ordinary interactions to comment about and understand political events. More often than not, political arguments tend to be circular, repeating the same facts as premises under perhaps slightly different guises. Much political argument concerns issues of taxation and government spending. In logic, an argument is an attempt to demonstrate the truth of an assertion called a conclusion, based on the truth of a set of assertions called premises. ... Politics, sometimes defined as the art and science of government[1], is a process by which collective decisions are made within groups. ... Plato is credited with the inception of academia: the body of knowledge, its development and transmission across generations. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...

Political argument should be distinguished from propaganda, in that propaganda has little or no identifiable logical structure or the logic, if it exists, is egregiously fallacious. It has been suggested that Propaganda in the United States be merged into this article or section. ... In philosophy, the term logical fallacy properly refers to a formal fallacy: a flaw in the structure of a deductive argument which renders the argument invalid. ...

A classic example of political arguments are those contained in The Federalist Papers arguing in favor of ratification of the constitution. Title page of an early Federalist compilation. ...

There are several ways of classifying political argument:

• Based on the purpose of the argument.

• Based on the logical structure of the argument.

• Based on the subject matter dealt with in the argument.

Purpose of political argument

The purpose of argument is usually to sway belief. Political argument can occur in the context of political theory; for instance Machiavelli's The Prince can be regarded as advice to rulers based on various kinds of arguments. Political argument though is not generally a purely intellectual activity, since it may also serve the strategic goal of promoting a political agenda. One usually thinks of political argument as exclusive to democracies, but in fact some kinds of political argument may occur in undemocratic regimes as well, for example, to encourage greater sacrifice from the population, although it is more likely in such cases that propaganda will take the place of argument. In a democracy, though, political argument is particularly important, since there is a direct relation between the beliefs of citizens and the structure of power. Moreover the institutions of a democracy in part define the relationships between beliefs and power. In this case, political argument is an important element of political strategy. It is also possible that in a democracy, propaganda may also replace argument; indeed, much political adverstisement has no discernible logical structure, and in our definition falls under propaganda. Detail of the portrait of Machiavelli, ca 1500, in the robes of a Florentine public official Niccolò Machiavelli (May 3, 1469—June 21, 1527) was an Italian political philosopher during the Renaissance. ... One of the covers of the book Il Principe (The Prince) is a political treatise by the Florentine writer Niccolò Machiavelli, originally called De Principatibus (About Principalities). ... It has been suggested that Propaganda in the United States be merged into this article or section. ...

This view of political argument in a democracy is closely related to the problem of social choice. Consider a social decision model of the kind used in the theory of social choice (such as used in stating Arrow's theorem). In this model society has a set of individuals X and it faces a set (political) alternatives A which need to be ranked in some way. A ranking is a relation R between the elements of A which is transitive and reflexive. Note that two alternatives a, b can satisfy a R b and b R a. If this is the case, we say R is indifferent to a, b. Each individual x in X will have an idiosyncratic ranking R_x of the alternatives in A. A profile is any function P that associate to each individual x a ranking of alternatives P_x; a profile is thus a function from X to rankings of A. An arbitration scheme (or constitution or voting scheme) is a way of producing a ranking R_soc for the whole society from any profile P. Thus an arbitration scheme is itself a function P → R_soc. Social choice theory studies how individual preferences are aggregated to form a collective choice, such as, for example in voting systems. ... An abstract model (or conceptual model) is a theoretical construct that represents physical, biological or social processes, with a set of variables and a set of logical and quantitative relationships between them. ... In voting systems, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, or Arrow’s paradox demonstrates the impossibility of designing a set of rules for social decision making that would meet all of a certain set of criteria. ... In mathematics, the concept of binary relation, sometimes called dyadic relation, is exemplified by such ideas as is greater than and is equal to in arithmetic, or is congruent to in geometry, or is an element of or is a subset of in set theory. ... In mathematics, a binary relation R over a set X is transitive if it holds for all a, b, and c in X, that if a is related to b and b is related to c, then a is related to c. ... In set theory, a binary relation can have, among other properties, reflexivity or irreflexivity. ...

Though any argument about politics is in a sense a political argument, an effective political argument is one that can actually change the social preference ranking. Effective political argument is a concept distinct from valid political argument.

Example

Let us consider an idealized system of tax policy; tax is based on a tax cutoff point T, that is individuals with income in excess of T pay taxes, everyone else pays no taxes. In a simple majority rule social arbitration scheme, one might expect that a natural tax rate T can be determined: the median income (plus 1). However, a (possibly fallacious) political argument might attempt to change individual's voting by their pocket book by arguing that investment in capital and general welfare will increase by reducing taxes on higher income levels, that is raising the tax cutoff point. In probability theory and statistics, a median is a number dividing the higher half of a sample, a population, or a probability distribution from the lower half. ...

A political argument may be ineffective but may still have a purpose, for instance as a justification for an unpopular political action, or as part of a historical narrative.

Logical structure of political argument

Any argument claims to prove something. In the case of arguments used in politics, this something is an assertion about an element of the public sphere, such as economic policy, the environment, decisions about war and peace, abortion etc. An argument cannot start from purely logical principles. An argument is based on premises and some methods for reasoning from premises to conclusions. The validity of an argument in politics can be evaluated in at least two ways: in purely semantic terms or in terms of adherence to certain rules of argument (which we can consider rules of fairness).

Semantically, one should note that some of the premises used in an argument and the relationships between the assertions in the argument, are associated to specific models of economic or political processes. These models should be testable hypotheses. Other premises are moral assumptions: whether a particular action is good or desirable. For example, arguments concerning war against an must consider questions about specific threats that the adversary poses, the likelihood of success, the cost of war and so on. In practice, purely semantical evaluations of argument validity are extremely difficult to formulate in a politically neutral way, since political positions usually involve commitment to some model of social and economic processes.

References

• A. Hamilton, J. Jay and J. Madison, The Federalist, Modern Library paperback edition, 2001

• K. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, Yale University Press, 1963