What We Learn From Unusual Cases: A Review of Azari and Gelman's “19 Things We Learned From the 2016 Election”

Abstract

No one needs to be told that 2016 was an unusual election year. For social science, its strangeness has two implications. First, it is a learning opportunity. Whether we think of 2016 as a highleverage case or as off the equilibriumpath, an unusual case gives perspective that we do not usually get to see. This is the potential that Julia Azari and Andrew Gelman have exploited. Second, however, is that unusual cases are, well, unusual. They are often outliers. They differ onmultiple dimensions, and we may not know why they came about. Lessons from them may not generalize. The election of 2016 was unusual or even unprecedented in so many ways. Not only do we want to be cautious about extrapolation, but the way we learn from outliers is different than the way we learn from typical cases. They can function asmuch as counterfactuals as cases, unless, of course, we think they are harbingers of a new normal. It is notable how many of the things Azari and Gelman note we learned from 2016 were things that at least some social scientists had already articulated. And I would argue that many of the othersmay not be as large as they are portrayed here. Despite the outrageousness of the 2016 election in so many ways, its lessons are mostly modest revisions of well-established work or raising still unanswered questions about less-established work. I think Azari and Gelman would agree. Most of their points comewith caveats that predictmy reactions. I think if we amplify the caveats over the initial points, we get a very different thesis. The 2016 election was a strange one, but one that can be explained fairly well by existing social science theory, once we know the parameters.With this inmind, a few reactions to some of the points raised by A&G.