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It’s summertime and the living is easy.
Unless you happen to work in the politics business, in which case the living at this time of year is pretty darn hard.
Why hard?
Because in the summer, people are happy, easy-going, and relaxed – and nothing grinds our political process to a halt faster than happy, easy-going, and relaxed people.
Simply put, feel-good emotions are to politics what garlic and sunlight are to vampires. So whenever politics sees summer coming, politics runs away and cowers in a corner.
Anger, anxiety, crankiness – these are the emotional fuels that make our political machines run. It may sound cynical, but it’s true. Politics, after all, is really all about mobilizing people, mobilizing them to support an issue or to vote for a political party or to contribute money to a cause. And the easiest, most effective way to mobilize people is through appeals to their darker emotions, like fear and hate. This is often called “pushing hot buttons.”
The Liberals pushed hot buttons in the last couple of federal when their frantic ads called Stephen Harper a George-Bush-loving cross between Genghis Khan and Jerry Falwell. Since coming to power, the Conservatives have pushed their own hot buttons by airing TV ads suggesting Stéphane Dion is nothing but a tax-loving, Adscam-approving, bleeding-heart wimp.
Lots of people, of course, hate this style of politics — referred to as “negative” campaigning. But like it or not, it works. As former Liberal strategist and “Prince of Darkness,” Warren Kinsella wrote in Kicking Ass in Canadian Politics, “Political types say they don’t like doing the tough stuff – but they do. And voters say they aren’t influenced by tough stuff – but they are.”
Indeed, academia supports Kinsella’s view. Confirmation and the Effects of Positive and Negative Political Advertising, a 2004 University of Notre Dame study, found that during the 2004 American presidential election, negative political TV ads caused 14 percent of test subjects to change their minds about their favoured candidate. (No word on whether the other 86 percent just gave up on democracy altogether.)
Why does negative campaigning work?
Short answer: Nobody knows.
Long answer: University eggheads studying this question have come up with a couple of theories.
One theory suggests that on some primal level, negative ads actually arouse us.
No, not that kind of arousal.
Negative emotions like hate and fear arouse a primitive part of our brain, the same part that triggers the “fight or flight” reflex.
When aroused in this manner, our brains become more vigilant. (This, I suppose, was a feature designed to ensure our ancestors were smart enough to get away from sabre-toothed tigers.) The bottom line is that arousal aids retention.
Another theory is that fear causes us to break out of our routines and to consider alternatives – which is why I consider the alternatives to watching TV when my wife wants me to mow the lawn.
One drawback of negative campaigning is that it doesn’t work very well when people are in a good mood. I know this not from any study, but from my own time pushing hot buttons when I worked for an organization called the National Citizens Coalition, a group that rails against government waste and incompetence.
I had taxpayers up in arms, for example, when I released a report exposing ridiculous government-funded projects, projects like a play called The Extasy of Bedridden Riding Hood and the study Deviancy and the New Woman.
But never would I have released such a report in the summer, because a) nobody would have paid attention, and b) everybody would have bought tickets to see The Extasy of Bedridden Riding Hood.
When the beckons and the days are long and languid, winter-weary Canadians are just too darned content to get riled up about anything.
As someone who cares about politics, this attitude just burns me up. And I would do something about it too, if it just wasn’t so nice outside.
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