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Gut instincts drive voting and election campaigns

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After the 1974 election returned Pierre Trudeau to majority governance in his third term, a distinguished group of political scientists got together to figure out what the heck just happened.

At the time, the Liberal Party had won seven of ten general elections since the Second World War, forming the government continuously for a decade, and its share of the vote varied on average less than 5%. Party loyalty seemed stable, even stagnant, but then, suddenly, the vote had swung, after a close fought campaign on the dreary topic of inflation.

To explain this, the researchers identified a large and diverse group known as “flexible partisans,” whose party loyalty was either unstable, inconsistent, or weak. These voters were just as interested and informed as “durable partisans,” but they were “particularly sensitive to short-term forces,” such as the campaign-defining photo of Tory leader Robert Stanfield dropping a football. Flexible partisans, the researchers concluded, were the reason “large scale reversals in parties electoral fortunes” were possible.

After decades of carving the electorate into social, economic and ethnic groups, social science had finally discovered the voter who follows instinct.

This is the person who votes because Justin Trudeau looks inspiring, or Stephen Harper seems trustworthy, or Tom Mulcair sounds wise. It is the person who feels deep down that they understand a candidate they have never met. These people feel their politics viscerally, chemically, and they are neither as rare nor as shallow as that characterization might seem.

This creature, the gut voter, has risen to greater prominence as campaigns became more personal, first on television and then the Internet, and his growing significance to campaign strategy reflects more than just the progress of political science and professional electioneering.

This same revolution also swept psychology and economics, revealing the hidden forces that drive decision making, in everything from dating to shopping to voting. We are all gut voters, in a way. We are aware of what we think, but not why we think it. And we tend to imagine we are more consistently rational than the experimental evidence suggests.

“People aren’t robots, but they find some things more appealing than other things,” said Yoel Inbar, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Political orientations are not written into genes, but they are firmly fixed and resistant to change. Voting is not just emotional, it is – as David Patrick Houghton put it in the book Political Psychology – “also rapid, instantaneous, and involves largely unconscious processes. Changing your beliefs involves changing the whole architecture beneath.”

The surge in interest in how emotion interacts with politics has been called the Affect Effect, and in their book of the same title, Dan Cassino and Milton Lodge describe various arguments that suggest “the brain is primarily for feeling, not thinking.”

This is known as the “hot cognition hypothesis,” that thinking itself is charged with affect, feeling, sensation. It means that even when you try to think dispassionately about a politician, you cannot, because you never have. In the voting booth, political preference is an automatic, emotional process, driven by the lingering influence of earlier, equally biased, political judgments.

One study they cite, on affirmative action and gun control, showed that the process of political judgement “seems to come after the affective process, in which the individual forms his or her likes or dislikes about an object.”

As a way into the political mind, Inbar has studied how feelings of disgust and purity influence voting behaviour, and he has learned that people who are more sensitive to disgust, and show the strongest reaction to it, tend to be more politically right wing.

He explains this by saying that disgust first evolved to keep us safe from pathogens, in things like rotten meat or feces. Over time, that extended to other possible pathogen threats, such as people from outside groups.

He even did one unusual experiment where he showed that a faint bad smell in a room increased anti-gay sentiment in subjects predisposed to be disgusted by homosexuality.

“Disgust seems to have expanded to also incorporate more conceptual stimuli,” Inbar said, with hot button political examples including gay marriage on the right and the excesses of Wall Street on the left. As he put it, this evolutionary reaction has “decoupled” from the facts on the ground, even though it still has a powerful effect on the mind. The niqab issue, Inbar said, is a particularly powerful illustration of this effect.

Having realized how hard it is to change the voters’ guts, modern politicians have tried to play to them, not through rational argument or evidence-based policy, but through emotional association and what is popularly called “dog-whistle politics.”

The gut can be positive, but it can likewise be negative, and the typical voter cannot control how it goes, even if he tried. As Cassino and Lodge put it: “We live a half-second behind our own actions, creating a story about why we said, thought, or did what we did.” 

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