We have a number of questions tagged political-theory. They are generally questions with some philosophic component. They are not questions about any actual government, policy, process, group, etc.
Political theory does not fit into any of the areas of our help. On the other hand, we have a reasonable number of these questions and they aren't being closed as off-topic.
If we think that political theory is on topic, we should edit the Help page to make this clear.
Yes, since the community is supporting political theory questions we should make it clear that these questions are acceptable on this site. The Help page is basically our "policy" that formally describes what is or is not on topic.
The Help page should be a resource for users to understand what kinds of questions they may ask. Our current Help may be dissuading some people (especially newer users) from asking political theory questions because they don't appear to be on-topic.
The Help page should also make it clear to users what kinds of questions are on-topic for the purposes of closing or opening questions. Currently, it would not be unreasonable for all our political theory questions to be closed as being off-topic.
Finally, the Help page is a tool for us to teach users what to do. When there is a discussion about what is or is not on topic, we should be able to refer users to the Help page to clarify what is or is not wanted on this stack. Currently, our Help page doesn't accomplish that task for political theory.
I would recommend adding a fourth item to the Help page.
- Political Theory:
Many questions about governments, policies, and processes are abstract or philosophical in nature. Questions about political philosophy and theory are on-topic, so long as they can be adequately backed-up. We recommend using the political-theory tag for these questions, as they are answered differently than other questions.
I am not solid on this text, but I hope it will be a good starting place.
The last sentence is meant to indicate that, unlike empirical questions, things like historical case studies, survey evidence, references to laws or policies, economic indicators, etc are not likely to be best evidence for a political theory question. It's a recommendation based on my experiences both asking and answering theory questions here, and one I'm happy to reconsider if need be.
As a newbie to politics site, I think it would be a good idea to have political-theory questions on-topic:
So, yes, we should update the Help page.
Even if this SE is originally constructed as a Q and A site, this site, Politics, which covers from foreign affairs to economic policy and armament and others, there could be at any moment the chance that any kind opinion-oriented answer/question can be "embedded". So I think it would hard for even moderators to judge if a question/answer is opinion based or not by the exact fair standard, so I think Political theory, aka Political opinion, can not be helped from being averted to be off-topic.
