User:Jrussellpedia

A post critiquing Wikipedia's article of superdelegates:

I choose to evaluate the Wikipedia entry on superdelegates. I served as managing coordinate on Harvard’s Campus Voices project in 2007-2008. The Campus Voices project covered the Democratic and Republican candidates in the early primary and caucus states in the 2008 presidential election. The potential effects that superdelegates could have had on the Democratic race intrigued me and led me to pursue the topic in my senior honors thesis. My thesis gave a brief history of superdelegates, used economic models to explain their staying power and analyzed how they and other political institutions are essentially change-resistant.

The Wikipedia entry on superdelegates has certainly improved since originally looked at the entry nearly five years ago (there was just one section, I believe). The article begins with a clarification of superdelegates vs. pledged delegates, provides a brief history of superdelegates, discusses the role of superdelegates in 2008 and concludes with a brief section of critiques to superdelegates. Still, there are areas for improvement.

From a comprehensiveness standpoint, the article does not do a good job of actually explaining what superdelegates are. The article needs to give more details on who can be a superdelegate and what their role can be. One way to do this would be to provide an example of a superdelegate and a quote from them explaining their role. There were dozens of vocal superdelegates in 2008 that could have been cited. Additionally, the article does not give a full explanation of why superdelegates were created. Superdelegates were created in response to the tumultuous 1968 convention where party leaders essentially overrode the public sentiment of rank and file Democrats and chose Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the nominee. Superdelegates were created to open the nomination process to rank and file Democrats and minorities and women. Readers can learn this by clicking a link but this explanation is vitally important and should be in the text of the article. Finally, the article does address arguably the most important tension surrounding superdelegates. Superdelegates were created to open up the Democratic nomination process but most view superdelegates in the 2008 context where they could have (if then Senator Obama did not win as many pledged delegates) used their power to select Senator Hillary Clinton over Obama. This tension is critical to any discourse on superdelegates and needs to be addressed in the article.

Almost all of the citations used in the superdelegates article are from newspapers and magazines. Most of these newspapers are prominent, mainstream periodicals like the New York Times and CNN. The article also cites a few documents the official Democratic Party website. The article only cites one book and one scholarly article. There is little scholarly work on superdelegates and no book solely dedicated to superdelegates but I used over a dozen books and scholarly articles in my thesis to explain the genesis of superdelegates and discuss their role in past elections. This article needs to include these to add additional legitimacy and details on superdelegates.

For the most part, the article is written from a neutral point of view. Even though superdelegates are arguable much less important for the Republican Party, more attention could be paid to Republican superdelegates. The tone of the criticism section is, as one would expect, critical to superdelegates. I don’t have a problem with this. However, there should be a section that talks about the successes or perceived successes of superdelegates. This would make the article very objective.

The article is very readable. One does not need any advanced understanding of politics to read and understand this article. But I would argue that the article is too simple in many places and fails to provide enough information on how and why superdelegates were created. Adding this more detailed information could be balanced by providing relatable examples of superdelegates.

There are only minor formatting issues with this article. There is an errant space after the first line of text. The article also incorrectly places an article (“the”) in front of Politico (the political website).

There are no illustrations in this article.

Overall, the Wikipedia article on superdelegates adequately explains the current role of superdelegates. More attention should be placed on the history of superdelegates and implications superdelegates could have moving forward. The article should also include examples and quotes from past and existing superdelegates. Continually, the article needs to be updated to include information from books, scholarly articles and political party documents and by-laws.