Election anxiety and the problem with polarisation
Over the course of this US presidential election campaign, the undulations of the polls have resembled the contours of gently rolling hills. For many voters, however, it has been an emotional rollercoaster, destined to come to a rest either at a high of exhilaration or a desperate low of despair.
The American Psychological Association this year found that fears about the future of the nation had become the most common source of significant stress, affecting 77 per cent of adults. Just five years ago, worries about healthcare and mass shootings topped the list. Today nearly one in seven (69 per cent) see the coming presidential election as a significant stressor, similar to 2020 but far higher than the 52 per cent who felt that way in 2016.
The campaign has been an emotion-fuelled as well as an emotional-filled ride, with feelings more than reason seeming to determine its trajectory and ultimate destination. Experts and pundits on both sides are calling out the increased tribalism and sheer nastiness of political discourse. Pew Research has shown that negative feelings towards people with differing views are increasing, with more Americans believing that supporters of other parties are more closed-minded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent.
In Europe, too, negative emotions are driving the political agenda. A survey earlier this year conducted by Kapa Research across 10 EU countries concluded: “On question after question, responses reveal a strong undercurrent of fear impacting voting behaviour.”
Are modern voters too ready to go with their hearts over their heads? Seen this way, heightened emotion threatens a delicate balance that has been essential for a healthy polis for millennia. In his canonical account of rhetoric, Aristotle argued that to be persuasive, a speaker needs a combination of reason (logos), emotion (pathos) and character (ethos). A recent example of the power of this triad is Barack Obama, who came across as a man of integrity and intelligence, but who also had the power to stir the hearts of voters.
In recent years, the likes of Obama have become outliers. As for logos, that increasingly feels like a liability, with campaigns designed around slogans such as “Make America Great Again” that cut straight to the way people feel. Or think of British prime minister Keir Starmer’s simple mantra of “change”, with little said about how that change might be brought about.
It seems, then, that pathos now rules the political domain, with logos and ethos playing at best a supporting role. But to many experts in voter psychology, this diagnosis is itself made more on gut feeling than cool reason.
Start with the division between reason and emotion. “In science, we’ve known for a very long time that emotionality and rationality are just the two sides of the very same coin,” says Michael Bruter, a professor of political science and director of the Electoral Psychology Observatory at the London School of Economics (LSE). “When we think we are acting rationally, our rationality is embedded in a whole range of emotions and emotional premises.”
Bruter sees the Brexit referendum as a vivid example of how things don’t line up along neat rational-versus-emotional lines. “You had people commenting all along about rational Remainers versus emotional Brexiters. And when Brexit won, a lot of people who had not wanted the country to leave the EU were in tears.”
The idea that people used to vote for more rational reasons also doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. In the UK, for example, until 1979 the vast majority voted along class lines. “For many people, voting was based more on who you were than what you thought,” says Bruter. “That’s not being rational.”
The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has blamed social media for an increase in the emotional temperature, arguing that there was a change of gears around 2009, when Facebook and Twitter added their like and retweet buttons respectively. But even if social media has magnified and amplified our emotional responses, they have always been fundamental to politics.
“When it comes to history, we always think that our moment is the most emotional, most divisive, most whatever,” says Myisha Cherry, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. “There’s no doubt that emotion is kind of at the forefront. But I don’t think it’s at odds with the last 20 to 30 years of American politics.”
Consider also the long tradition, going back at least to the Ancient Stoics, of understanding emotions not just as raw feelings but as affective states that are deeply tied in with judgments we make about the world. Emotions can both have their reasons and be reasons for action. That is why we can talk of them as being rational or irrational, justified or unjustified, says Lisa Bortolotti, a professor of philosophy and member of the Institute for Mental Health at the University of Birmingham. “If you think about phobia, it’s a fear that is irrational. And we also distinguish different types of anger that are justifiable. Emotions are about the world as much as they are about ourselves.”
Cherry gives the example of Muslim voters who are concerned about the Democrats’ stance on Gaza. “They have reasons for why they probably don’t cast their vote. But a lot of that reason is also influenced by anger and disappointment.” Or think of Democrats who “have reasons for believing that reproductive rights is a right that we should have, but also a fear of what will happen if reproductive rights are taken away”.
The title of Cherry’s book, The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle, makes it plain that negative emotion can play a positive role — especially when the stakes really are high, as they are in many ways now. With climate change beginning to affect communities around the world, reproductive rights under threat, wars in Europe and the Middle East and the rise of China, the idea that elections are or should just be concerned with rational calculations about “the economy, stupid” is itself now idiotic.
So whenever we see heightened emotions in the political sphere, we should not assume they are driving voters’ judgments. On the contrary, many emotions are responses to judgments, implicit or explicit. Feeling and judgment are in constant interplay.
“Sometimes we write off people’s emotions as obsessive or inappropriate because we don’t want to take on the information that those emotions are giving us,” says Bortolotti. “Think about traditional cases of ‘hysterical’ women, or classifying people who fight for their rights as excessively aggressive, as happens with Black movements.”
And, of course, everyone thinks it is other voters who are irrational, not them. As Bruter puts it, “When we deal with others, we only see the emotional underpinnings, and we don’t see that the way they vote is actually coherent and rational within their own emotional framework.”
