Elections are often seen as an accountancy task on the part of voters. They are thought to cast their votes on the basis of which party is going to make them personally better off in the future. So deciding how to vote is an exercise in evaluating the costs and benefits of the various policies associated with the rival parties. Such reasoning does take place and is influential, but there is another dimension to electoral decision-making linked to voters’ feelings about parties and policies. This ‘gut reasoning’ is based on emotions and feelings, and this type of affective reasoning has been shown to be quite powerful in electoral politics in recent research.
The chart above shows the responses to a set of statements in a BPIX poll conducted last week which asked ‘Which, if any, of the following words, describe your overall feelings about the policies of the x party?’ Respondents were asked to cite up to four words from a list of eight, with four positive and four negative descriptors. The chart shows the results for the Labour and Conservative parties.
Labour outdoes the Tories on the negative descriptors, and the reverse is true for most of the positive descriptors. With many more people angry, disgusted or uneasy about Labour than the Conservatives, it is no surprise that the latter is ahead in the polls. However, the chart shows that many people are also uneasy about Conservative policies and few are happy, confident or proud of them, although about a third are hopeful. This data explains quite well the story of the election: many voters have given up on Labour, but at the same time they are far from wholeheartedly embracing the Tories.
