Book Review |
Swaying the swingers: how neuroscience influences voting behaviour
Politicians use many different techniques aimed at holding their traditional voters as well as widening their appeal. It is not surprising that, as we learn more about how the human brain works, political campaigners are also trying to benefit from that knowledge.The Political Brain by Drew Westen, an American clinical and political psychologist and Professor in the Department of Psychology and Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Emory University, is based on a brain scanning study of 15 committed Democrats and 15 committed Republicans in the final heated month of the 2004 Presidential election campaign. Each was shown slides of their favoured candidate, respectively John Kerry and George W. Bush, contradicting the other. Subjects were able to detect contradictions made by the rival party candidate and those of neutral figures but were not able to recognize when their own candidate was either lying or misrepresenting the facts.
In essence, the author's conclusion from the brain scanning results is that ‘the political brain is an emotional brain. It is not a dispassionate calculating machine, objectively searching for the right facts, figures and policies to make a reasoned decision.’ He builds on this formulation by analysing political TV advertisements (adverts) that, whilst banned in the UK, are widely used in the US. Indeed, they are the major budget item on which candidates spend millions of dollars. Westen concludes that ‘Republicans understand what the philosopher, David Hume, recognized three centuries ago: that reason is a slave to emotion, not the other way around. With the exception of the Clinton era, Democratic strategists for the last three decades have instead clung tenaciously to the dispassionate view of the mind and to the campaign strategy that logically follows from it, namely one that focuses on facts, figures, policy statements, costs and benefits, and appeals to intellect and expertise’.
The neuroscience is conveyed in lucid language and, although comprising a comparatively short section of the book, will be of considerable interest to anyone with a general interest in the brain. The bulk of the book is a well-written and lively account of how American politicians try to influence voters from the viewpoint of an author who is a committed Democrat and one who has acted as a paid political consultant for many Democrat campaigns. At times, it reads like a polemic directed at Westen's own party to stop treating voters as rational and dispassionate and to wake up to the realities of voter behaviour, and it is none the worse for that. But the reader of this part of the book will need to know, or want to know, a lot about the American political scene to find this an engrossing subject. Neuroscientists will be familiar with the established research evidence of more than 50 years that personality variables accompany differences in political opinion (Adomo et al., 1950
). Most of that research by political scientists and psychologists has focused on conservative politicians showing more structured and persistent cognitive styles, with liberal-minded politicians being more responsive to informational complexity. A recent study using electroencephalographs has found that greater liberalism is associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate brain activity and claims to be the first ‘connecting individual differences in political ideology to a basic neurocognitive mechanism for self regulation’ (Amodio et al., 2007).
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A brain imaging study, this time of swing voters, in the late summer of 2007, was analysed by a group of researchers and, illustrated with coloured graphics, published in the New York Times on November 11, 2007 (Iacoboni, 2007
). The images do not represent individual brains, but rather reflect the combined data gathered from several—in some cases all—subjects. These researchers found that ‘Voters sense both peril and promise in party brands’. When shown the words ‘Democrat’, ‘Republican’ and ‘Independent’, ‘subjects exhibited high levels of activity in the part of the brain called the amygdala, indicating anxiety. The two areas in the brain associated with anxiety and disgust—the amygdala and the insula—were especially active when men viewed ‘ "Republican". But all three labels also elicited some activity in the brain area associated with reward, the ventral striatum, as well as other regions related to desire and feeling connected. There was only one exception: men showed little response, positive or negative, when viewing "independent"’. (Slide 1 in Figure 1) The researchers found that emotions about Hillary Clinton were mixed (Slide 2 in Figure 1). Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, respectively Democrat and Republican, fell on opposite sides of the gender divide. Men showed little interest in Clinton initially but after watching her video they reacted positively. Women responded to her strongly at first, but interest waned after they watched her video (Slide 3 in Figure 1). With Giuliani, men responded strongly to his still photos, but this faded after they saw his video. It appeared that women grew more engaged after watching Giuliani's video. Mitt Romney sparked the greatest amount of brain activity of all the candidates’ speech excerpts, especially amongst the male observers. Looking at other Republican candidates, Rudy Giuliani evoked more empathy than Fred Thompson. When the subjects viewed photos of Thompson, they saw activity in the superior temporal sulcus and the inferior frontal cortex, both areas involved in empathy. When subjects viewed photos of Giuliani, these areas were relatively quiet. John Edwards, a Democrat, researchers found, had promise and a problem. He had a strong effect on swing voters—both those who liked him and those who did not. In recent presidential elections, Democrats have done better with female voters, while Republicans have appealed more to men. The researchers found that this gender gap amongst voters may be closing. Barack Obama, a Democrat, and John McCain, a Republican, were judged to have work to do. The scans taken while subjects viewed the first set of photos and the videos of McCain and Obama indicated a notable lack of any powerful reactions, positive or negative. Since the researchers performed the scans, Obama has, however, won in Iowa and come very close to beating Clinton in New Hampshire where she had her ‘choking-up’ moment and believes her tears won it. (Slide 4 in Figure 1).