Bortolotti argues that despair over voter rationality can stem from “an idealised conception of what human agency is like. We like to think that we act for reasons and that we make decisions based on our best judgment, that we’ve got evidence for our beliefs and the evidence is the reason why we go for those beliefs rather than other beliefs.” So when we realise none of this is isolated from emotion, we jump to the conclusion we are not rational at all. But perhaps we should accept our rationality is real, but simply more limited than we might hope.
So it is entirely appropriate that we bring both heart and mind to our electoral choices, and the idea that voters have become more emotional and less rational is much weaker than many commentators suggest. Nonetheless, there may be some more specific ways in which the role of emotion in politics has changed over recent years.
Most notably, voters appear to have become increasingly hostile to their opponents. Cherry sees this in herself and others. “When I think about Trump supporters,” she admits, “I may not only view them as fellow citizens, but also view them as irrational, stupid, racist, sexist, misogynist, selfish. And to them I’m a snowflake, I’m a woke. There’s no doubt that there’s an affective dimension of the way we view the other side, a lot of it is animosity, and a lot of it is hatred.”
Cherry sees a growth in two corrosive forms of anger. One she terms “rogue rage”, which is “a kind of anger at an injustice” that may or may not be real. “But instead of the anger being directed to the specific target that is indeed responsible for the kind of unfairness that they are experiencing — whether that is policies or politicians — usually [people] direct that anger against scapegoats.” In both America and Europe, those scapegoats are typically immigrants.
A second form of pernicious anger is “wipe rage”, in which people are “just angry at anyone and anybody. It’s not really that focused, but it can really galvanise them and motivate them to do some things, particularly reckless ones.” This can also lead to negative factors being more motivating than positive ones. Many voters are not enthusiastic about either of the US presidential candidates, but, says Cherry, “They are excited about ‘shitting on the other side’ and making sure they don’t win.” In the UK, Labour too benefited more from hatred of the Tories than from love for Labour.
Bruter and his LSE colleague Sarah Harrison have argued that hostility, rather than polarisation, characterises the present emotional landscape of politics. “There is indeed a strong rejection of people who don’t agree with us,” says Bruter, “but that is not based on a strong in-group solidarity with people sharing our political preferences.” Young people in particular are increasingly hostile even towards many who support the same political party as them. And across Europe, voters have become more volatile and so less tribal, switching allegiances between elections far more than they used to.
The growth of hostility can be broken down into three stages, says Bruter. “Over time, people have become increasingly sceptical and cynical towards politicians. Then, later on, they started becoming cynical towards political institutions themselves. Now they have moved on to the third stage, which is becoming quite angry towards the very people they believe enable what they dislike. In other words, towards other voters and in particular partisan voters.”
Harrison calls this “democratic frustration”. As Bruter explains it: “A lot of us have great hopes about what democracy should be and what it should bring us and what functions it should fulfil. But what is available to us is living short of those hopes and expectations.”
Bruter worries that “the big risk is that if people cannot channel their frustration and unhappiness through regular democratic processes, people will try to achieve whatever goals they are pursuing outside of those channels.” And if others see those alternative channels being more effective, decline in trust in traditional democratic tools increases yet further, creating a dangerous feedback loop.
The ideas of Cherry, Bruter and Harrison also help explain why ethos seems to have become less important. If you have a pervasive cynicism and undirected anger at the world, then there is no longer any faith that mainstream politicians have the character to stand up for us. “They’re all the same” has become the resigned refrain of those disillusioned by politics.
So when presented by disrupters such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, voters can support them for one of two reasons. One is that their opponents are no better but at least these people appear to be on their side. The other is that their questionable character does matter, but in a good way: what we need right now are loose cannons and mavericks who will stand up to the liberal elite and drain the swamp.
Bruter and Harrison argue that our electoral apparatus is not well designed to deal with such disillusioned voters. “There is no box on the paper which says that the system is not working,” says Bruter. “How am I going to make sure that whatever message I’m trying to give is going to be heard? So in many cases, that will be vote for Brexit or vote for Trump.”
If the biggest challenges facing our democracies are rooted in disillusion, to focus on the emotions that arise from this is to miss the point. Take the rise of fake news. It is common to blame this on people abdicating their rationality and going with their gut, as though this were the root cause. But if we ask why people no longer trust scientific experts and the like, their scepticism becomes more understandable, if not justified.
“It’s a really complex world, and we know that persons who have been reliable in the past have also had situations where they were not reliable,” says Bortolotti. “So it becomes a lot more difficult to be able to assess the reliability of sources. It’s not just about emotions.” We need to rebuild trust in expertise and public institutions if we want to get rid of the pernicious emotions that cynicism gives rise to.
Perhaps the most basic misunderstanding of the role of emotion is, as Cherry argues, that “what people find as a problem with the emotions is really a problem with human behaviour. The problem is not how people feel but what they do with their feelings.” Bruter, for his part, worries that we are far from managing our anger. He believes that political hostility is permeating daily life, poisoning the well of civic space.
When the election result is announced, the problem will not be the strong emotions people feel, but what they decide to do with them. They would do well to emulate Cherry. I expected her to say that she’d be livid if she woke up to find Trump had won. Instead, she sounded surprisingly phlegmatic.
“I think that moral progress ebbs and flows,” she says. “I don’t believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice. I believe that we have to work to make it happen. So no matter what happens, we’re going to continue to fight the good fight. I don’t know if that’s just part of my African-American heritage as the way that we think about fighting for justice. But this won’t be the first time, and we’ll just keep it moving.”
Julian Baggini is the author of ‘How to Think Like a Philosopher’
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