A vote on values - Habits of the heart and the election landslide
Published:Sunday | January 15, 2012 | 12:00 AM
Lawrence Alfred Powell, Guest Columnist
The weeks since the election have seen a variety of theories hurriedly thrown together in an attempt to explain what for many was an unexpected outcome. Many of these are interesting, and provide partial insights as to why the People’s National Party (PNP) might have tipped the balance, but fallen short of explaining why a two-to-one landslide came out of nowhere to the bafflement of pollsters, parties, the media and everyone else.
I don’t pretend to be able to explain this wide gap between the major parties either, but I do want to suggest that it might do us some good to step back a bit and look at this whole pattern that has evolved since 2007 in a broader perspective, looking at the entire culture. Maybe we can see something from that vantage point that we can’t see from up close.
If we ask the question, ‘What are the habits of the Jamaican heart, in terms of the country’s dominant cultural values’? – as was done in the 2007 national survey of values – at least a few of the pieces of the election puzzle might begin to fit into place. As any well-trained social scientist will tell you, elections and policies based purely on power strategies and economic reasoning alone do not penetrate well in appealing to the hearts of the mass electorate – whose cooperation is, after all, needed in order to implement those policies in a democracy.
Cultural incompatibility
No matter how well-conceived they might seem logically, public policies that go against the grain of people’s heartfelt values are ‘culturally incompatible’ – and though they might appear to be working in the short run, will ultimately fail for lack of grass-roots support.
Similarly, election strategies that may appear extraordinarily clever in the short run are likely to suffer this same fate – and that is probably at least part of what we just saw happen to the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in the December landslide. The shadow of the arrogantly clever Machiavellianism that brought Golding to power in 2007, and then hastened his demise in Dudus-Manatt, was still lingering in many voters’ minds as they headed to the polls. Unbeknown to an upbeat JLP, this shadow of betrayed trust and cultural values had been silently following Holness wherever he went – right into the election.
As a purely rational proposition, it must have seemed to JLP strategists and G2K that when Golding resigned, passing the PM baton to a fresh generation, he had made a brilliant strategic move, sidestepping altogether the accumulated popular sense of values betrayal. After all, a clean break had been made with the past.
But a betrayal of that magnitude – of deeply felt values and the undermining of basic trust – does not disappear so easily, nor so quickly. Though the pollsters’ radar could not detect it using standard ‘horse race’ questions, the values betrayal was still there lurking, to resurface with a vengeance on election day in a landslide very few anticipated.
While admittedly very difficult to measure in a concrete way, there are, in fact, a few clues to be found in a previous national survey, in which questions about Jamaicans’ values had been asked. Social psychologist Shalom Schwartz has developed an ‘inventory of basic human values’ which has been tested across more than a hundred different world cultures. From this Schwartz inventory, 35 of the value questions were asked in Jamaica in the 2007 national survey conducted by UWI’s Centre for Leadership and Governance.
If one looks closely at the results of this survey of a random sample of 1,013 Jamaicans, it can be argued that the PNP, and Simpson Miller in particular, had positioned themselves to be more in alignment with the basic value preferences of the Jamaican people, especially the populist ones, than had the JLP. There were 35 values listed in the survey. Among the values that Jamaicans ranked in the upper half were ‘honesty (genuine, sincere)’ (ranked third), ‘family security (safety for loved ones)’ (second), ‘honouring of parents and elders (showing respect)’ (first), ‘equality (equal opportunity for all)’ (11th), and ‘responsibility (dependable, reliable)’ (12th).
Note that these are predominantly what Schwartz would term ‘collectivist’ values – that is, these are family-, religion-, and equality-oriented values that place more importance on preserving the group and on cooperation, rather than on promoting individual initiative and competition.
PNP message pointed
These are also values that one can see clearly reflected in the 2011 PNP campaign themes, in Simpson Miller’s election night acceptance speech, and in her inaugural address. In all of these contexts, ‘Sista P’ adopted the value symbolism of a nurturant, caring mother who wished to preside lovingly over a national Jamaican ‘family’, with heavy spiritual overtones woven throughout her speeches.
When economic policies had to be discussed or proposed, they were laced with reassuring egalitarian messages expressing strong identification and empathy with the plight of the downtrodden poor and the unemployed. Portia’s humble origins were repeatedly stressed, and her common manner and speech served to reinforce this identification.
After the election, in accepting the role bestowed on her as symbolic national mother and preacher, she spoke of “hugging in friendly rivalry” and pointed out that “as we move to balance the books, we will be moving to balance people’s lives as well”.
These are expressions of predominantly collectivist values, more than individualist ones. They cater to the unifying group strengths of families and churches as the bedrock institutions of Jamaican society.
