Earlier this
week, an opinion poll suggested that the health service would be the top
priority issue for people voting in the Assembly elections in May. Whilst I can’t dispute the findings of the
poll itself – I’m sure that it’s an accurate reflection of what people said – I
wonder what it actually means. The
implication is that those who see health as their top issue will sit down and
carefully compare the detailed promises of each party on the subject and come
to a conclusion about which party is proposing the policies which will do most
to improve the health service in Wales before going out and making their mark
alongside the name of the appropriate party and candidate.
Years of
political campaigning, however, tell me that it hasn’t worked that way in the
past, and it is unlikely to work that way in the future. It seems to me much more likely that voters
will use their general perceptions and prejudices about parties to justify
voting in much the same way as they would have voted anyway; the number of
voters swayed by detailed policy commitments is a lot lower than politicians
and the media would have us believe.
The question of
what motivates people to vote as they do has also come up in comments on a few
recent posts on this blog, most recently here. One of my anonymous ‘friends’ argued that “People vote 'for' a reasonable expectation
of a better standard of living. And
people vote 'against' anything that is likely to get in the way of an
anticipated improvement in standard of living”. In a rather more nuanced contribution,
Democritus argued that “when it comes to
votes of first order importance … the main issue tends to revolve around which
choice is likely on balance to make the polity as a whole or the voter as an
individual better, or at least not worse, off”.
If it were
really true that most people vote in accordance with the more extreme
interpretation of that perspective, then it would set a very high – (perhaps impossible,
for reasons I’ve touched on before and will return to in the future) – bar to achieving
independence, because it would require us to convince the majority of people in
Wales that they could be certain of being personally materially better off as a
result. Even the more nuanced position which
‘merely’ requires people to be convinced that we’d be materially better off as
a whole (or at least no worse off) is still a fairly high bar to set.
Personally, I’m
not so certain that either of these positions stands up well to detailed
examination, although I’m closer to agreeing with the second than the first.
Whilst there
are some individuals who really do vote at elections on the basis of naked short
term self-interest, I wonder how general that really is. I'd agree that it has become more common in
recent years; I’d put the turning point at around 1979 - although whether the
election of that year led to a change in attitude or caught a mood which was
growing anyway is more of a moot point.
In either event, from that point on, the Tories positively encouraged a
more selfish and self-interested approach, and Labour caught up under
Blair. Much of what passes for politics
since then has seen parties (and not just those two – the infection has spread)
carefully crafting their offerings to seek to appeal to the perceived
self-interest of selected target groups.
And the media have aided and abetted in that process. But does it really govern the voting
behaviour of the majority?
It’s also possible
to argue, of course, that even people who don’t vote on the basis of such
narrow personal interests nevertheless vote for what they see as being the best
outcome for some larger group of which they are members, which is still voting on
the basis of self-interest albeit in a more diffuse fashion. They could be voting for what they think is
best for their children or grandchildren; for their socio-economic class; for
their nation; or even for the planet as a whole. All of these can be interpreted as
self-interest of a form, even if at one or more removes.
There are
occasions, however, when what looks like a vote in favour of an economic
self-interest is actually little more than a rationalisation of a much darker
motive dressed in the clothing of economics.
I’m thinking here of the antipathy towards immigration, usually
expressed in terms of jobs or economic costs such as benefits no matter how
much that rationalisation is at variance with the facts. But if we were to interpret self-interest
more widely again, then I suppose that we could see ‘not wanting to have more
foreigners in the country’ as little more than a variant on the theme of
self-interest.
All of the
above assumes, in one way or another, that electors are considering all the
options before voting and that voting is a considered and rational act. I wonder.
In my time at university I read about the work of Graham Wallas who argued
as long ago as 1908 (Human Nature in
Politics) that voting is largely the result of habit based on irrational
assumptions. That still seems as
perspicacious an assessment now as it did when I first read about in in 1971. To the extent that the electorate as a whole
votes on the basis of self-interest, I rather suspect that it is more a
question of viewing self-interest through a prism based on pre-existing
prejudices and assumptions. That
includes the rather simplistic, and hopelessly out-of-date, perception that
Labour is for the workers and the Tories are for the bosses.
None of the above
means that voting behaviour can’t and won’t change, but it helps to explain why
change is often slow. Even where change
appears sudden (Scotland for instance?), that is usually the result of a
process where perceptions have been changed over a much longer period. Sudden voting change doesn’t come from
nowhere.
What does all
this mean for the independence project in Wales? Two things, it seems to me. The first is that a vote for independence can
only follow – never precede – a lengthy process of changing the perceptions
through which people view the issue; and we will never do that by simply
parking the issue until things ‘get better’ by themselves. And secondly, that convincing people that we
should be independent isn’t simply a question of demonstrating direct and
incontrovertible economic benefit; those who argue that it is are not merely
postponing the question, they’re setting what looks to be an unsurmountable
barrier, which simply makes me wonder about their real commitment to the aim.
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