Post #8: EOTO Presentation 2

EOTO Presentation 2

By Davis Trax

There are many political theories that exist such as Confirmation Bias, Gatekeeping and the Illusory Truth Effect. When we did our second round of EOTOs, I ended up choosing none of the ones I listed, but I instead chose Overton Window, an idea and policy theory that suggested a certain mindset of politicians.

The Overton Window idea was named after and created by policy analyst Joseph P. Overton, who stated the success rate of a policy is determined by where it would exist along the spectrum shown above. He also stated the window frames the overall range of possibilities without going too extreme on either side. So I haven't gone into any detail about this Overton Window and what it does and what the theory suggests. The Overton Window is a way to understand the change of societal ideas over time and how they influence politics. This concept states that politicians are generally limited in the ideas they support and the ones that they do support should be generally accepted by society. Any of the policies that society accepts lies within the Overton Window, and its placement depends on how much of society supports the idea. There are other ideas that exist, but these are almost always lying on the outside of the Overton Window.

As you can see, the Overton Window exists along a spectrum of ideas, each side being bookended by radical ideas of the left and right wings of politics. The ideas within the Overton Window are ones that both parties can equally support. Throughout time, this window shrinks and expands as ideas are more and less accepted over time. 

I state that there could be a way that politicians can move ideas from the outside to the inside. I honestly think that it could probably happen by the politician continuously promoting the idea to all of society, but I also think that this would be an extremely rare case.

The only issues that arise from this theory are that politicians don't have a clear cut option for the very middle of the window, meaning the most unanimously popular and supported policy, so they have to create it on their own agenda. Second of all, some politicians don't care about the window. They disregard it completely or they believe it is subjective and that it lies somewhere else closer to their parties agenda, like on the very far right or left.

What I gain from this theory is that we as a society have more power in society than we might realize. If we as a society find a common ground for an idea or policy, this theory states that a sane politician, which is hard to come by nowadays, would support this policy or idea in office or during an election period.

Hopefully, more people read up on this and we can see that if we want to, we could potentially make the government more inclined to do what we want because we all want the same thing.