Howard Barrell:OVER A BARREL
By the time you make your squiggles on a ballot paper on June 2, you will have read all the parties’ manifestos, analysed the outcomes they propose and the plausibility of the methods they suggest, sifted their merits out further in intelligent debate, cogitated and reflected still further, and then, with a self-conscious seriousness appropriate to one about to exercise casting the vote on your country’s fate, you will decide which party to vote for.
Wouldn’t elections be boring things if that was the case?
The more interesting truth is that our choice of party is less likely to be influenced by serious analysis of its programme than by our answers to a range of more impressionistic questions about the parties and their leaders.
Because I tend to (over-)psychologise, my questions might be: why does African National Congress president Thabo Mbeki find it necessary to suck incessantly on a pipe? What soft centre is Democratic Party leader Tony Leon trying to hide when he behaves so aggressively? Why is New National Party leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk still trying to be like Billy Bunter 30 years beyond childhood? What is Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi so scared of that he is so prickly? Or, is there anything other than wool in Pan Africanist Congress leader Stanley Mogoba’s cranial cavity?
You, no doubt, have your own approach.
According to Bob Mattes, the head of the Institute for Democracy’s opinion monitoring service and probably South Africa’s leading pollster: “Given no other information about a candidate or a party, a voter can look at things like skin colour, ethnic features, language, accent or even the way a candidate dresses to infer whether it is likely that the candidate, or their party, knows anything, or cares about the voters’ problems or the problems of their community.
“Voters can also look to the way that candidates and parties campaign. Do they speak with authority? Do they appear to know what they are talking about? Do they seem trustworthy? Do they demonstrate any connection with the voters? And where do they campaign: in city centres, suburbs, townships or squatter camps?”
You and I will also tend to attach a lot of importance to a party’s or candidates’ past performance. Logically, there may be no reason to suppose the past and present provide any guide to a party’s or candidate’s future performance. But elections turn on our and other voters’ expectations.
“Voters reach some sort of summary judgment about how things have been going, and the reasons why,” says Mattes.
“As consumers, people know whether prices are going up or down and whether salaries are keeping pace. If they buy anything on hire purchase, credit or own a home, they know something about interest rates. As workers, they have some idea whether jobs are more or less secure than they were the previous year. And so on.”
But it is a mistake to believe people vote on the basis of whether they personally are better or worse off. Instead, they will tend to be influenced by how the larger community, province or nation is doing economically.
“This is because it is very difficult for an individual to isolate the government’s responsibility for his or her own fortunes separately from a lot of other factors,” says Mattes. “You may have lost your job because of government cutbacks, but you may also have lost it because the boss didn’t like you or just through plain bad luck.
“It is much easier to blame or reward the government when you look around and see many of your friends or neighbours being retrenched, or see lots of new houses going up.”
You and I may also be influenced by the media, our friends and families, neighbours, a particular journalist, a trade union or community leader – by the “information network” of which we are part. In this respect it is interesting to note how the ANC and the DP have been making special efforts to win over the coloured community and political leaders from the NNP in the Western Cape in the belief that this will help increase their shares of the coloured vote.
“The `reality’ you comprehend and your interpretation of its consequences for you may differ radically depending upon what your economic and material circumstances are, and where you get your information about politics,” says Mattes. “This is why voting patterns may differ sharply along lines of class, race, ethnicity or region.”
The conventional wisdom among pollsters and election experts is that election campaigns themselves really have quite limited impacts. Most voters tend to have a party preference or loyalty before a campaign begins and will stick to it.
“An analogy from the world of consumer research would be `brand loyalty’,” says Mattes. “Most consumers do not have to make new decisions about which product to buy on a daily basis, or make up their minds when they are inside the store. You tend to figure out which product works best for you, based on whatever experience you have of it, as well as whatever information you can glean from advertising, friends, family or colleagues. Once you figure this out, you tend to go back to that brand as long as it still does what you want it to, and as long as you are not aware of any better alternative.”
What election campaigns set out mainly to do is to mobilise the party faithful and ensure they vote on polling days, and to identify and convert the undecideds.
If this all makes us, the voters, sound rather easily manipulated, gullible and stupid, Mattes assures us we are not. All the questions we ask in the course of the election campaign will be distilled down, in the end, to one eminently sensible one: who do I think will govern best in the future?
“Voters may not be very well informed, but they are not stupid,” Mattes insists. “As one analyst once put it, they do not ignore the information that they do have, and they do not make up information that they do not have.”