Expert Political Judgment by Tetlock Philip E

Author:Tetlock, Philip E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-12-24T16:00:00+00:00

History of the USSR

Competing Schemas. Conservative observers viewed the Soviet state, from its Bolshevik beginnings, as intrinsically totalitarian and oppressively monolithic. Stalinism was no aberration: it was the natural outgrowth of Leninism. Liberal observers subscribed to more pluralistic conceptions of the Soviet polity. They dated cleavages between doctrinaire and reformist factions of the party back to the 1920s and they saw nothing foreordained about the paths taken since then.7 These observers suspected that the system had some legitimacy and that dissolution was not the inevitable result of Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika.

Counterfactual Probes. The competing schemas carry starkly different implications for the acceptability of specific close-call scenarios. Once the Soviet Union comes into existence in 1917, conservatives see far less flexibility than do liberals for “rewriting” history by imagining what might have happened had different people been in charge of the party apparatus: counterfactuals such as “If the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had deposed Stalin in the early 1930s, the Soviet Union would have moved toward a kinder, gentler version of socialism fifty years earlier than it did,” or “If Malenkov had prevailed in the post-Stalin succession struggle, the cold war would have ended in the 1950s rather than the 1980s,” or “If Gorbachev had been a shrewder tactician in his pacing of reforms, the Soviet Union would exist today.” Conservatives tend to believe only powerful external forces can make a difference and are thus receptive only to counterfactuals that front-load big causes: “Were it not for the chaos and misery of World War I, there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution” or “Were it not for Reagan’s hard-line policies, the cold war would not have ended as peacefully and quickly as it did.”

TABLE 5.1

Correlations between Political Ideology and Counterfactual Beliefs of Area Study Specialists

Counterfactual Antecedent Antecedent/Consequent Linkage

About Soviet Union

No WWI, no Bolshevik Revolution

.25 –.57

Longer life to Lenin, no Stalinism

.13 .68

Depose Stalin, kinder, gentler Communism

.66 .70

Malenkov prevails, early end to cold war

.17 .71

No Gorbachev, CPSU has conservative shift

–.16 .30

No Reagan, no early end to cold war

–.30 –.74

A shrewder Gorbachev, Soviet Union survives

.11 .51

About South Africa

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