Inside the Mind of a Voter

A New Approach to Electoral Psychology

Michael Bruter, Sarah Harrison

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691202013
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An in-depth look into the psychology of voters around the world, how voters shape elections, and how elections transform citizens and affect their lives Could understanding whether elections make people happy and bring them closure matter more than who they vote for? What if people did not vote for what they want but for what they believe is right based on roles they implicitly assume? Do elections make people cry? This book invites readers on a unique journey inside the mind of a voter using unprecedented data from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Africa, and Georgia throughout a period when the world evolved from the centrist dominance of Obama and Mandela to the shock victories of Brexit and Trump. Michael Bruter and Sarah Harrison explore three interrelated aspects of the heart and mind of voters: the psychological bases of their behavior, how they experience elections and the emotions this entails, and how and when elections bring democratic resolution. The authors examine unique concepts including electoral identity, atmosphere, ergonomics, and hostility.From filming the shadow of voters in the polling booth, to panel study surveys, election diaries, and interviews, Bruter and Harrison unveil insights into the conscious and subconscious sides of citizens' psychology throughout a unique decade for electoral democracy. They highlight how citizens' personality, memory, and identity affect their vote and experience of elections, when elections generate hope or hopelessness, and how subtle differences in electoral arrangements interact with voters' psychology to trigger different emotions. Inside the Mind of a Voter radically shifts electoral science, moving away from implicitly institution-centric visions of behavior to understand elections from the point of view of voters.

1

Homo Suffragator

Homo What?

It is not every day that political scientists introduce categories derived from a classical language, which may put off even the most sympathetic of readers. Nevertheless, if we are talking of a Homo Suffragator in this book, it is because voting—conferring the ability to take democratic responsibility for influencing one’s community—might constitute a turning point in the evolution of mankind. It allows for peaceful and negotiated power organization, and creates specific habits, functions, and behaviours. Indeed, we will come to argue that voting may even ‘bring out the best’ in human beings, not only by defining their understanding of their relationship with their society and political system and their own role as citizens and voters (conceptualized as ‘electoral identity’ in chapter 6), but by making them feel ownership for democratic organization and decisions, thus making them more likely to accept and comply with democratic outcomes, even when these do not match their own preferences.

We also talk about Homo Suffragator because our journey inside the mind of a voter is interested in understanding how elections influence and permeate our lives, how, despite their occasional nature, they might through experience, memory, ritualization, and anticipation come to define who we are, how we grow and transmit, how we fit within our societies and relate to various categories of others within them, even how we live.

At the same time, considering elections as changing the nature of mankind requires us rethink how we study them. Thus, if elections affect our lives, then we need to understand them not only as an institutional mechanism to choose representatives or leaders, but as a human experience. Conversely, if the ability to resolve conflict peacefully through elections is so critical, we must understand how and when elections deliver that sense of resolution.

This chapter will thus briefly explore the scope and historical context of the book, introducing some key new concepts (and their articulation with the existing concepts and literature of electoral behaviour) that will be developed in chapter 2 and used throughout the book. It will also highlight how we can borrow from the combination of physiological, anthropological, and psychological insights traditionally applied to understand the stages of evolution of mankind similarly to comprehend the psychology, functioning, personal/societal relationships, and behaviour of Homo Suffragator.

Why Homo Suffragator?

Homo Suffragator means literally ‘person who can vote’. What this power entails, what it changes with regard to man’s condition and social interaction, and what the psychological mechanisms are that determine whether or not one exercises this power are all questions central to the puzzles our study aims to resolve. Throughout the book, we explore the relationship between human nature, personality and morality variations, cognitive and emotional elements, and systemic choices and determinants which constrain and shape our electoral power.

