Putting an end to personality politics

Paul Albertella under a Creative Commons Licence

It’s common to hear the phrase ‘we get the government we deserve’ so close to election time, as campaigners try to urge, cajole or just guilt more people into voting.

This is well intentioned, but for me it’s not enough to ask or berate potential non-voters without understanding the underlying problem.



Just knowing what the parties stand for can be hard enough to find out. Coverage tends to focus on the personalities of the party leaders, with plenty of media bias thrown in the mix along with spin from the politicians. For the upcoming election in Britain, the focus seems to be on who’s promising to pick who in a coalition – and whether we can trust them.

All in all it’s a pretty noisy landscape, and caught up in the cross-fire of these personality battles it is ultimately the voter who is the first to lose out.



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This is why it’s no surprise that, given recent turnout rates, the number of people who will exercise their democratic right on 7 May could be fewer than 30 million out of the 53 million that make up our electorate.



Vote for Policies is one of a growing number of online voter advice services which allow people to assess which political party matches their views most closely. In 2005, there were 2 such services available in Britain; this year, 7 are up and running.

The number of people using them is rising steadily, with approximately 2 million users in 2010, but has yet to reach the proportions of other European countries such as Switzerland, Finland and the Netherlands, where research shows that between 30 and 40 per cent of voters consulted a voter advice service before casting their vote.



I have no background in politics, and in fact up until 5 years ago I had almost no interest in politics, either. So when I set up Vote for Policies before the 2010 general election, it was specifically to help make politics more accessible to people like me. What changed for me was reading the manifestos.

Realizing I knew nothing of any substance about what any of the parties stood for, I took it upon myself to read the manifestos. Not a particularly enjoyable experience (they’re a pretty dry read!), but it was only through reading them that I was able to see clearly what the parties were promising to do, and how they differed. Not only was it great to have such clarity, it was also surprising as to which party I aligned with most. Politics suddenly became interesting.



As a web producer, my first reaction was to create something online so that more people could have the same experience – but in a matter of minutes, not hours. Vote for Policies was born – with a mission to increase voter turnout by helping voters make a decision based on policies, and nothing else.



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Because of this focus on policies I wanted to move away from the quiz-based services that ask to you agree or disagree with a series of statements, and instead show people real policies from real manifestos – but without displaying the party names until the end.

It’s important we have that direct connection with the policies, not just because it helps make our governments more accountable to them, but because there is now evidence to suggest it really works as a tool for increasing voting intention to vote. A third of the public, 35 per cent, according to research just published by TNS, agree they are now more likely to vote in the general election as a result of taking part in the survey and seeing their results.



This is a real breakthrough, not just for Vote for Policies, but all the other voter advice services which are also using policies to engage more people with politics and to encourage them to vote. This stuff really works.



But that’s not the end of the story. Not only could focusing on policies get more people voting, the TNS research shows it could shake up the result, too.



A fifth (20 per cent) said they are now reconsidering who they might vote for. This proportion varies, with one quarter (25 per cent) of those planning to vote for Labour at the beginning of the survey are reconsidering who to vote for. This compares with 20 per cent of UKIP supporters, 18 per cent of Conservatives and 16 per cent of Liberal Democrats.

So regardless of how much we think personality matters in the political debate or not, policies surely matter more. Even from a purely logical basis, we don’t need to consider how much we like the leaders of our political parties until we know what they’re promising to do – so the policies have to be our first port of call.



If we want a democracy where we can all participate, and the popularity of our political parties reflects the policies we want implemented, we have a solution right now. Other countries recognize this, new research here in Britain backs it up, and we have the services online already to make it happen.

Make politics about policies and not personalities, and we might just get the government – and the democracy – we deserve.



Matt Chocqueel-Mangan is founder of Vote for Policies. Over 600,000 surveys have been completed since its 2015 campaign launch in February. Vote for Policies allows individuals to compare the main political parties’ policies on topics of most importance to them, without knowing which party they belong to. It is the only survey to use verbatim text directly from the parties’ manifestos.



TNS Omnibus interviewed a representative sample of 1,199 adults in Great Britain between 21 and 23 April 2015. Interviews were conducted as online self-completion and results have been weighted to make them representative of the general population. Full data tables and details on the methodology can be found here.