4－1－21 LSAT

dorbear

[face=Verdana]

21. Whenever a major political scandal erupts before an election and voters blame the scandal on all parties about equally, virtually all incumbents, from whatever party, seeking reelection are returned to office. However, when voters blame such a scandal on only one party, incumbents from that party are likely to be defeated by challengers from other parties. The proportion of incumbents who seek reelection is high and remarkably constant from election to election.

If the voters' reactions are guided by a principle, which one of the following principles would best account for the contrast in reactions described above?
(A) Whenever one incumbent is responsible for one major political scandal and another incumbent is responsible for another, the consequences for the two incumbents should be the same.
(B) When a major political scandal is blamed on incumbents from all parties, that judgment is more accurate than any judgment that incumbents from only on party are to blame.
(C) Incumbents who are rightly blamed for a major political scandal should not seek reelection, but if they do, they should not be returned to office.
(D) Major political scandals can practically always be blamed on incumbents, but whether those incumbents should be voted out of office depends on who their challengers are.
(E) When major political scandals are less the responsibility of individual incumbents than of the parties to which they belong, whatever party was responsible must be penalized when possible.

The question stem asks for a principle that would account for voters' actions. The last sentence has nothing to do with voters' actions, so it is an essentially filler used to
create wrong answer choices. This is a tough one for many reasons, among them, (1) the credit one is at (E), (2) the priciple also serves as conclusion in the passage, needs an assumption which is not explicitly noted in the passage, and (3) as principle questions, some extent of imprecision is allowed and should be tolerated.

To paraphrase the stem, when voters blame a scandal equally on all parties, almost all incumbents win reelection. But when a scandal is blamed on a single party, incumbents from that party tend to lose. The assumption here is "it is not the incumbents who should be held responsible for the scandal."

(A): This deals with what should happen to individual incumbents who are responsible for scandals, but the stimulus just describes how voters treat parties or incumbents as members of their parties.
(B): This makes a judgment about the likely accuracy of the judgments of blame, but nothing of the kind is mentioned in the passage.
(C): This makes the mistake of concentrating on individuals, instead of parties. Moreover, (C) runs contrary to the passage. According to (C), in cases where all parties are blamed for a scandal, all incumbents should be turned out.
(D): The passage doesn't imply that voters evaluate the challengers. On the contrary, voters are depicted as making choices depending on how they believe about the incumbents' parties.
(E) is correct. According to (E) and the assumption noted at start of it, if Party X is responsible for a scandal, voters should try to punish Party X by voting out its incumbents; however, if all the parties are responsible, there's not much voters can do - whomever they vote for would be a member of one of the offending parties, so they might as well vote for the incumbents. Thus (E) accounts for the contrast in voter reactions.

Of course, even without the assumption at the beginning of (E), the principle stated here is still hold to account for the voters' actions.[/face]

[此贴子已经被作者于2003-11-24 13:02:27编辑过]