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An editorial in Nature published on November 22, 2007 entitled ‘Mind Games: How not to mix politics and science’ attacked the New York Times editors for publishing ‘the results of (to put it mildly) questionable scientific research’ and singled out ‘an inconvenient truth gumming up the deductions: increased activity in any brain area is rarely exclusive to any one function. That insula activity did not necessarily mean the subjects were disgusted. Insula activity has also been associated with drug craving, the taste of chocolate, pain and the quality of orgasm’. They also draw attention to the fact that three of the authors list their affiliation with FKF Applied Research, a company ‘notorious for using similar brain-scan analysis to conclude which TV adverts aired during a major sporting event were most effective’, and that the other three authors ‘have benefited from funding’ from the same company (Nature Editorial, 2007
). The scathing editorial ends by asking whether anyone needs a $3 million scanner for functional magnetic resonance imaging to conclude that Hillary Clinton ‘needs to work on her support from swing voters’. All in all, Nature provides a necessary health warning about this type of popular research in which small numbers are used and peer review is inadequate, risking the danger of conclusions that are not robust.
Interesting insights emerge in Westen's book on why Democratic campaigners are unable to run emotionally compelling campaigns. In 1985, he wrote a book which proposed ‘a theory of personality, a social theory, and a theory about the interrelation of the two’ (Westen, 1985). He approaches the subject from his roots in psychoanalysis and acknowledges that his three greatest intellectual debts are to Freud, Marx and Durkheim. In part, he feels that the resistance of many key Democrats to using emotion is cerebral, an intellectual bias in favour of factual debate, combined with a feeling that the brain is a morally more superior route to the voter than access through their heart. He also argues that there is a mistaken belief that reason can provide not just the means but also the ends, and for an underlying feeling that distrusts the manipulative side of emotion. On top of all that resistance, there is a personality style that is associated with many people who, in the author's experience, reach the top in Democratic politics in the US. These personalities have an inbuilt discomfort with emotion. He sees this as representing ‘the biggest static impediment to more effective campaigns, because it is both institutional and psychological’. He writes of an obsessional personality style characterized by tone deafness to emotion and, where a Democrat does express emotion, it is usually righteous indignation. The best emoters in the politics of the last 15 years have been Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and, in contrast, those who have appeared most discomforted by emotion have been Al Gore, John Kerry and Gordon Brown. But in the past, many Democratic Presidents, not just Clinton, have been adept at playing on the voters’ emotions: one only has to think of Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman and Franklin D Roosevelt.
There is also another political phenomenon emerging to capture the headlines, which is well described by Senator Hillary Clinton's pollster, Mark Penn, in his new book, Microtrends. He writes about ‘the niching of America’ and highlights the ‘small, under-the-radar forces that can involve as little as one per cent of the population, but which are powerfully shaping’ American society. In 2008, we can expect to see Democrats and Republicans spending a lot of money not just on generalized emotional TV adverts but on highly focused TV adverts to people who do not identify themselves with any political party but are part of Penn's 75 categories such as ‘Internet Marrieds’ or ‘Young Knitters’. This is the politics of disaggregation of which we will hear much more as part of the information revolution in which we are living. E-mail is already becoming a feature of modern election campaigning.
