User:Magnus.eisengrim

Brause's Law
Brause’s Law states that the American public tends to choose the most capable of the major party candidates in a U.S. presidential election. It was developed by Alison Brause, a management consultant based in Brooklyn, NY. It is grounded in the work of Elliott Jaques, a management consultant and psychotherapist who developed a method for measuring an individual's capacity to process information. The original statement of Brause’s Law (that the American public chooses the candidate with the highest information-processing capability) held true for all recent elections for which the capability of each candidate could be measured (the elections of 1960, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, and 2000). It did not hold for the 2004 election between John Kerry and George W. Bush. Even when results of this election are included, however, the difference in capability between the two candidates is a statistically significant predictor of the popular vote, and is a better predictor of the vote than economic and political characteristics typically associated with presidential voting.

Jaques’s approach to measuring capability is controversial. In Jaques’s original conception, the individual to be measured (typically, a candidate for corporate promotion or hiring) is engaged in discussion on controversial topics he or she both cares about and understands well (to ensure that he or she is working at their highest level of capability). The candidate is invited to make arguments in favor of their point of view, and the arguments are scored for complexity. The more complex the argument, the higher the capability level. In Jaques’s theory, higher complexity is associated with greater use of abstractions, and the use of contingency, causal relationships, and multiple linked arguments. This approach is similar to the cognitive developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and his followers, but assumes a more specific developmental sequence that is (implicitly) domain-general. Jaques also assumed that development would continue at a predictable rate throughout the individual’s adult life. Although Jaques offered some empirical support for both assumptions, neither assumption has been put to a robust test. Brause relied on transcripts of presidential debates to measure argument complexity, and the candidates’s arguments may have been affected by coaching.

In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Democratic candidate Barack Obama is generally considered to have “won” the debates over Republican John McCain, but both made arguments of roughly equal complexity. Nevertheless, because Obama (at 47) was considerably younger than McCain (at 72), Jaques’s theory predicts that Obama’s capability level would increase and that he would work at a higher level of capability during his four-year term than would McCain. Thus Brause's Law would predict an Obama victory.