The construct of Homo Suffragator also mirrors the labels of the stages of human evolution (Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, Homo Heidelbergensis, Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Sapiens). These stages of evolution have been identified not only with physiological developments, but also with the nature of the new conditions, skills, and behaviours that have characterized humans. For example, the ability to create tools was acquired by Homo Habilis; Homo Erectus learned to master fire and cook; Homo Heidelbergensis was the first to hunt and to bury the dead; whilst Homo Neanderthalensis learned to build housing and wear clothes. Finally, it is Homo Sapiens (the current stage of evolution of mankind) who first mastered language and transmitted knowledge.

Of course, we are not suggesting that shaping how our community is ruled through elections is similar to those fundamental skills and behaviours, or that man has reached a new stage of evolution through the foundation and practice of mass democratic politics. However, it is perhaps a fair intellectual exercise to enquire as to how democracy has modified the human condition.

In this sequential vision, the very nature of man is always partly defined by his/her interaction with others and with his/her environment. In our conceptualization of a Homo Suffragator, this takes the form of a reference to the concepts of ‘empathic displacement’ and ‘electoral ergonomics’ which we discuss in chapters 4 and 8 respectively. The idea behind the first concept is that citizens approach elections subconsciously projecting how their behaviour will fit vis-à-vis others. The second notion is even simpler: every small detail of electoral arrangements and organization will interact with voters’ psychology, influencing which aspects of their personality, memory, and emotions will be triggered to influence their electoral behaviour, experience, and sense of resolution, and even lead to different interpersonal relations between citizens, thereby restricting or reinforcing the emergence of ‘electoral hostility’ (chapter 9).

Even more importantly, there may be value in mirroring the broad-minded approach scientists have adopted when characterizing stages of human evolution. Indeed, they have habitually combined quasi-anthropological narrative and descriptive analyses of how the various stages of homines lived and acted, quasi-biological assessments of their nature, activities, and reactions, and attempts to decipher the foundations of their psychology, preferences, emotions, and motivations. There could be worse inspirations for a book aiming to understand both how political beings experience elections, and also how elections come to interact or interfere with their lives, psychological functioning, and habituation.

Finally, from the point of view of macro-history, stages of human evolution are never straightforward or clear-cut. Not only are there multiple controversies within the scientific community regarding some stages of human transformation, but evolution is also, by its nature, progressive and fluid. It is thus only in retrospect—often centuries after a crucial articulation in the history of the species, that scientists have been able to conclude that a new stage had been achieved. From that perspective, the resolution of societal regulation and coexistence through electoral democracy is a startlingly recent event, especially if we focus on universal suffrage, which in many countries only dates back to the mid-twentieth century for men and women, in some cases even later. To figure out what exactly this new societal modus operandi will have changed in terms of our modes of interaction—the social, moral, and economic outputs of mankind—and how durably they will have been shaped by it, may thus take centuries or millennia.

All this makes the Homo Suffragator metaphor inspiring, and we hope that it will intrigue readers rather than put them off, stimulate rather than confuse them, give them a flavour of why we argue that, to an extent, we need to deconstruct some of the basic premises of electoral research and turn its usual perspectives upside-down. We realize that this is an unusual approach, but we believe that it can make our attempted journey inside the mind of a voter stand out and excite for the right reasons, and we hope that the reader can find some worth in our thought-provoking ‘evolutionary’ parallel. We apologize to those who, by contrast, suspect that this is merely a pedantic (or worse, megalomaniac) choice by two scholars predictably and admittedly over-excited by the object of their research, and only hope that by the end of the book, such readers might at least partially have changed their minds.

What Is a Homo Suffragator?

If, as according to Aristotle, ‘man is, by nature, a political animal’, then perhaps we should consider the democratic citizen to be, whether by nature or institutional construction, a voting person, or at the very least, a person who can vote—literally, a Homo Suffragator.

From the very beginning of Athenian democracy, the possibility to vote has emerged as the central entitlement of democratic citizens. In fact, arguably, the entitlement to vote may be the sole characteristic shared by ancient and modern democracies, and is thus the foundation of our understanding of what democracy is.