There are many lessons from all these studies on the neuroscience of politics and how to motivate the ideological base which no politician can or should ignore. But if this base is, as I believe, becoming smaller it is evermore important to engage the emotion of the floating voter or the loosely attached party follower. Politicians are probably correct in believing more complex emotional buttons must be pressed in order to do this. In my judgement, Westen is too optimistic about the extent of US voters’ identification with their parties. He claims that 80% of the US electorate are political partisans. But I notice, in a recent interview given to the Financial Times Magazine, he only claims that ‘about 60% of the population, roughly half on each side of the aisle’ are largely impervious to data and their mind is made up (Hamman, 2007). I have serious doubts that the figure is as high in any true meaning of the term partisan, be that Democratic or Republican. Even for those who claim a political allegiance, some may be loosely attached.
Participation rates in elections, other than at town level, are nowhere near as high in the US as in the UK. In the UK, we have had as many as 84% of the population voting, although at the last General Election it was <62%. In the 1950s, in the UK, one in 11 people joined a political party. Today, that figure is one in 88. In 1957, half the electorate identified ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ strongly with a political party; today, only one in three. The percentage of people who voted in recent US Presidential elections were: 50.3% (1988), 55.1% (1992), 49.0% (1996), 50.2% (2000) and 55.5% (2004). By contrast, in the UK in recent General Elections, the percentages of people who voted were: 75% (1987), 78% (1992), 71% (1997), 59% (2001) and 61% (2005). Virtually unlimited budgets and TV advertising allow American politicians to focus short-targeted messages to their voters. Evangelical Christians have a passionate political agenda on abortion and on creationism. War Veterans in the US are a target group. The ‘Sanctity of life’ and ‘patriotism’ are highly emotive issues. As yet, these issues are not anywhere near as important for voters in the UK. Karl Rove, the man most responsible for George W Bush becoming the Governor of Texas and two US Presidential elections, exploited these issues effectively and ruthlessly. Domestic policy differences in the US are becoming more theological than ideological with Bush seemingly indifferent to a massive budget deficit, hitherto an anathema for Republicans and which the Clinton Administration had restored to balance. In the absence of big political ideas that carry conviction, voters’ allegiances appear to be won and lost more easily in the US on these emotional theological issues. But this may begin to change when Bush ceases to be President in January 2009, particularly if the Democrats win.
Sometimes in the US, the Republican party has been content for others, not formally attached to them, to use the more politically hard-hitting adverts. The most infamous yet used was against Dukakis in his electoral fight with George Bush Sr in 1988, which was issued by an independent action committee. This focused on Willie Horton, a convicted black murderer on a weekend pass, an issue in Governor Dukakis's home state of Massachusetts. As yet, the tentative use of this type of personalized attack in adverts appears not to have been successful in the UK. Perhaps this is because only being able to use posters, newspaper adverts or printed material delivered to the home, the images ‘stick around’ longer and have time to jar, and in consequence become less persuasive and make some people very angry; whereas the TV advert flashes across the screen for a short enough time to register but not long enough to form an entrenched negative reaction.
In 2000 the Republican National Committee for George W Bush put out a TV advert about Al Gore's prescription drug plan for senior citizens with the narrator saying, ‘The Gore prescription plan: Bureaucrats decide’ and the word ‘RATS’ came up on the screen for a few milliseconds. When this was discovered the defence offered was that the hyphenation of ‘Bureaucrats’ had inadvertently been changed. Such a subliminal message was, however, shown by Drew Westen to affect voter perception. The advert was pulled after an outcry of protest. But it demonstrates vividly why there is underlying concern about the manipulative capacity of the new techniques of electioneering.
Amongst all this manipulative politics, it is worth reflecting on the message of another recent book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, by Bryan Caplan. He argues that democracy fails ‘because’ it does what voters want. The essence of Caplan's argument is that ‘Voters typically favour the policies they perceive to be in the general interest of their nation’. This is, however, no cause for democratic optimism. The key word is ‘perceive’. Voters almost never take the next step of critically asking themselves, ‘Are my favourite policies "effective means" to promote the general interest?’ In politics, it can be argued that, as in religion, faith is a shortcut to belief. Yet, an answer to those who believe that the voter is not intelligent enough may be that the structure of democracy is wrongly applied. Political power has become too centralized for some voters to grasp all the complex issues, many of which have become too remote to be understood by all the voters. The way to close this gap, it can logically be argued, is by greater decentralization of political power with more decisions taken at the appropriate decentralized levels.
