What happens when you run a country like an advertising campaign?
Here’s the core problem with focus groups in politics: they assume people’s attitudes are stable. Ask voters what they want, give it to them, win elections. Simple. Except people don’t actually know what they want. They’re contradictory, irrational, and they certainly don’t have ready access to all the information required to make policy decisions. By responding to the fluctuating whims of focus groups, you end up chasing shadows.
This isn’t abstract theorising. It’s what happened to Britain.
In 1985, Philip Gould met Peter Mandelson, then director of communications at the Labour Party. Gould, an ad-man by trade, offered something new: qualitative focus groups to replace the anonymous quantitative polling from MORI. By 1987, Gould was in and MORI was out. He set up the Shadow Communications Agency and became an expert in American electoral techniques, even aiding Clinton’s 1992 campaign.
It wasn’t until 1997 that Gould got his chance to shine. During the run-up to that election, the strategy was informed by 300 focus groups, with a further 70 conducted after the election was called (Butler and Kavanagh, 1997, 129-30). The goal was to develop a “third position” for Labour—not just between the major parties, but above them. This position was designed to appeal to swing voters while making it difficult for the opposition to develop a contradictory stance. On one hand, a ruthless strategy for winning elections. On the other, an attempt to give people a new politics of empowerment, participation, trust, accessibility, purpose, and perhaps above all of authenticity.
The focus groups didn’t entirely meet this lofty goal. A raft of evidence has shown that people aren’t rational and don’t always know what they want. By responding to often contradictory opinions, the Labour Party abandoned long-term policy decisions to focus on the here and now. Geoff Mulgan captures this in Good and Bad Power: “The nearer the one came to power in the mid-1990s the shorter the time horizons were, rarely looking more than a few weeks or months ahead. Their highest aspiration was simply to survive in power.”
To Labour, it seemed this didn’t matter—people were getting what they wanted. Or in the words of Derek Draper, former Labour lobbyist:
“The point about focus groups politics is that there isn’t one, because people are contradictory and irrational and so you have a problem in terms of deciding what you are going to do if all you ever do is listen to a mass of individual opinions which are always fluctuating and don’t have any coherence and crucially are not set in context. So that is why people can say I want lower taxes and better public services. Of course they do. You say do you want to pay more taxes to get better public services, people are less sure, they then don’t believe that of they do pay more taxes it will be spent on better public services so you end up in this quagmire and the truth is a politician has to say ‘Look this is what I believe, I believe that you should pay slightly more taxes to make better public services and I pledge that I am competent enough to use that money wisely. Do you want that? Vote for me yes or no.‘”
Applying tactical marketing techniques to government policy was doomed to fail. This short-term decision making—driven by a misunderstanding of how focus groups should be used—is to blame for some of the inappropriate spending and contradictory decisions made by the last government. The failure of the tripartite system of regulating the City and the ASBO initiative are two ill-thought-out policies that accentuated the financial and social problems Britain now faces.
September 11th and the war in Iraq highlighted the deficiencies in this approach. There was a realisation that long-term national interests have to take precedence over the short-term view of focus groups. This shift was apparent when Tony Blair ignored the million-strong march in London protesting against the war. A year later, addressing the Labour Party conference, he explained: “I don’t think as a human being, as a family man, I’ve changed at all. But I have changed as a leader. I have come to realise that caring in politics isn’t really about ‘caring’. It’s about doing what you think is right and sticking to it.”
But here’s the strange part. Blair’s change of heart didn’t signal the end of focus-group politics. It spread. The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and Labour all continued trying to woo floating voters and occupy the middle ground. Which is why in the 2010 election there seemed to be very little to distinguish the parties, or as Andrew Sullivan put it, “the Brits all sound as if the national debate is within the US Democratic party.” This isn’t unique to UK or US politics—the steady march of marketing thinking has reached Australia with similar consequences.
To say all of this is caused solely by focus groups overplays their importance in political history. But the techniques created by market researchers certainly influenced the last Labour government, and by using them incorrectly, they laid the foundations for policy decisions whose shadows hang over Britain today.
Maybe the lesson is that governing isn’t marketing. You can’t A/B test your way to a coherent society.