I would guess that old Commie-fighter Nixon’s ideas had to evolve somewhat, sincerely, before he, as POTUS, could consider rapprochement with Red China.
Word. People change their minds all the time, especially in light of new information. This is a little-known process called “learning.” The accusations of flip-flopping are meant to undermind a politician’s credibility. It’s supposed to demonstrate that the person has no principles and will change his public opinion for political advantage.
That’s an oversimplification. Some areas of New York State are pretty conservative, even within New York City, there’s Staten Island.
Changed his mind vs. flip flopped is entirely based on your assessment of the politician’s motives and your understanding of his stances. That is, if you think he’s really considered new information and his situation is different, you can say he’s changed his mind. If you think he’s just altering his position based what will get him elected, it’s a flip flop.
The difference is all about perspective. A politician changes his mind when he now agrees with you. He’s flip flopping when the change means he now disagrees with you.
Oops. Forgot to respond. There’s actually some literature on this sort of thing (Hannah Pitkin is the really big name) — but basically, you need a balance. Representation doesn’t mean electing someone who will only do what the electorate has told them, but it also doesn’t mean electing someone to make all the electorate’s decisions for them. Ergo, you need a balance.
My understanding of what flip-flopping means is different that most of what I’ve seen here in the thread. I understand to mean when a politician changes his message based upon the audience of that message. Often they’re crafty and manage to avoid directly contradicting themselves, but not always. An example might be if one is doing a speech in a liberal area and mentioning something that will do well among liberals, then taking the opposite position in front a conservative audience.
Obviously, a smart politician will simply play up his positions that would be favorable to the audience and downplay his positions that are unfavorable, but sometimes they get caught directly contradicting themselves, and that’s what I’d call flip-flopping.
I wouldn’t call just changing one’s mind, even if it’s toward the popular direction necessarily flip-flopping, even if it’s done more than once on the same issue. I don’t agree with this idea, but I understand that some politicians will weight polls heavily and sometimes override their own ideology based upon polls. It might seem disingenuous, but I don’t really think it’s a whole lot different than a lawyer defending someone he personally thinks is guilty but offers a good argument in his favor anyway. Maybe a politician believes one position strongly, but sees that an overwhelming percentage of his constituents feel the opposite, so he will fight for that position, even though he disagrees with it.
Obviously, as someone said, just seating a weathervane is dumb, but I’d also like to hope that even the most principled politician will eventually favor his constituents over his own ideology if a significant proportion disagrees with him. For instance, here in Virginia former Governor Kaine admitted that he was anti-Death penalty but promised not to use his power to support his ideology. Of course, whether or not he actually lived up to that is a matter that some would contest, but in so doing I wouldn’t call him a flip-flopper even though he was clearly making a concession for the sake of getting elected.
This pretty much covers it and I was waiting for someone to put it this way.
The Times had a lengthy article on this. It is unlikely that sentiment changed dramatically in these districts, though one guy said he’d vote the way his district wanted, and the pro-SSM forces got out a lot of mail from supporters. Another person changed his vote because his wife had a beloved gay relative, who cut off contact because of the guy’s anti-SSM vote two years ago.
IME - FlipFlopping isn’t a one time occurance - its when there is a pattern, especially when you can ttrack the person doing it going ‘back and forth’ on a given issue - afraid to take a true stand or only appearing to agree with what the current audience wants to hear.
(in front of soldiers, I agree with the war, at a church I voted against going, etc)