With voting playing such a critical role in the definition of the democratic citizen, there arises a need to understand how the act of voting shapes our thinking, our habits and even some of our physiological reactions. On the face of it, elections are merely ‘snapshot’ moments, occurring relatively infrequently, and as such are unlikely candidates to define our nature. However, we know from psychological research that rare events can, in the right circumstances, structurally irradiate our existence. Elections can affect the life of nations well beyond their temporal limitations; maybe the same is true of their effects on voters’ personal lives. Elections can also weave into a thread of sequential but nearly continuous history, where the hopes, regrets, joys, or disappointments stemming from a given election will frame the context of the next. At the collective but also at the individual level, elections have a potential for ritualization and sequential continuity, such as to weave a thread that will sustain a life fabric. Collective and individual memories, meanwhile, be they happy or traumatic, can punch above their weight: the once-a-year childhood holiday may be remembered with more vividness than the two hundred days of school that separated it from the next.

The claim that voting makes us Homo Suffragator also rests on the idea that voting alters our perception of our own function, role, and responsibility in a civic context, and conversely that a democratically shaped civic context imposes itself upon us regardless of our preferences.

Thus, political science has long noted the existence of ‘honeymoon periods’ welcoming most newly elected leaders, but the way in which the mechanics of these seems to clash with the known logic of electoral behaviour deserves our attention. Indeed, the existence of honeymoon periods suggests that democratic victors effectively benefit, mere days after an election, from the support of people who did not vote for them. The electoral process itself seems to lead to democratic legitimation of the winner by citizens whose electoral choice was initially contrary.

In this book, we claim that this shows that our nature as Homo Suffragator goes beyond our preferences as a voter, and that citizens do not approach an election as a mere opportunity to weigh in with their pure preference but rather as a context in which they inhabit a specific function. This invested voter role may vary across times, systems, individuals and even, for a given individual, across elections. Homo Suffragator is thus defined not only by his/her nature—let alone preferences—but also by his/her ‘electoral identity’, which is at the heart of our model (chapter 6), which he/she embraces, whether consciously or sub-consciously, and which radically differs from partisanship, relied upon by much of the political behaviour literature since the publication of The American Voter (Campbell et al., 1960).

Homo et Homines

In the various evolutionary stages of mankind, the Homo is defined in relation to his/her environment, but also systematically by the relationship between the individual and his/her fellow homines. The interaction between the individual and his/her society is a complex emotional, intellectual, and physical web which is also shaped by evolution as the species’ needs, means, tools, and regulation of interaction and communication transform (Maslow, 1943). As mentioned earlier, ritualized interactions, such as the burial of the dead, and language are seen as defining moments of evolution in their own right by evolution scientists.

Along the same lines, we are interested in understanding what the act of voting changes in terms of the relationship between the individual Homo Suffragator and others. This pertains to direct interaction (e.g., discussing or arguing about elections—see Huckfeldt and Sprague, 1987; McPherson et al., 2001), but also to the definition of his/her role as a voter in egocentric and sociotropic terms. It even involves projecting his/her electoral behaviour onto that of other citizens, to redefine efficacy, strategic behaviour, feelings of inclusion or marginality, and sense of positive or negative affect towards fellow voters, including developing electoral hostility in reaction to actual or perceived differences in electoral preferences and behaviour (chapter 9).

It is crucial to remember what democratic elections are: a specific mechanism intended to arbitrate between conflicting preferences of individuals and resolve conflict between them. There is thus an intrinsic rationale to the notion of Homo Suffragator being a ‘true’ stage of evolution when it comes to regulating societal conflict. That ability to bring about a sense of resolution also becomes a key criterion of the effectiveness of elections in making citizens happy. Furthermore, elections have the potential profoundly to change the fabric of intra-social interaction, creating a framework for collaboration and coalition, or designing democratic ‘waiting times’, all of which differentiates them from the mechanisms of other forms of power structure. They also create a unique logic of representation—and thus of sociotropism and empathy—which adds another dimension to political power. Finally, elections open the door to different dynamics of human evaluation, projection, and accountability, not only towards those competing for citizens’ votes, but between voters themselves. These mirror effects between individual, group, and society lead to specific patterns, some well delineated in the literature (representation, coalition, partisanship, etc.), but others deserving of the new conceptual attention at the heart of our book.

