A Structure of Political Revolutions

"This line of thought echoes the way the twentieth-century Austrian philosopher Karl Popper thought science works: Scientists put forward a theory which they then test against experience. If experience contradicts the theory's predictions, the theory is 'falsified' and should promptly be discarded. Popper saw science as the model of critical and rational thinking, always open to being shown that it was wrong, always accountable to empirical evidence. He also saw science as a model for democratic politics. In a democracy, the government should always be open to criticism, and it should of course be accountable to voters, who test the degree to which government policies work or not. If not, they get rid of them in the next election and vote in a new government.
"The problem is that science doesn't actually work that way—and neither do democratic politics."

Alexis Papazoglou at The New Republic writes that in politics "[t]he battle has to be won just as much at the level of rhetoric and persuasion as anywhere else."