Political campaigns

To get elected politicians need to win the majority of votes in certain constituency (in a majoritarian system) or a certain minimum number of votes (in a proportional system). This can lead to a significant political underrepresentation of political minorities if they are thinly spread across regions / constituencies (e.g. UKIP voters in UK).

Political campaigns are processes that media like to cover (as being the issue of national interest and an adversarial process) which gives natural media attention to the candidates. The majority of this attention goes to the mainstream candidates, but fringe candidates get their portion as well as (1) state rules can mandate giving all the candidate certain media presence; (2) people, especially undecided voters can encounter info on fringe candidates by googling “election 2016”; (3) for media the idea of telling about the non-mainstream candidates can be interesting differentiating story to tell.

Participation in a campaign could lead to huge costs to the political capital of the candidate with background in civil society activism. First, it is an adversarial process where competing candidates have strong incentives to attack each other using all the dirty methods (bringing details of personal life, part mistakes, etc.to the public) as losing the election is a direct harm for them (e.g. Sadiq Khan who happened to have some public conversations in the past with radical Islamic scholars). Second, the media has huge incentives to report and even focus on specifically dirty details of candidates biographies as those are ones the naturally attract attention. Third, if the candidate loses getting particularly low votes this is likely to backfire on her political agenda and / or on the community she represents as the opponents now can claim – look, the public support for this stuff is negligible. Fourth, participation in the political campaign requires a lot of financial resources and volunteer engagement that could be otherwise (and with 100% positive results) deployed to helping the cause the candidate is fighting for.

The results of elections are decided by the sample of voters who have shown in the voting stations and this sample can differ significantly from the general population. Even though to spend an hour in a year (and not even every year) does not seems to be a huge sacrifice we empirically know that turnover is rarely exceed 60% and is often lower than 50%.

Groups with traditionally low turnover are usually the very groups with strong progressivist agenda: racial minorities and young people. The group with traditionally high turnover are usually the group with relatively more conservative agenda: mid-age and old white people in Western Liberal Democracies (e.g. Brexit referendum).

First determinant of the turnover is the extent to which the group believes in the political system as a whole. If people associate themselves with the democratic system, then they are likely to go vote. If they feel excluded and disenfranchised – they are likely to stay at home (historically low turnover of racial minorities in US).

Second determinant of the turnover is the level of enthusiasm. Enthusiastic voters tend to not only vote themselves, but also engage their politically non-active friend and relatives (it was a big factor in the first Obama campaign when progressive voters where extremely enthusiastic). This creates specific problems with the “lesser of two evils” political narrative, like in the example of Hillary Clinton campaign.

Third determinant is the level of alignment of the election with the personal interest. Political narratives based on fearmongering (terrorism, racial war, climate apocalypses at the gates, etc.) are specifically effective in this regard as they directly align personal interests with the elections.