Engineering democracy
DEMOCRATIC politics has moved beyond the ready comprehension of most eligible voters. Young people, especially, feel illqualified to participate in the electoral process. Academic researchers report these young nonvoters explaining their dereliction in terms of feeling too illinformed to choose one political option over another. ‘‘I just don’t feel that I know enough about it’’, is the alltoocommon refrain. Since the rest of the population, the people who do vote, appear increasingly to be using the ballot as a weapon of social punishment and/or revenge — rather than as a tool for social construction and progress — the prognosis for democratic politics is looking pretty grim.
It wasn’t always like this. New Zealand was once a posterchild for democratic participation and engagement. At its peak, in the years immediately following World War 2, this country’s twoparty system enrolled nearly a quarter of the adult population as at least nominal members of either National or Labour.
Social historians are fond of dismissing this period as one of
deep social conservatism and rigid conformity. They may well be right, but, given the mass membership political parties responsible for making this country’s laws and preserving its morals, it is difficult to argue that conservatism and conformity were not what most people wanted.
The profound resonance of Rob Muldoon’s election slogan — ‘‘New Zealand the way YOU want it’’ — showed that this popular yearning for political and moral certainty was still very much alive as late as 1975.
The serpent in this conservative Garden of Eden was the fastmoving technological and scientific revolution which was transforming the way the world was doing business.
Conservative societies require stable and predictable economies. While it is arguable that the New Zealand economy has never been particularly stable, by the early 1980s our instability was incontestable.
Rescuing this situation was beyond the scope of New Zealand’s democratic traditions. Consequently, political, social and economic transformation ceased to be the preserve of political parties and became, instead, the responsibility of professional administrative elites. Democratic politics was no longer about parties facilitating popular sovereignty. It was now a matter of highly paid experts deploying an increasingly sophisticated array of techniques to persuade voters that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, they were still the ones calling the shots.
Just how sophisticated those techniques had become was demonstrated in the twin political earthquakes of 2016: Brexit and Trump. Dominic Cummings, the mastermind behind the ‘‘Vote Leave’’ campaign to take the UK out of the EU, hired not political scientists, not commonorgarden statisticians, but astrophysicists to refine his techniques for identifying, motivating and enrolling ‘‘persuadable voters’’ to his cause. The Trump campaign’s arcane use of social media goaded people, in ways of which they were barely conscious, to ‘‘Make America Great Again’’.
While the formation of the Jacinda Ardernled Coalition Government was arguably a political accident, very little about the 2020 general election will be left to chance. Labour is already gathering the best and the brightest manipulators of the popular will from Australia, the US and the UK to convince the NZ electorate that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, Jacinda and her colleagues are ‘‘doing this’’ — and doing it well.
No matter that, according to just about every metric, this Government is failing to deliver the ‘‘transformational’’ policies it promised. Such a prosaic view of politics is as outdated as it is limited.
Rationality is not what governs people’s voting behaviour in the 21st century — not even the rationality of political parties supposedly dedicated to turning the inchoate hopes and dreams of their supporters into coherent economic and social policies. Voting behaviour in the 21st century is determined by emotional responses, engineered to produce the desired effects by communicators skilled in the techniques of motivational psychology.
The awful truth is that although we may believe ourselves to be making rational political choices, we are much more likely to be displaying the effects of ‘‘cognitive dissonance’’ and ‘‘confirmation bias’’. The even more awful truth is that so much of this behaviour is the product of deliberate, psychopolitical engineering. Like BF Skinner’s labrats and pigeons, we are being programmed to respond to stimuli which we do not control.
When young voters say: ‘‘I really don’t know enough’’ about the complexities, nor yet the ultimate purposes, of contemporary politics, they are being admirably realistic.