Motivation and cynicism

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A couple of weeks ago, Roger Scully’s Elections in Wales blog carried a guest post by a new colleague of his, Dr Stuart Fox.  It dealt with the subject of young voters and how to appeal to them.  It concluded, in essence, that the difference between younger voters and their older peers isn’t about the issues that concern them so much as about their willingness to vote at all; in broad terms, their concerns largely mirror those of other sections of the electorate.

I thought that it was an interesting conclusion.  By and large, the thrust of what the various parties are doing to attract younger voters assumes almost the direct opposite, and is largely based on the assumption that younger voters do have a different agenda and can be motivated to go out and vote for party X by an electoral offering which targets those policy areas which the parties assume are of direct personal interest to the target group.

In a sense, the parties are behaving in a consistent fashion here in assuming that issues like tuition fees and voting age will motivate younger voters – they also assume that issues such as pensions will motivate older voters, and so on.  It’s possible of course that the parties are right and the pollsters are wrong on this.  By that, I don’t necessarily mean that the pollsters are wrong in the numbers or in their analysis of the numbers – the post shows plenty of evidence to support the conclusions and analysis drawn from them.

But the validity of all that depends on the veracity of the responses given by people when asked the questions, and there are two obvious ways in which the answers might be invalid.  The first is that people might just be lying.  It is at least possible that people might say one thing (because they might not want to appear selfish) but do another; I seem to remember that there was some evidence of that phenomenon a few years ago in relation to the idea of an income tax rise.  The other is that people might be drawing a distinction in their own minds between what they see as being the ‘most important issues’ facing the country and what might actually motivate them to vote as individuals.  If either of those were to be true, than perhaps the parties have got it right after all.

But what if they’re not?  What if the responses given are entirely truthful, so that the analysis and conclusions drawn are entirely valid?  That would suggest (and not just for young people) that the electorate was going to decide much more on the basis of what they feel is right for the country as a whole rather than on a narrowly selfish basis. (And I realise, of course, that ‘group selfishness’ in this context isn’t at all the same thing as altruism).  That would suggest that continued and repeated appeals to the more selfish instincts of particular groups of people might simply add to the cynicism about politicians and parties rather than improve the motivation to participate.   

And I suspect that that cynicism, coupled with a feeling that ‘it doesn’t really make any difference’ (given that the offerings are all so similar) might actually be a more accurate reason for low turnout than any failure to ‘press the right buttons’ for any particular section of the electorate.