Why do politics

It is in this context that my new book, Who Enters Politics and Why? Put simply, it is wrong to assume that we would all be equally desirous of running for office should the right opportunity structures present themselves. At an aggregate level, British politicians — and those who stand for office but fail to get elected — are more motivated by equality, social justice and caring for others Self-Transcendence values , and more autonomous and open-minded Openness values , than the comparatively small-c conservative population they govern who are otherwise more motivated by Conformity, Tradition and Security values.

However, these comparisons also indicate that politicos generally, and MPs in particular, are more driven than the public to control resources and be in charge of others Power values , and that these differences in Self-Enhancement values are exaggerated among those MPs who rise to the frontbench. Multivariate analyses demonstrate that personality characteristics like basic values can explain as much or more variance in political ambition and candidate emergence than other well-researched demographic and socio-economic variables such as gender, age, education and prior occupation.

I also look at the interaction between partisanship and basic values to answer three important and interrelated questions. Firstly, do politicians share the value priorities and thus motivational goals of those citizens who vote for them and, ultimately, trust them with their democratic sovereignty? In exploring these lines of inquiry, various analyses show a partisanship and basic values share a strong relationship at all levels, b partisan elites are much more polarised in their basic values than partisans in the public, and c psychological congruence between MPs and voters occurs to a much greater extent on the Right of British politics than the Left.

Yet when comparing the basic values of MPs with partisan voters from multiple UK elections, voters for parties on the Left of British politics primarily Labour are more psychologically akin to out-partisans on the Right, and elected politicians on the Right primarily Conservative , than those politicians on the Left that they actually elect.

These findings add nuance to mainstream theories of instrumental and expressive partisanship in which voters are either seen as Athenian democrats weighing evidence or alternatively as heuristic-driven motivated reasoners. On the latter point, these findings help to make sense of the successes and failures of the Labour Party in recent decades.

Stepping back to examine that state of political consumption, I also look at the existence of an unhealthy premium on the individual in contemporary democratic politics. To achieve this, I test a number of hypothetical assumptions grounded in existing studies of the personalisation of politics and the media through a conjoint experiment of voting preferences. Put simply, I asked a representative sample of the British public to choose between randomly populated hypothetical profiles of politicians in an election scenario.

These profiles comprise images and text, including adapted survey items for basic values re-written in the first person. The resultant data show that in experimental scenarios where voters do not know the partisanship of a candidate, personality outweighs other political and socioeconomic variables as a voting heuristic. They knew the election was happening but they just viewed political participation as pointless.

They thought of it as a joke. If you have money, your life is good. You can buy anything. I heard that from old white men. I heard that from young black women. We know already that politicians are bought off by corporations. No one actually cares about us. Well, Trump and Bernie Sanders. So they turned inward. No one was really looking for external collective strategies changing the world. There was this sense that any kind of redemption is only going to come out of your own efforts. Before and after the election, J.

But in your book, you vehemently disagree with his worldview. I heard a lot of self-blame and a lot of people who wanted to take responsibility for their own fate. There was a lot of soul searching and a lot of pain. Vance makes it seem like everyone just needs to be like him — a lone hero who escapes his difficult past on his own. Can the pain people feel be used as a bridge to bring people together?

And I saw signs of it. Families suffering from addiction were coming together and wondering, how can we change the ways that doctors prescribe medicine?

Or how can we challenge pharmaceutical companies to stop making these medications that get our children addicted?

Suppliers compete to provide better inputs that allow rivals to improve their products and services. New entrants and substitutes promote innovation and shake up existing competition, as long as they are not held back by high barriers to entry. Customers have the power to penalize rivals for poor products and services by taking their business elsewhere.

In healthy industries, the rivals do well as long as customers are satisfied. Competition takes place on two key levels: competition to win elections and competition to pass or block legislation. Our elections and our legislating are drowning in unhealthy win-lose competition: The duopoly wins and the public interest loses. This tragic outcome results from the structure of the politics industry. Robert James. Applying the Five Forces to politics reveals the key problems.

The rivals the Democrats and the Republicans have entrenched their duopoly so that they do well even if the customers they should serve citizens and voters are profoundly dissatisfied. The rivals differentiate themselves by dividing up voters according to ideological and partisan interests.

They target mutually exclusive groups of partisans and special interests in order to minimize overlap of core customers. This division enhances customer loyalty and reduces accountability. Each competes to reinforce the division by demonizing the other side instead of delivering practical solutions that would most likely require compromise.

And most customers have very limited influence—in large part because substitutes and new entrants have been effectively blocked. The barriers to entry facing new competitors such as a new political party or substitutes such as independents are colossal, and the duopoly cooperates to strengthen those barriers whenever possible. No major new political party has emerged since , when antislavery Whigs split off and formed the Republican Party.