In contrast, among the values that Jamaicans had ranked near the bottom in 2007 were more instrumental values such as ‘wealth (material possessions, money)’ (ranked 29th), ‘social power (control over others, dominance)’ (35th), ‘authority (right to lead or command)’ (33rd), ‘daring (seeking risk)’ (34th), ‘self-discipline (self-restraint)’ (22nd), and ‘a varied life (challenge, change)’ (32nd).
In the Golding era between the 2007 and 2011 elections, JLP appeals tended to stress the importance of these instrumental values more often than did PNP. Perhaps these ‘get-ahead’ values were very important to the upwardly mobile professional and business classes who were hoping to benefit from modernisation, and would appeal to already strong JLP supporters.
But in the wake of Dudus-Manatt, the JLP lost sight of the reality that emphasising privatisation, foreign investment, modernisation, competitive free-market capitalism, middle-class social mobility, individual initiative, and the importance of power and money generally – might seem terribly arrogant and insensitive to the large mass of Jamaicans who have few or shrinking life options available to them in a time of global recession.
It is telling, for example, that in a recent Observer weekly online poll of reasons why the JLP “turned off” voters and lost the election, the most frequently listed response was “arrogance”.
The implications of these value differences are intriguing. While we do not have the means to prove the extent to which these basic cultural values actually crystallised in producing a massive voter shift, it would probably be a good idea for future Jamaican politicians to pay much closer attention to the formative values that undergird the society, and their popularity.
If their policy priorities and their political ambitions are seen as being too contrary to those basic values,
the electorate will not long ignore the inconsistencies with cherished ‘habits of the heart’. Not accidentally, Portia Simpson Miller has made a career of cultivating precisely those dominant populist values.
■ Lawrence Alfred Powell is honorary research fellow at the Centre of Methods and Policy Application in the Social Sciences at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and the former polling director for the Centre for Leadership and Governance at UWI, Mona. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and lapowell.auckland@ymail.com.
PNP message pointed
These are also values that one can see clearly reflected in the 2011 PNP campaign themes, in Simpson Miller’s election night acceptance speech, and in her inaugural address. In all of these contexts, ‘Sista P’ adopted the value symbolism of a nurturant, caring mother who wished to preside lovingly over a national Jamaican ‘family’, with heavy spiritual overtones woven throughout her speeches.
When economic policies had to be discussed or proposed, they were laced with reassuring egalitarian messages expressing strong identification and empathy with the plight of the downtrodden poor and the unemployed. Portia’s humble origins were repeatedly stressed, and her common manner and speech served to reinforce this identification.
After the election, in accepting the role bestowed on her as symbolic national mother and preacher, she spoke of “hugging in friendly rivalry” and pointed out that “as we move to balance the books, we will be moving to balance people’s lives as well”.
These are expressions of predominantly collectivist values, more than individualist ones. They cater to the unifying group strengths of families and churches as the bedrock institutions of Jamaican society.
In contrast, among the values that Jamaicans had ranked near the bottom in 2007 were more instrumental values such as ‘wealth (material possessions, money)’ (ranked 29th), ‘social power (control over others, dominance)’ (35th), ‘authority (right to lead or command)’ (33rd), ‘daring (seeking risk)’ (34th), ‘self-discipline (self-restraint)’ (22nd), and ‘a varied life (challenge, change)’ (32nd).
In the Golding era between the 2007 and 2011 elections, JLP appeals tended to stress the importance of these instrumental values more often than did PNP. Perhaps these ‘get-ahead’ values were very important to the upwardly mobile professional and business classes who were hoping to benefit from modernisation, and would appeal to already strong JLP supporters.
But in the wake of Dudus-Manatt, the JLP lost sight of the reality that emphasising privatisation, foreign investment, modernisation, competitive free-market capitalism, middle-class social mobility, individual initiative, and the importance of power and money generally – might seem terribly arrogant and insensitive to the large mass of Jamaicans who have few or shrinking life options available to them in a time of global recession.
It is telling, for example, that in a recent Observer weekly online poll of reasons why the JLP “turned off” voters and lost the election, the most frequently listed response was “arrogance”.
The implications of these value differences are intriguing. While we do not have the means to prove the extent to which these basic cultural values actually crystallised in producing a massive voter shift, it would probably be a good idea for future Jamaican politicians to pay much closer attention to the formative values that undergird the society, and their popularity.
If their policy priorities and their political ambitions are seen as being too contrary to those basic values,
the electorate will not long ignore the inconsistencies with cherished ‘habits of the heart’. Not accidentally, Portia Simpson Miller has made a career of cultivating precisely those dominant populist values.
■ Lawrence Alfred Powell is honorary research fellow at the Centre of Methods and Policy Application in the Social Sciences at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and the former polling director for the Centre for Leadership and Governance at UWI, Mona. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and lapowell.auckland@ymail.com.