“If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom,” observed Mark Twain, “we need only observe it at election time.” Not a lot has changed since Twain wrote that in 1885, except that the more we learn about elections, the more we realise how right he was.
People sometimes make the mistake of trying to justify the study of elections and voting on the basis that they are an important part of democracy. They are – but things can be important without being interesting. Elections are important and interesting. They’re interesting because they involve people – candidates, activists, voters, non-voters – and like most things involving people, explaining what they do and why they do it is not always straightforward. Sometimes it is depressing, sometimes it is uplifting, but it is always revealing.
The ideal voter of democratic theory is a rational man or woman, someone who gathers all the evidence about the issues of the day and the plans of the parties, weighs it all up responsibly, cogitating at length, and then delivers a mature and informed judgment at the ballot box. Actual voters aren’t much like that – which is why they are so interesting.
In practice, voters’ choices reflect the whole rich tapestry of human nature: swayed by emotions as well as reason, salesmen as well as products, by tribal attachment as well as cool calculation. Britain offers a particularly interesting case study for election researchers. We have more and more elections to study – with an electoral cycle that now coughs up an important set of contests on a yearly basis – which use an increasingly eclectic set of electoral procedures.
There’s the growing use of referendums – with two UK-wide contests in the last decade alone, plus separate ones in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. No one thinks those we have recently seen will be the last either. Then there are the voters, who are becoming ever more unpredictable, and continue to surprise even seasoned election watchers – both this June’s referendum vote for Brexit and last May’s Conservative Westminster majority confounded many.
Yet those who think the decisions voters make are ignorant or even irrational do them a disservice. The judgments rendered by the electorate are sometimes misinformed, and often harsh, but they are rarely irrational.
Take the vexed political issue of immigration. Many experts on the issue despair at the ignorance voters display: they seem hopelessly wrong about the numbers coming, the reasons they come and the impact they have on the economy. Yet although they are muddled on the details, voters are remarkably responsive on the big picture. Concern about the issue tracks numbers closely: when migrant numbers go up, more voters cite it as a concern. Voters noticed the pledges by successive governments to bring numbers down, they noticed when these pledges failed, and they noticed that one important reason for that failure was rising immigration from the EU. The growing number of voters who wanted immigration reduced drew the logical conclusions from all of this: the old parties had failed on the issue, so they turned to a new one (Ukip); controlling migration looked close to impossible within the EU, so they voted to leave.
This pattern of behaviour – ignorant about the details, but responsive on the big picture – is one we see quite often. It has a lot to recommend it. When a room gets too cold, we respond by turning up the heating. When the room gets too hot, we turn it off. We usually manage to do this without knowing the precise temperature. Voters often display a similar thermostatic logic. Of course, voters aren’t consistently rational even on the big picture stuff. But usually when they apparently go off the rails, there is an interesting logic underlying what they do, throwing light on the strengths and weaknesses of how we reason more generally.
The approaching party conference season will provide plenty of examples of how politics is an expression of, and a reflection of, who we are and how we think. The parties will appeal to tribal loyalties and tribal enemies because all of us are swayed by tribal affinities, though we don’t like to admit it. Politicians will appeal to our hearts over our heads because our decisions are often swayed more by our emotions than we like to believe. Politicians will promise contradictory things, because voters often demand contradictory things. And even those who never watch a minute of this will be forming judgments based on conversations at work, with friends or around the family dinner table – as well as longer-standing allegiances, identities and beliefs.
This is why we love to study politics for a living – it reflects human nature in all its contradictory and capricious variety. The ballot box is not just the cornerstone of our democracy – it is a window into ourselves.
Philip Cowley and Robert Ford’s More Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box is published by Biteback on 1 September
