Sometimes short-term popularity isn’t a good thing.

… and the benefits of doing so are much bigger than a lot of commentators seem to realise.

When I say (in the previous post here) that a politician, or a political party can get away with backing a particular cause – my convictions on Trout Dipping, for example – as long as it enjoys ‘a reasonable level of support’, I mean that Trout Dipping needs to have enough of an attraction to allow a political party to include it their manifesto in a way that wouldn’t damage their chances of winning an election.

Sure, they can adopt one or two points of conviction. The public understand that, sometimes, politicians have to make ‘tough choices’ and that Neville Chamberlain’s popularity in 1938 provides us all with an object lesson.

Sometimes they have to spoon a bit of nasty medicine into the voters, but have you noticed how that medicine is always the kind of tincture that doesn’t upset the wealthier voters? The sort of thing that can only be sustained with constant support from the news media?

The point here is, political parties have to appeal to a much more diverse electorate than most commentators on politics generally realise. I’d suggest that – if this misunderstanding were cleared up, the demand for politicians to behave in an idealistic way would dry up a bit.

For those of us who hope, one day, to find Trout Dipping enshrined in the law, we have to hope that people start to be a bit more realistic soon, because until they do, we’re screwed.

Here’s the problem.

If they adopt one or two unpopular policies, they have to be politically sustainable (and Trout Dipping isn’t, for all of the reasons that I explained).

They may even get away with one or two policies that aren’t instantly acceptable to the voters, but in a world where everyone knows what they are against, being in favour of anything that isn’t a slam-dunk is an electoral risk.

On Election Day, the winners will, in very large part, be the candidates and the party that scare the electors the least. The ones that adopt policies that are either unpopular, or that attract a lot of vocal criticism will lose.

If I wasn’t going to offer a better alternative (and I will – I promise), you could see what I’m about to say as being a very bleak and impoverished picture of democracy.

Here goes;

If we want a political party to achieve the things that we want (as opposed to giving us the warm glow of losing righteously), then we have to limit our expectations to getting only getting the things that we aspire to that are electorally acceptable.

This is not quite as bad as it sounds. A political party can do a lot more to make the political weather that it lives in when it is in government. It can quietly shift the political centre-ground in the right direction.

Winning elections has all kinds of hidden benefits that never get mentioned in manifestos.

This still must be somewhat frustrating for voters, and extremely annoying for people who take a more active and partisan view of politics, over the short term.

Yet another corollary of the everyone-agrees-with-me delusion is that those active citizens generally seem to be particularly convinced that they’re part of some silent majority or other.

All in all, it’s a very frustrating situation for people who see themselves as voting with their convictions. Why would they want to join a political party if, in doing so, they have to chose to either keep their convictions quiet, or hobble their own party?

Let’s look at them next because the way that they behave, and their expectations, can make all of the difference in deciding how effective a principled political movement can be.

Imagine we were building a democracy from scratch, after some kind of apocalypse? All property rights would be void, all power-relations would be gone and we’d be working on a blank sheet of paper.

There are all sorts of logistical and logical problems we’d have to solve, but one of the most interesting ones would be the points at which human nature – however you want to define it – reject democracy and work against it.

For example, a few years ago, an anthropological study claimed to show that – under certain circumstances (epidemics, infections, the presence of parasites, food poisoning, etc) people are more ethnocentric, hierarchical and xenophobic.

These are, I think you’ll agree, not democratic values.

In a fairly unmethodical way, I’ve been pulling together a list of other attitudes and perspectives that make it harder to expect people to behave in the kind of rational, collaborative way that an idealised democrat would like us to.

The one I keep returning to is the popular ‘everyone agrees with me’ fallacy. I could cover this quickly with a link to the ‘false consensus effect’ cognitive bias, but there’s a very political illustration that I’d prefer to use.

In 2005, the late Chris Lightfoot took a large lump of Mori’s polling data on political issues and he then plotted everyone who replied on one of those ‘political compass’ axis.

Since Chris’s passing, the website has disappeared and I can’t link to it, but (please, take my word for it) rather than showing red-dot Labour voters clustering on the left hand side with blue-dot Tories on the right and orangy Lib-Dems in the middle, it showed that (a) no-one seemed to agree with anyone else about very much, and (b) there were plenty of coloured dots in absolutely the wrong part of the political compass.

People don’t agree with you anything like as much as you think. Even your own body doesn’t agree with you. (h/t Ivan).

Other things on that list of obstacles: There’s The Tragedy of the Commons. There’s Mancur Olson’s ‘Logic of Collective Action’ which shows that there is a free rider problem that makes it a lot harder than you would think to get a group of people with a common purpose to act together to solve that problem in a coherent way.

At work, a few months ago, we went on a course about organising groups of people (I work for a trade union) and we looked at Tuckman’s stages of group development.

Long story short? It’s a lot harder than you think.

Then there’s ‘the democratic trilemma’ (h/t Chris Dillow) argument that even a fairly small group of people will struggle to be able to collectively rationalise in a fair way, and then translate any decision that they do make into action.

People don’t have as many common causes as you think. It’s harder to reach a collective decision, and they don’t work collaboratively towards a common goal even when they have one.

It they do, it takes patience, and probably lots of money to buy professional help.

It may be that they’re part of an expensively assembled false consensus. It is probably a group that would struggle to tell you what they are in favour of, even if it’s fairly easy to get a group of people to oppose something.

I’m sure that there’s a much better, more rigorous academic essay that can make this point with graphs and formulae, but I hope the point is clear.

Once anyone who is looking at democracy understands just how hard it is to reach a consensus and to act on it, thinking it through has to change the way that you understand how politics works.

Just think this through from a politician’s point of view? That principled decision that you are about to announce?

The more experienced the politician, the more aware they will be aware of how many people are going to disagree with any clear statement of intent that they may make.

There is one exception. If they’re supporting the aims of a small purposeful group of people with a lot of resources, it could be a bit easier (that’s another one of Mancur Olson’s conclusions). When we see a purposeful group with an elegant set of arguments, we may be advised to check to see if there is an army of well-concealed lobbyists behind it?

Principled positions and principled people may not be as important to democracy as we think.

There are other ways of getting democracy to work for justice, but having admirable people saying the right thing, or a group working towards something that looks like a noble cause? They may not be it.