Blog prompt #1 : Literary methodology on the experimental strata

Or, in simpler english, scientific literacy and the scientific method. Scientific literacy is an important concept in general, because people need to have at least a general grasp of how science works so they do not make attempts to condemn it as vile witchery, or simply brush scientific discoveries and concepts off because they don't mesh with their personal beliefs. I wouldn't say that scientific literacy is explicitly necessary for a functioning and robust democracy, but it certainly helps a great deal, and may explain why the american model has persisted for hundreds of years beyond its expected utility. Many of our founding fathers had solid groundings in the scientific theory and literature of the time. But even if true scientific literacy is not necessary, or at least not necessary at a level of fluency, I would say that knowledge of and familiarity with the scientific method are necessary, both for participants in the democratic process and for candidates and participants in the political portion of the democratic process.

If a candidate for office has any idea what they are talking about, they will at some point be forced to bring up more esoteric concepts than the construction of a molecule, be it from an economic science standpoint or a pure technological standpoint. For the professionals and industry interests that will lend support based upon those portions of their campaign platform to parse and decode these statements and technical jargon, its fairly easy, given a professional investiture and a reason to need to comprehend it. But for the regular people that make up the majority of the vote, they aren't likely to have an encyclopedic knowledge of new technologies and concepts. Once, this would have been more of a barrier than it is today. Easy access to knowledge and industry publications virtually guarantees that if one is willing to look, and knows how to, that they can find at least a baseline of information on nearly any subject they could care to name. In its essence, the scientific method can be applied to that concept in the method of search, as well as allowing people to understand the basic theory of how the research was organized and completed. So while scientific literacy isn't precisely necessary for democracy to run, a basic grounding in science and the scientific method is.