A political argument is an instance of a logical argument applied to politics

Politics

Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...

. Political arguments are used by academics

Academia

Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...

, media pundits

Pundit (politics)

A pundit is someone who offers to mass media his or her opinion or commentary on a particular subject area on which they are knowledgeable. The term has been increasingly applied to popular media personalities...

, 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.

Political argument should be distinguished from propaganda

Propaganda

Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....

, in that propaganda has little or no identifiable logical structure or the logic, if it exists, is egregiously fallacious.

A classic example of political arguments are those contained in The Federalist Papers arguing in favor of ratification of the constitution.

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

The Prince

The Prince is a political treatise by the Italian diplomat, historian and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. From correspondence a version appears to have been distributed in 1513, using a Latin title, De Principatibus . But the printed version was not published until 1532, five years after...

 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

Propaganda

Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....

 will take the place of argument. In a democracy

Democracy

Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...

, 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 advertisement has no discernible logical structure, and in our definition falls under propaganda.

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

Binary relation

In mathematics, a binary relation on a set A is a collection of ordered pairs of elements of A. In other words, it is a subset of the Cartesian product A2 = . More generally, a binary relation between two sets A and B is a subset of...

 R between the elements of A which is transitive

Transitive relation

In mathematics, a binary relation R over a set X is transitive if whenever an element a is related to an element b, and b is in turn related to an element c, then a is also related to c....

 and reflexive

Reflexive relation

In mathematics, a reflexive relation is a binary relation on a set for which every element is related to itself, i.e., a relation ~ on S where x~x holds true for every x in S. For example, ~ could be "is equal to".-Related terms:...

. 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.

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

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

Median

In probability theory and statistics, a median is described as the numerical value separating the higher half of a sample, a population, or a probability distribution, from the lower half. The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to...

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.

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 and 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.