I think flip-flopping in politics is often a politician changing his view in a short amount of time and not admitting to the prior held view.
If a politician changes his view and publicly states that he held a very different view before but he was swayed by x, y, and z then I think nobody would accuse them of flip-flopping.
Good point, but people also need to understand the explanation, and they have to believe the change of mind is genuine and that x, y, and z are the genuine reasons (as opposed to some other contingent or craven reason) for the switch.
For example, John Kerry's "for it before I was against it" sounded to some like he was dissembling and hiding that he may have changed his opinion on an appropriations bill simply because the wars were becoming less popular with the public.
If you're only changing what you're saying merely to temporarily win your audience's mindshare, it doesn't matter if you're a smarmy CEO, politician, lawyer, or programmer.
You can honestly change your opinion and point of view, and you can also lie. Changing your opinion and point of view is not seen as negative, but deception is generally frowned upon to the point of societies making fraud a higher level crime (see Perjury).
One thing to remember about politics is that there is a much higher degree of moral positions. Flipflopping on moral positions make people think the preson not worthy of trust, in a whole other way than flipflopping on technical solutions since technical solutions are a lot less dependent on core values and soft issues without hard truths compared to how politics is.
That's true, except the definition is elastic in politics. A candidate who thought a certain way at 18 years old is expected to still think the same way - on all opinions - at 45, which is absolutely ludicrous.
That's a strawman though, nobody actually says that. People complain about "flip flopping" when they see a politician campaigning and he or she says one thing on tuesday, something contradictory on wednesday, and then is back to the previous position again on thursday.
Usually when I see it, it is people complaining that a candidate endorsed different viewpoints than they did during past elections (in other words, they think something different than they did years ago). Kerry and Romney both come to mind (though to be clear, both (or at least Romney) have been accused of the type you are talking about as well). Specifically I have heard some people claim that Romney has flip-flopped because they perceive a difference between his positions as a presidential candidate and as a governor.
I think a lot of that is just that if the person in question clearly does just say whatever they think people want to hear, then a dramatic change in position appears more likely to just be more of the same. Romney suddenly being against "obamacare" is a good example. It doesn't appear that he changed his mind because of new information, since he still claims his version of the same thing is great, but Obama's is terrible.
Actually, it has been used many times. Most recently, Bill Clinton was forced to defend things he wrote when he was at Oxford; George Bush was named as a person whose foreign policy platform was unchanged since he was 16, just to name two.
Or perhaps another way of looking at it is they are trying to represent voters better. Since that's, well, their job.
We should not get onto politicians for representing voters, rather than themselves. Changing their approach to public policy is a very good way for a public official to better represent voters.