When the value of democracy itself appears to be impugned, many fall back on Winston Churchill's often quoted words: ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’. But his words were never intended to be an argument for the status quo. In his lifetime, votes for women were hotly contested. Democracy comes in many forms. It took many decades while democracy was being actively practised to widen the franchise, to fight successfully for women's votes; and not until the 1960s did all Black people have the vote in the US.
Another way to promote the greater interest is to depoliticize more decision-making and pass on responsibility to unelected decision-makers who are experts. It was, for example, considered an essential democratic safeguard in the UK up until 1997 that a politician, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, fixed interest rates. Now it is accepted that this power is better exercised within a democracy by a Committee of experts chaired by the Governor of the Bank of England operating under politically chosen inflation targets. Perhaps, the next basic economic concept on which to focus reform should be how to fix legislative parameters for the better ‘balancing of the books’. We still operate a system in the UK where the UK Cabinet is held responsible for the detailed management of the English National Health Service. This is despite the responsibility for health care being recently devolved to much smaller legislative units in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales each having their own Assemblies—more commonly called Parliaments. I now believe that the English NHS is far too large a management unit and the most important democratic reform is for it to be split up into no more than seven units in England. To maintain democratic answerability, regional ministers who are also Westminster MPs from English constituencies could be held responsible.
Devolution, decentralization and general disaggregation, which can easily come with more market driven economic decisions, represent for me the new formation for democracy in the 21st century. If we are to retain in our democracies the ability to identify with and to influence decision-making that affects our lives, then democratic accountability and control mechanisms need to be as close to the individuals as makes sense for efficient and effective management. If that reform does not take place the inefficiency and the incompetence of democratic policies controlling health and education will breed further disillusionment. It is insufficient, therefore, just to analyse the emotional and the irrational aspects of voting behaviour as observations in isolation. We also have to examine the structure of our democracies so that voters’ choices can promote the efficient and the effective management of the publicly provided services in the general interest. The Westminster Parliament is failing miserably to exercise its democratic influence on the European Union; and the Westminster Parliament has not yet properly adjusted to its own devolving of power to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Piecemeal reforms have led to predictable inconsistencies which, if not corrected, soon will push the break-up of the UK.
Yet, looking back over my years of political campaigning, which began in 1962, I am struck by one thing. For all the alleged failures in voters’ behaviour, their irrational passions, emotions, prejudices and supposed ignorance—or any other descriptions for good or ill, of British democracy—I cannot find a single one of the General Elections—1964, 1966, 1970, two in 1974, 1979, 1983, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2001 or 2005—in which, retrospectively, one might quibble about the wisdom of the outcome. In two of those elections, in 1970 and 1979, I was removed from Ministerial Office and very salutary it was, though I probably did not think so on the day! For all the oddities and unfairness of our voting system I have never felt that the electorate, taken as a whole, is unable to assess the important underlying issues and broadly to judge them correctly. In the last analysis, the value of democracy is the ability to ‘kick the politicians out of office’ or, in a less emotive phrase, the ability to ensure the alternation of power.
References
Adomo TW, Frankel-Brunswick E, Levinson DJ, Sanford RN. The authoriarian personality (1950) New York: Harper and Row.
Amodio DM, Jost JT, Master SL, Yee CM. Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. (2007) September 9. Nature Neuroscience advance online publication. doi: 10.1038/mm1979.
Hamman H. Political animal. Financial Times Magazine (2007) November 17.
Iacoboni M, Freedman J, Kaplan J, Hall Jamieson K, Freedman T, Knapp B, Fitzgerald K. This is your brain on politics. (2007) November 11. New York Times. op-ed.
Nature Editorial. Mind games: how not to mix politics and science. Nature (2007) 450:457.[Medline]
Westen D. Self and society: narcissism, collectivism and the development of morals (1985) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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