For the love of God, I can't figure out what TPP is? Tertiary Politics Philosophy? Please help me out, since I've never gone into Anglo-Saxon Academics. Only know the Continental Terms
On your point though, you could argue that as well for Health, Migration Policies, etc. ... Not? So if you want to confine it to few question, you better leave that out. Also Foreign Policy is heavily dependent on the size and influence of your political entity, and the situation of the time, it's also mostly intertwined with other stuff and some argue, it needs to be secret, so I would argue against including it into a general questionary.
Technology and
Public
Policy.
We used several similar terms as you did in your earlier response, such as the expert and lay divide. I'll mention some of the literature from the class in a reply to Mangxema below.
Broadly, I am matching my categories to the greater trends I observe in recent history (say, since the French Revolution began): the liberals v. the monarchs (or authoritarian dictators nowadays), the socialists v. the capitalists, the militarists v. the pacifists... and economic theory is tacked on because that seems to be a major point of political contention, not just in the US but over in Europe as well (see all the columnists either praising or bashing the ECB's actions, or lack thereof). I don't make any claims that it is a complete list or that everything is listed, I only gave some examples of what I was thinking for each.
I would place the healthcare debate under the social issues category, and migration policy, depending on the context of the question, to generally fall under the foreign views--open society, or closed? In essence, the four proposed categories come down to how the individual interacts with the state, how the individual interacts with the market, how the market and state should interact (and the individual is still entangled there), and how the state interacts with the rest of the world.
It's true that people in smaller nations or declared-neutral nations like Switzerland will have a different idea of how a state should interact with the rest of the world than a more militant superpower that has embraced a doctrine of preemptive "self-defense". By making it a separate category, we eliminate this factor from other categories, so that people's opinions on militarism and foreign intervention won't affect their views on economics, or whether they like voting or dictatorships. Thus, by virtue of making one category incomparable, we make the others more comparable.
The problem with questions like this is that 'better' means different things to different people. To use an analogy, think of buying a car. Depending on what you value (performance, reliability, overall value, etc.) your answer 'What is the best car?' is going to be different.
--
Somewhat related to that, when I was in college, my professor for the government course that I took said that pretty much everyone in the country agrees on certain basic beliefs. For example, freedom is good; fairness is good; security is good. The disagreements come into play when those goals come into conflict, so one approach to this question could be how would you order those?
Deborah Stone is an author of a textbook from that TPP class (
Policy Paradox), and basically her argument comes down to a few major points: rationality is overrated, the market and polis (state) are perennially in conflict, the market is overrated, the state is overrated, and the key values (she defines 4: equity, liberty, security, and efficiency) are always in conflict.
Long story short: I definitely agree that 'better' is subjective. Even categorizing effects as equity-focused or liberty-focused is subjective. Some people see universal healthcare as equity-focused (as in, all people should receive equal treatment for their ills) while others see it as liberty-focused (freedom from harm). You'll notice this is never properly defined in any public debate on the issue; people start with their loaded assumptions and never clearly state them.
progressive taxation is:
a) morally justified
b) fiscally justified
c) not justified at all
I think your answer to this question pretty much reveals your general attitude towards the purpose of taxation and role of government.
Uh... both?
It's probably still relevant, at least for the US. Abortion, religion, and homosexual rights are still contentious issues in the US somehow, and the over-riding value structure these questions hit at rarely change.
But yeah, these don't really work outside the US.
I think we are trying to build an absolute scale that enables us to compare across countries, and even if the majority of people in one nation have agreed that abortion should be legal or homosexuals should have equal rights, then this indicates the center for their society is further to the social left than the United States is. I don't see that as a problem--we are so used to using relative scales in our own countries. I think we need to make a test that enables the relative comparison of countries and people against some absolute scale rather than arbitrary local "centers".
