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RSS FeedDo people tend to base election votes more on emotion or reason?
Results so far:
| Emotion | 79% | 584 votes | Total: 742 votes | |
| Reason | 21% | 158 votes |
Emotion
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Add to FavoritesIndividual voters will be influenced by emotion, yet is this a bad thing? There are many examples in history where emotional appeals led to progressive legislation that would not have been accomplished in any other way.
In England, for example, legend says that the bill for Habeus Corpus passed the vote in the House of Lords simply because the speaker, being inebriated, counted the obese Lord Salisbury as ten. The bill passed and was signed into law.
We are complex creatures, and for better or worse, the understanding of the issues and the response to them will vary by individual, as does the understanding of a party platform. In fact the average thinking voter, being blessedly human, will vote according to his or her conscience, moral sense and personality; this means that the sum of the experiences that made them what they are will play a part in moulding the attitudes that lead them to their decision as to how they will vote.
The reality is nowhere near as clear cut as the question implies however; individual voters often believe that they are voting impartially, comparing the platform of the individual party with the issues and awarding their votes accordingly to the candidate and party that will best benefit the nation as a whole.
Thus they may have the best of intentions, yet will still be strongly influenced by their reaction to individual issues and policies, as well as the language in which those are couched: those reactions will be based on personal and highly subjective criteria. This is the price of universal suffrage in a heterogeneous society.
It is an unpalatable truth that a significant minority of voters will support one party all their lives, often the party that their parents supported. This is not a reasoned decision, but based entirely on emotion. Another significant minority will vote very rarely or not at all, usually justifying this inaction by one of a number of excuses along the lines of "There's no difference between the parties."
The number of voters who actually vote, and who can be swayed from one party or candidate to another for any reason is actually a minority, albeit a significant one, and their rationale will vary from largely emotional to minimally so.
Politicians understand this, which is why they attempt to spin' (exploit) issues so that they will elicit a response from a specific segment of the population. Needless to say, these target populations are those whose vote can be influenced: the committed voters are rarely given more than token recognition.
The size of this segment of eligible voters who will both regularly vote and whose vote can be influenced by platforms and campaigns rather than personalities and glitz is a minority of those eligible to vote. Even if we assume that most individuals try hard to use reason to award their votes, they still comprise a minority of eligible voters.
Learn more about this author, Richard Sprigg.
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Reason
In times of relative comfort and security, many of us might lean toward emotion to vote for a candidate. But when we face hard choices and bewildering issues, we tend to become more pragmatic.
When life is good, it's easier to view a candidate by his or her warmth, appearance and rhetoric on emotional issues such as gay marriage, stem cell research, pro-choice or pro-life, prayer and Creationism in schools, regulation or deregulation, global warming and the plight of the polar bear. These issues have little effect on our daily lives.
When our very survival is threatened, when we face the stresses of reduced healthcare, lower wages, job losses, home foreclosures, the collapse of financial institutions and the looming bankruptcy of General Motors, we become more interested, more aware, more "reasoned" in investigating proposed solutions as well as the character of a candidate. How we "feel" about abortion seems less urgent than the stark reality of whether we lose our job and our home.
Reason is the reason the current President-Elect won the 2008 election. More of us looked at our wallets and found them empty while our costs for fundamental needs increased.
Many of us were slapped up side the head with the realization that government actually makes a difference in how we live, how we feed our children, whether we get medical attention, and if we're going to make it to 2012, the next election cycle.
But whether reason trumps emotion also depends on a recent political phenomenon: the elevation of one party's agenda to a religion. The Republican Party, once the party of small government, personal responsibility, fiscal prudence and protection of individual rights has morphed into the party of moral righteousness and champion of Fundamentalist Christian beliefs. There are Republicans who equate a Republican president with a Catholic pope. They subconsciously think of Republican Senators as bishops and House Representatives as priests who always speak the Word of God. These Officers of God are virtually infallible: their statements are beyond refute, their positions above reproach, and their goals divinely inspired. They can do no wrong.
This phenomenon is cultural, not political. Civility is based on reason and is but a thin veneer covering our tendency to judge and react from primal emotions. Religion promotes rational behavior over the instinctive, however, in a secular era, many of us place our beliefs as much in our political party as in our church.
During the 1980s, the Republican Party cleverly aligned itself with Christianity in order to reach Nixon's "silent majority." After all, 82% of Americans considered themselves practicing Christians. The Party's platform deemphasized issues of governing and emphasized moral imperatives . . . visceral matters of the heart and religion upon which voters were encouraged to believe they were closer to God if they voted for Republicans. The Bush-Cheney administration compounded that and imbued the Commander-In-Chief with divine provenance to start two wars, one of vengeance and the second for oil.
In the end, however, the GOP's agenda was revealed not as adhering to God's Law but, instead, to a peculiarly deceptive and avaricious craving to seize power and grant benefits to its own hierarchy. Not unlike, I might add, the Christian popes of the Dark Ages.
With our international reputation in tatters and our domestic economy shattered, that illusion has been dispelled. Still, the Republican Party's image of being enshrouded in robes of divinity caused a substantive number of the electorate to vote their emotions rather than their common sense.
Fortunately they were far fewer in number than the reasoned electorate.
Learn more about this author, Michael Patrick.
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