Why politician fail

The figure shown above illustrates this pattern. The two bars on the left represent how much blame was given to the governor on average when there was no expert testimony. The grey bar is when the governor is of your own party, and the white bar shows how much blame was placed on the governor when the governor is of the opposing party. We see that there is virtually no difference between these two bars, meaning that there was little difference in how much blame was given when there was no information present.

However, turning to the two bars on the right, we see that the story is quite different. These two bars represent cases where the expert blames the governor. Here we see that the white bar is much higher than the grey bar, because the governor is of the rival party.

Put simply, when the expert blames the other party, people listen and use that information. But when the expert blames their own party, people tune it out, seemingly unwilling to listen and blame their own party. The same general pattern emerges in the figure shown below where we are looking at levels of blame given to the legislature instead of the governor. Some qualifications that need to be mentioned about the study is that we are only looking at one kind of information being supplied — expert, non-partisan testimony about who is to blame.

It is possible that other kinds of information could have different effects and actually reduce partisan blame as some have found. The other qualification worthy of mention is that the hypothetical scenario presented pertained to state politics.

It is possible that information is used differently in the context of state matters where general levels of knowledge are low, and information is taken as a more credible signal in national politics. What the researchers found was that people were much more likely to enter these skill related games than when performance was just determined by luck. They were also more likely to lose money. People were even more likely to be overconfident — and lose cash — if they had been recruited in answer to an ad which stressed that winners would need to know lots about sports, logic or current affairs.

They forgot that, while they might themselves be quite knowledgeable about sports, that would also be true of the people they were playing against. American researchers found exactly the same illusions of explanatory depth when it came to politics: people were willing to say that they supported a particular candidate because of their policies on an issue, but when asked to describe those policies 50 per cent found they knew less than they expected, compared to just five per cent who found they knew more.

The team investigating illusions of explanatory depth found that it was linked to whether you thought abstractly or concretely and, in particular, whether you broke the problem down into its constituent parts.

If I ask how you can win Derby North, the task is actually smaller but those answers looks more trite. A few quarters of underperformance will surely make the position of any chief executive officer CEO very shaky. So the temporal orientation of most companies does not extend beyond the next few quarters. Thus, when there is a choice between an investment that will have a substantial future pay-off and a small immediate one, and an investment that will have a smaller pay-off, but an immediate one, one should not blame the CEO for playing a short-term game.

Of course, political leaders and corporate leaders will say that they are committed to the future and long-term goals.

But their actions will nevertheless be governed by what their brains expect to happen in the immediate present, much like our forefathers in the savannas—a clear say versus do gap created due to their temporal orientation. Several problems that a large country like India faces need long-term vision and decades of focused effort.

The temporal orientation of the political leadership does not facilitate strategy formulation beyond five years. So how do we develop alternative strategies that work around the short-term temporal orientation problem?

It would be too optimistic to expect a politician to start thinking of a future beyond his next election, when his very survival depends on it. It might be more practical to accept this reality and work around this problem. Who could then take care of the long-term future of a country? Some of the brightest talents in our country join the administrative services. They are part of the government machinery for a lifetime.

So, unlike the politician who only has a short-term view of policy decisions, bureaucrats can have a much more long-term vision. Instead, they become a part of a professional field with its own norms, traditions and habits. As social scientists have extensively documented, someone who enters a profession will, in a variety of both conscious and unconscious ways, be subject to pressures to conform to the norms of that field.

Newcomers to professional politics are no different. Even the most determined and well-meaning among them will, upon taking office, enter a world in which all social or professional interactions encourage them—subtly or not so subtly—to play along and not make too many waves.

Ironically, another part of the social norms guiding professional politics pushes people in the opposite direction—often with dire consequences. Thus, their inclination not to rock the boat is offset by a strong desire to be known for one or two career-defining Faustian projects. Thus, the social norms guiding professional politics succeed in simultaneously harming the public interest in two seemingly contradictory ways.

Unfortunately, experience strongly suggests that such bouts of proactivity by elected leaders in the face of public disapproval only very rarely work to our benefit. Much more often, they appear to serve either the private interests of the politicians' associates or merely their need for self-aggrandizement.

The social sciences offer us two other insights into how politicians operate. These have to do with power and what happens when politicians spend time dealing with other influential individuals.

First, social psychologists have found that individuals who experience a sense of power become less able to empathize with others. Politicians, by virtue of their jobs, are likely to perceive themselves as power holders and, thus, to be unable to adopt the perspective of those affected by their decisions.

As their political careers develop over the years, and they come closer to attaining positions of greater power, politicians will gradually become less and less able to put themselves in the shoes of the average citizen.

Second, we know that a sense of identification with a social group—i. Individuals identify with groups with whom they believe they share significant traits. The result can range anywhere from calling yourself British to emphasizing your ethnic background or even simply saying you are a supporter of your local football club. Think, for example, of an immigrant developing a new sense of national identity or someone who recently switched careers.

In those and other situations, individuals can combine within themselves several identities, sometimes without even being fully aware of it. Needless to say, we all categorize ourselves—be it in more or less conscious fashion—into a variety of groups. What happens next, though, is even more interesting.

They develop an increasingly positive image of fellow group members. They experience a sense of loyalty to the group and exhibit, either consciously or unconsciously, a much greater inclination to help and cooperate with other group members.

As a result, the group member becomes less prone to help and cooperate with them. These ideas can help us understand the behavior of our elected political class. We know that, over the course of their duties, acting politicians will spend many of their waking hours dealing with members of other powerful elites. They will, for example, spend vast amounts of time interacting with representatives of large corporations and other established interest groups.

We can easily envision how this process unfolds. It is only natural that, over the course of time, most politicians will start to see business leaders as their peers in the process of policy-making.

Employing the lessons of social identity theory, it becomes easy to predict what happens next. Politicians become increasingly sympathetic to the arguments presented by the other members of this elite they belong to. Perhaps most distressing is that this process can take place in a largely unconscious way. Politicians themselves might often be unaware of the ties and the growing sense of identification that they are developing with their peers in the business community; yet, whether or not they are aware, the consequences will be just as real.

Therefore, we have at least two distinct psychological mechanisms that can help us understand how our elected politicians will, over time, become increasingly unable to adopt the perspective of the common citizen—and all the while their way of thinking will continue to grow closer and closer to that of other powerful factions in society.

However, it is not just a sense of power and identification with other elites that can bias politicians' reasoning. Powerful ideas warp the way we think, too—especially when those ideas are fundamental to our way of seeing the world or we are known for espousing them.