One of my father’s vivid memories of growing up as a Jewish child in Nazi Germany concerned the horrifying visit of his uncle Walter one evening in 1933. Pale as a ghost and shivering with fear, Walter entered the house crying: “I’ve been bewitched!” On his way home from the train station he had come across a Nazi rally. At first he feared the mob, but when he gained some confidence that his Aryan appearance would disguise his Jewish identity a strange feeling slowly took hold of him.
When the rally sang the Nazi party anthem, Walter joined in, mumbling the words to the song. Not long after that he suddenly noticed that he was actually getting swept up in the emotions. Along with everyone around him, he was shouting “Sieg Heil”. He completely forgot that the ideology he so much wanted to be part of regarded him as one of its most hated enemies.
When we talk about politics, we tend to pretend that voting is ultimately a rational choice. The works of the great rationalists Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant are set texts in political science departments. On the doorstep, most campaigners still win over voters by logical argument, or at least try to, weighing up candidates’ pros and cons on different policies. James Carville’s famous phrase from Bill Clinton’s early 90s campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid!”, reflects a conventional wisdom that voting is primarily about spending money wisely.
In recent years, however, a growing body of evidence has shown that our political behaviour is governed more by emotions and less by rationality. The decision to go out and vote, for a start, is in itself an irrational decision. Political scientists refer to it as the “voting paradox”. Voting involves considerable effort, which needs to be offset by a considerable benefit if the decision is to be rational. But each of us separately has virtually zero influence on the election outcome. Through the entire history of democracy there has been no national election anywhere in the world that was determined by a single vote.
Why do we vote nonetheless? The reason is that voting is an emotional and, to some extent, recreational activity. If voting was about influencing the election’s outcome, you would have agreed with your next-door neighbour, who supports the rival party, that you both stay at home. But no. You want to be there to cast your vote, because voting is more about expression than about consequences.
In a research paper that Esteban Klor and I published a few years ago, using data from US state elections, we showed that patterns of state election turnouts are similar to patterns of football match turnouts. You will be more attracted to travel to the stadium and pay for a ticket if the two teams are close competitors and your team has a slightly higher chance of winning. After all, we expect to enjoy the game more when our team wins rather than loses.
Ideology too is mostly about emotions and hardly at all about rationality. Imagine a world in which ideology was ruled by rationality without any biases. In such a world there would be little room for political debate among intelligent people. If we were all exposed to the same facts we would end up reaching the same conclusions. We would still need parties and elections since our interests are not identical. But we would never remain split over questions such as which economic policy would benefit most British people, or which policy would be most effective for tackling terrorism.
The fact that we continue to debate these issues endlessly, and yet never seem to agree, suggests that there is something in ideologies far beyond rationality. This other thing is subjective taste, which, to a large extent, is shaped by our emotional being. De gustibus non est disputandum (In matters of taste, there can be no disputes), as the Latin idiom goes and, indeed, disputes never help bridge opposing ideologies.
Pazit Bloom, of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, conducted laboratory experiments showing that priming subjects with pictures of disgusting food affects their political/moral view even when they are prompted to express their rational view on the issue. Subjects were asked about their opinion on adoption by gay couples. Those who were primed with revolting pictures showed a more negative moral conviction even to questions that were supposed to prompt reasoning.
Political orientation is even influenced by unconscious emotions. Ran Hassin, from Columbia University and the Hebrew University, showed that subliminal priming can affect political orientation. Americans who were exposed to a picture of the US flag on a screen for a fraction of a second were unable to notice the flag. Yet the opinions they expressed in a subsequent questionnaire were significantly more to the right of those who were not primed with the flag’s picture.
In circumstances where reason is at odds with subjective taste, it is the latter that carries the day. In most cases we tend to pay attention selectively to the evidence that confirms our political orientation while pretending that the conflict between reason and taste does not exist. How many of our friends who regard themselves as right wing would admit that while they were disgusted by the idea of signing an agreement with fanatic ayatollahs, they logically realise that the west would be better off with the Iran agreement? How many of our leftwing friends would concede that while they were emotionally averse to any form of American intervention, the sanctions against Iran do seem to work and removing them now would be a dangerous move?
Charles Taber and Milton Lodge of New York’s Stony Brook University used laboratory experiments to show that people’s political reasoning is biased by their subjective moral sentiments. After subjects expressed their opinions on gun control and affirmative action, they were given a list of pro and con arguments used by professional lobbies that seek to affect policies on these issues. They were asked to rate the strength of each argument evenhandedly and based on pure reasoning. But these ratings turned out to be highly biased. Arguments supporting one’s own view were rated stronger.
Ideology can distance us from common sense. Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s chief agronomist, fused “new biology” and socialism in a futile effort to raise crop yields. But his theories only caused famine.
Our craving for ideology also means that we like our politicians to be ideologists. The psychologist Vittorio Caprara and his associates at Rome’s Sapienza University showed that voters seek to vote for politicians who have a similar personality to themselves. Ideology is often the means by which politicians convey their personality to us. Politicians who downplay ideology are wrongly tagged by us as opportunists who are into politics for themselves and not for the public.
But our desire for ideologists comes at a price, because it creates the wrong incentives for our policymakers. Politicians are much more rational than us voters. They are governed primarily by their instinct for political survival. Our need for them to follow an ideology means that they will obey it to appease us. They even believe in their ideology to convince us that they will do so. But this is precisely against the public’s interests.
There can be no ideology that is superior on all issues and in all circumstances, except for the ideology of choosing the best policy for each issue separately and independently of political orientation. We need our politicians to make smart political decisions that are aligned with the public interest. Sometimes such a smart decision is liberal; at other times, conservative. We don’t need them to impose their subjective moral sentiments on us or to use policies as a means of emotional expression.
Born at the end of the 19th century with great promises for a better society, ideology at the end of the 20th century has nothing to show for itself but hundreds of millions of dead, murdered by the three greatest idealogues of all time: Hitler, Stalin and Mao. By understanding our craving for ideology there is a chance that one day we’ll be able to dispense with it. When that happens we shall all be better off.
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