Tribal voters

Last night I watched “Have I got news for you”; a taped version, but by chance we were watching it at almost the same time as a repeat was broadcast. This was an episode hosted by Martin Clunes from a short while after the UK General Election. HIGNFY is often amusing and quite often insightful, but this edition was a real disappointment, much of it consisting of cheap shots at the departing Gordon Brown, to a large extent focussing on his inability to smile.

So this is a man whose period of Prime Ministership included (the start of) a global recession, greed-driven collapses of banks and failed international talks on climate change, yet they expect him to smile sincerely? If they had gone over real mistakes I could have seen a point to it, but none of the “failings” they attacked was significant to the welfare of the country. Unfortunately this HIGNFY is fairly typical of the superficial way the election has been covered by most of the media and voted in by most of the populace.

I’m strongly in favour of electoral reform, but a fairer representation in parliament of the way people voted makes no sense unless the people make informed choices of the way to vote. Instead people vote for the party they’ve always voted for, or vote to “get back” at a party that has done something they didn’t like (even if most of that parties policies are close to what the do want), or they “vote for change” without paying any real attention to whether the change will be for the better (the banking collapse caused misery for many, and yet many voted for a party that has historically supported and been supported by banking interests). The proffered Alternative Vote system might be a small improvement over First Past the Post (falling short of proportionality), but if people continue to choose the party to vote for as if they were supporting a football team or by which candidate looks nicest, it isn’t going to make the government more representative of what would be in the interests of the people.

There are many well-understood ways in which people fail to make rational choices, and politicians show no qualms in taking advantage of them. An example is negativity bias, in which people are more strongly influenced by remembering things that went badly than things that went well, even if a rational evaluation would show that the things that went well far outweigh those that went badly.

So the most significant electoral reform would be to ban candidates from appearing on television or using sound- (or text-) bites, restricting them to considered textual modes of communication (which could be read out on the radio or television by neutral voiced actors), and restricting these texts to statements of policy. If this disadvantages slow-readers (such as myself) or reduces the excitement of the process, that would be a small price to pay for a more representative democracy.