Sharing this because while eliminating AC E, I was forced to question the difference between causation and sufficiency as well as the danger of using Lawgic as shorthand when you're not actually dealing with conditional statements.
Most Strongly Supported
Argument Summary:
Premise 1: Media rarely cover local politics thoroughly.
Premise 2: Local politics is usually conducted secretly.
Major premise: Local politicians tend to be isolated from their electorates as a result of each of these factors.
Conclusion: Chance of a particular act of resident participation receiving official response is lower, discouraging resident participation.
Prephrase:
Not really sure where they are going with this. MSS questions are difficult to prephrase for anyway.
Answer Choices:
A- Nah. Invalid reversal. We don’t know what is sufficient to bring about a likelihood of official response. Eliminate.
B- A -> B therefore /A ->/B. Invalid. Eliminate.
C- Most important??? Eliminate.
D- The current state of media coverage contributes to the isolation. Improving this coverage would reduce that contributor but would not necessarily cause any change. Correct!
E- Isolated -> Reduced chance of official response -> discourages participation. /C -> Less A. Hm. I think the issue here is with the word “causation”. “Imply” and “Cause” are not synonymous and if you contrapose a conditional statement, I don’t believe we can just switch the direction of causation. “If I am disrespectful to my parents, that discourages them to let me go out on friday nights. But if they were encouraged to let me go out on friday nights, does that cause me to be less disrespectful of them?” We are dealing with terms like "influence" and "discourage". I use Lawgic as a shorthand to deal with these ideas, but that doesn't make them conditional statements and so we definitely can't assume causation. Eliminate.
https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-june-2007-section-2-question-22/