I started this as a response to Soonergrunt's
diary, but decided I could expand a bit more if I made it my own diary.
I've been voting Democrat for nearly 40 years now, but if I had to give a precise definition of a Democrat, I'd be hard pressed to do it. The same thing actually goes for Republicans, but I'm more interested in the question as it applies to Dems.
Psychologists have an approach to the description of concept knowledge called "prototypes". This comes out of the work of Eleanor Rosch in the 70's. It may be interesting to use Daily Kos to develop not the definition of a Democrat, but the description of a prototypical Democrat.
This is actually a fun process. The basic idea is that the prototype of a concept can be described in terms of a set of descriptive features, and that individuals are relatively more
typical or
atypical to the extent that they share features with the prototype. For example, a prototypical bird has the feature "can fly", so people tend to think of flightless birds as less bird-like than flying birds, and flying mammals as more bird-like than non-flying ones. As you seen, there is usually some degree of match between
definitions and
prototypes, but not a perfect match. By definition, a penguin is a bird and a bat is not, yet at least in some ways, a bat is more birdlike--closer to the protypical bird--than a penguin.
BTW, it has been shown experimentally that in some cases, there is no single instance (or token, to use the jargon) which is identical to the prototype, that is, which has all of the prototypical features for the concept (or type).
So, the idea of this diary is to come up with a set of features that describes the prototypical Democrat (and, if people are interested, the prototypical Republican).
BTW, the idea of prototypes is commonly realized in the terms [DR]INO, which indicate that someone is technically a Democrat/Republican, but differs from the prototype in one or more salient ways.
Here are a few very obvious ones, let's get them out of the way up front:
- is an American citizen
- is registered to vote as a Democrat
- votes Democrat
Take it away!
Greg Shenaut