The Progressive Party and the Reform Party were both serious efforts, but they managed to elect only a few candidates and were disbanded within a decade. Despite widespread and growing dissatisfaction with the existing parties, contemporary third parties continue to fare poorly, as do independents, even though more citizens identify as independent than as either Democrat or Republican. Together, they deliver poor outcomes for citizens as reliably as well-oiled machines in a factory.

To produce results that are in the public interest and to ensure accountability for those results, we need to redesign both the elections and the legislative machinery. It is not, however, an ideological divide per se that creates the greatest problem for the country. When members of Congress consider a bipartisan, compromise bill representing an effective solution to a major problem—unaffordable health care, a ballooning national debt, climate change—their top concern must be whether they will survive their next party primary if they vote yes.

If they think that supporting the compromise bill will doom their chances—and on our biggest issues, on both sides, it almost always will—then the rational incentive to get reelected dictates that they vote no. This makes it virtually impossible for the two sides to come together to solve challenging problems. Therefore, our political processes fail to deliver results that benefit the public interest.

We have plurality voting to thank for the lack of new competitors. When the Founding Fathers designed our system, they had few examples of democratic elections to look to, so they borrowed the concept from Britain: The winner is the person who gets the most votes, but not necessarily a majority.

Almost years later, it is clear that plurality voting is far from optimal. In any other large, attractive industry with this much customer dissatisfaction, new competitors would enter the market. Democrats effectively squashed his bid, worried that he could pull enough votes away from the eventual Democratic nominee to hand the election to Donald Trump. Republicans would have responded the same way to any challenger they thought might siphon significant votes from Trump.

In the politics industry competition exists not only to win elections but also to craft and pass or block legislation. Should a candidate make it through a party primary, win at least a plurality in the general election, and head to Washington, a partisan legislative process awaits. Congressional lawmaking takes place under a powerful set of party-created rules that prioritize the interests of the political-industrial complex. Committee chairs and membership are controlled by party leaders, and the House speaker, who controls the legislative agenda, has the power to single-handedly block a vote on almost any bill for any reason—even those supported by a majority of the House.

The end product of this partisan legislative assembly line is ideological, unbalanced, and unsustainable laws passed by one party over the opposition of the other. This was not always the case. Landmark legislation, such as civil rights and welfare reform, historically had bipartisan support; in recent years the few successful attempts at passing major legislation, such as the Affordable Care Act and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, have had none.

Today, bipartisan action occurs only in a crisis when both sides can get something they want and tacitly agree to add the bill to the national debt. With its stranglehold on the elections and legislative machinery, the politics industry takes the position that less competition is better for citizens the customers.

Reengineering elections with final-five voting would incentivize elected officials to serve the public interest and hold them accountable for doing so. Business leaders can recognize that this is irrational and indefensible even as they turn a blind eye to the role their own companies play, not only in passively perpetuating an unhealthy system but also in actively seeking to benefit from it.

This must change. Our collective mindset must shift, and business must take a deep look at its role in politics today. The tentacles of the political-industrial complex reach deep into our business community, and vice versa.

The intermingling of business and political interests over time can make it hard to distinguish whose interest is being served.

Current rules and customs empower corporations to participate heavily in politics in multiple ways, from lobbying and hiring former government officials to spending aimed at influencing elections and ballot initiatives.

Many executives believe that these practices are natural, necessary, and profitable. However, our research and interactions with business leaders across the country reveal indications of a shift in attitudes. As expectations grow for companies to operate with a corporate purpose that benefits all stakeholders, business leaders are beginning to grapple with hard questions:.

Political involvement can benefit companies in the short term; this is often described as single-bottom-line thinking. What does business engagement in politics look like today? What is its impact, and how does it align with company interests and values? Lobbying expenditures at the state level are also significant. Companies are often richly rewarded for their spending. As is often the case, much of this funding was channeled through industry associations and other third parties not subject to public reporting rules.

Corporate revenues soared, while more than , Americans died from opioid overdoses. Almost half of all registered lobbyists are former government officials. Many of them are employed by companies that hire them directly, as corporate staff, or indirectly, via lobbying firms.

And many more about half of the former government officials working as lobbyists have avoided registering as such, taking advantage of reporting loopholes put in place by the duopoly. The prevalence of this hiring practice, often called the revolving door, indicates just how effective companies find it. And government officials are well aware that they may have opportunities to work as well-compensated lobbyists after they leave public service, so they seek to build good relationships with both companies and lobbying firms while still in office, which may influence their policy perspectives.

The infiltration of business interests into government also works in the reverse, when former lobbyists and business leaders receive government appointments.

As of March , more than former lobbyists were working at all levels throughout the federal government. For example, a former coal industry lobbyist now heads the Environmental Protection Agency, and consistent with the corporate interests he championed as a lobbyist, he has moved to dramatically weaken two major climate change initiatives.

Spending has historically been channeled through regulated corporate political action committees PACs that are subject to spending limits and disclosure requirements. Today companies increasingly give to third-party groups, such as business and trade associations, which can spend unlimited amounts to influence elections without having to disclose their donors.

The U.