The gut vote
How instinct can rule at the ballot box
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 10 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 per cent. Party loyalty seemed stable, but also possibly stagnant; then, suddenly, the vote had swung, after a closely 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 gut voter.
Now, of course, we see them everywhere — and t hei r prominence o nl y grows as digital media allows for ever more personal and immediate political campaigns.
These are the voters who responded to the genial appeal of Jack Layton, allowing the federal NDP a Quebec sweep in the last election. They are the Ontarians who resisted the urge to turf the scandal-plagued provincial Liberals, rather than bet on the untested new guy. And they were behind the massive swing against Jim Prentice that brought Rachel Notley’s NDP to power in Alberta. None of these votes made much sense as rational predictions, but in hindsight, you could almost feel where they came from.
Gut voters confound pollsters because the gut is capricious. These are the voters who feel deep down that they understand a candidate he has never met. They vote for Justin Trudeau because they “know” he is inspiring, or for Stephen Harper because they feel he is trustworthy, or for Thomas Mulcair because he is clearly “wise.”
They feel their politics viscerally, chemically. But they are neither as rare nor as shallow as that characterization might seem. We are all gut voters, in a way — in thrall to hidden forces that drive decision making, whether we are casting a ballot, dating or shopping. 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.
Our political orientations are also much more fixed than we might think. 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.”
Scott Matthews, a professor of political psychology at Memorial University, said the single strongest non-rational determinant of voting behaviour is party affiliation — not necessarily official membership, but a sense of belonging. It is a “social identity,” he said, as much as ethnic, religious or national identities. It is “a sense you are part of a certain group, and the fate of that group bears on your own view of yourself.”
Assuming the polls are not wildly off then, all that talk about the death of the Liberal Party after Michael Ignatieff was short-sighted and wrong. “As soon as they had a reason to come back to the party, they were ready,” Matthews said. “It’s emotional.”
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 judgment “seems to come after the affective process, in which the individual forms his or her likes or dislikes about an object.”
The gut voter, in this model, does not so much vote irrationally as pre-rationally.
As a way into the political mind, Yoel Inbar, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough, has studied how feelings of disgust and purity influence voting behaviour. He has learned that people who are more sensitive to disgust, and show the strongest reaction to it, tend to lean politically right.
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, and is now so “decoupled” from facts on the ground that it can include how we perceive people with different traditions. The niqab issue, Inbar said, is a particularly powerful illustration of this effect.
Feelings of disgust are also seen on the left of the political spectrum, for example in the anger over the excesses of Wall Street. “Disgust seems to have expanded to also incorporate more conceptual stimuli,” Inbar said.
Having realized how hard it is to change voters’ gut instincts, 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 or she 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.”
The gut voter does not so much vote irrationally as pre-rationally