Politics’ hidden duopoly
On October 31st, 2018, the Freakonomics Podcast ran a story in which they interviewed the authors of a September 2017 Harvard Business Review article entitled “Why Competition in the Politics Industry is Failing America”. The authors were CEO Katherine Gehl and business and management guru Michael Porter. The links to the podcast and the HBR article are included below.
The interview tells the story of how Gehl developed an interest in politics and became one of the top fundraisers in Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. But, the more she saw of Washington politics, the more disillusioned she became;
It became really clear to me that this fight was not about solving problems for the American people — this fight was about one party beating the other party, and that the parties were more committed to that than to actually solving problems or creating opportunities. Eventually, I understood that it didn’t matter who we elected. It didn’t matter the quality of the candidates. Once it became clear to me that it was a systems problem, I switched from investing my time in searching for the next great candidate and turned an eye to the fundamental root cause structures in the political system that pretty much guarantee that as voters we are perpetually dissatisfied.
The idea of “…structures in the political system that pretty much guarantee that as voters we are perpetually dissatisfied” sounded to me like something that’s as true for us in the UK as it is for voters in the US, and the root causes that Gehl and Porter identified are as relevant to this side of the Atlantic as they are in the US.
This idea of politics as a duopoly, in which the two players are more concerned with beating one another to gain or retain power than they are with actually using that power to benefit the electorate, also feels every bit as applicable to us in the UK as it is to the US. It explains why our two parties are moving further and further away from the political centre ground. There is no growth there! “People like us” (centre left or right “Social Democrats” who may identify with either Conservative or Labour) very rarely change sides. So for the parties, the key to growing their vote (and therefore “winning”) is to attract people from the margins to come out and vote for them. Unfortunately the way to attract those people is to pander to the aspects of their politics that led them to be marginalised in the first place, for example exceptionalist fantasies of UKIP voters and the ERG which have led the Conservatives to become the “f*ck business” party.
Addressing this challenge won’t be easy. It will take people who are busy building their lives, their relationships and careers to make extra time to engage with politics at grass roots level. To join their party of choice and show up. We can’t allow the people that govern our country to take us for granted any more, to ignore us and our needs and invest their efforts in policies that indulge the shouty special -interest groups who pay their wages and fuel their growth any longer.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/politics-industry/
https://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Documents/why-competition-in-the-politics-industry-is-failing-america.pdf