Australia and New Zealand provide a case for whether it pays to be nice – or if it’s simply not worth bothering.

The term “political science,” as many have observed, is somewhat of an oxymoron. Of all fields of scholarly pursuit, politics is comparatively ill-suited to the processes of the scientific method. Political systems and policies cannot exactly be isolated in a laboratory. The “data sets” of seemingly infinite variables are so complex and dynamic that while the “hard” sciences are sending rockets to Mars, our world’s most celebrated political scientists still struggle to accurately predict election outcomes.