A first concept is empathic displacement. This refers to individual citizens considering how the rest of the electorate concurrently behaves—with has important implications in terms of strategic voting, which requires assumptions about others’ electoral behaviour. Empathic displacement thus also pertains to how individual voters may feel that they engage in a collective event. It may be shaped by whether or not they vote, the manner in which they vote (e.g., attending a polling station surrounded by many other voters, or remotely), their electoral choice, and their direct human environment. Conversely, empathic displacement may itself shape a voter’s sense of inclusion or alienation.

One derived aspect of this sense of inclusion is the concept of projected efficacy. Whilst external efficacy relates to an individual’s perceived ability to influence the political direction of his/her community, it is often confronted by the rational reality that in practice, individual behaviour is extremely unlikely to affect electoral outcomes. By contrast, however, individuals have a capacity for projection in relation to their behaviour, which leads them to consider the effect of their actions if others were to behave similarly (see, e.g., Krueger and Acevedo, 2005). This is a key mechanism of civic behaviour (if ‘everyone’ threw their litter on the street, or played music loud on public transport, or jumped the queue, life would become miserable for all, so you do not do these things); we suggest, however, that such projection may powerfully redefine efficacy, and that when deciding whether to vote, and for whom, projected efficacy means many voters will consider what may happen if people like them emulate their behaviour.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, alienation may lead to electoral hostility, which we define as negative feelings towards others because of their actual or perceived vote. There is an abundant literature on polarization (e.g., Baldassarri and Gelman, 2008; Fiorina et al., 2008), but it largely relies on the concept of partisanship, and sees polarization as an extension of increasingly drifting competing partisan identification, such as that between US Democrats and Republicans. The concept of electoral hostility differs analytically from this in assuming instead that hostility represents further deterioration of citizens’ already negative attitudes towards their political personnel and institutions. Thus, citizens who develop negative feelings towards politicians and later towards institutions will, in a third phase, englobe opposing voters in that same negativity. Consequently, unlike polarization, hostility need not, firstly, mirror partisan rifts, but may instead follow non-partisan divisions and even split parties; and, secondly, will affect not the most partisan people, but potentially those who do not feel close to any party and may even not be politically interested or involved. We develop the concept of electoral hostility in chapter 9, and show how it becomes a feature of Homo Suffragator when elections fail to bring a sense of resolution and citizens lose faith in the ability of electoral democracy to deliver closure.

Finally, we aim systematically to analyze better-known aspects of the relationship between Homo Suffragator and fellow homines—notably sociotropism (towards both group and society as a whole) and egocentrism, horizontal and vertical socialization, and political discussion.

A Russian Doll of Long and Short Cycles

How would Homo Suffragator as a stage of evolution, a cycle within the history of mankind, combine with the (sometimes much) shorter cycles within electoral history? Political science is awash with models of electoral change (Inglehart, 1971; Franklin et al., 1992; Dalton, 1996, etc.) which look at how the bases of electoral behaviour have undergone durable changes throughout the history of electoral democr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Chapter Synopses
• 1 Homo Suffragator
• 2 Mapping the Mind of a Voter: Anatomy of Homo Suffragator
• 3 A Day in the Life of a Voter
• 4 Personality and Morality
• 5 Electoral Memory
• 6 Electoral Identity and Individual–Societal Dynamics
• 7 Elections and Emotions
• 8 Electoral Ergonomics
• 9 Electoral Resolution and Atmosphere: From Hope to Hostility
• 10 Coda: Flipping the Electoral World Upside-Down: Homo Suffragator beyond the Age of Reason
• Glossary of Concepts
• Bibliography
• Index