The Perils of Perception by Bobby Duffy

Author:Bobby Duffy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Figure 26. Younger generations in the Netherlands are less likely to feel attached to one particular political party.

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Emotion and identity are vitally important to how we see political realities and politicians. This has, to some extent, been under-recognized in some discussions of politics, that imagine people coolly weighing up policy preferences before choosing parties and leaders, and it’s right that we’ve rebalanced. It highlights the extent to which politicians can and do appeal to our emotions, with little reference to realities, and significant misdirection. This doesn’t mean that evidence is entirely ignored; facts still matter and we do change our minds.

Things are also not changing as much as some portray, or we imagine. We’re not checking out of politics at the rate we think, we’re not dumber on politics than we were in the past and we’re not ossifying into great ideological blocs any more than we did in the past.

But we’re also not making progress in representation as quickly as we think. That women still only make up an average of a quarter of our political representatives across such a wide range of countries is shocking. The variety of situations in different countries also has the power to startle, both with how ludicrously low female representation is in some, but also, more encouragingly, how much and quickly it can be shifted with focus and action. We need to guard against the complacency that representation and equality is improving more quickly than it actually is – knowing where we are is vital to understanding how far we still have to go, and what can be achieved.

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