Why Voters Aren't Motivated by a Laundry List of Positions on Issues

By Joe Brewer and George Lakoff, The Rockridge Institute. Posted February 28, 2008.

There is a faulty view of voting behavior -- widely held by political strategists on the left -- that people already know what they want. All you have to do is conduct a poll to find out where they stand on the issues, then build a platform of positions that accords with the polls, and they will vote for you. Missing from this view is the importance of cognitive policy -- the ideas necessary to understand what the issues are and how they should be addressed. It is the ability to understand where a candidate is coming from that makes public support possible. Endorsement quickly follows when this understanding combines with a sense of shared values.

There are two kinds of policy: cognitive and material. Material policies are familiar: they outline what is to be done in the world. For example, the details of a health care plan, or a plan for getting out of Iraq. Material policies each have a cognitive dimension, often unconscious and implicit. This includes the ideas, frames, values, and modes of thought that inform the political understanding of the material policy. For example, consider the following questions: Do all Americans, just by their very existence, deserve health care, just as they deserve police protection? How does health care differ from health insurance? How these questions are answered plays a crucial role in what the material details of health care policy should be.

The Rockridge Institute is centrally concerned with the cognitive dimension of particular material policies and how the cognitive dimension -- the often-unstated ideas behind material policies -- shapes those policies. We are especially concerned with how change in those ideas point toward material policy changes.

But there is a deeper aspect to cognitive policy -- general cognitive policy: strategies for getting high-level ideas -- values, frames and principles -- to dominate public discourse and shape public understanding so that future material policies will be natural and win public support with ease.

Conservative think tanks, over the past three decades, have been extremely successful in pure cognitive policy, that is, in shaping public discourse to lead the public to accept basic conservative values and principles. That long-term investment has paid off in making material conservative policies seem natural, for example, massive tax cuts for the wealthy, the pre-emptive invasion of a country that hadn't threatened us, defunding such federal agencies as FEMA and the FDA, and government spying on US citizens.

The success of a policy depends on how it meets both cognitive and material criteria. Concentrating on material criteria alone can be counterproductive if a policy is either unpopular, or if it instills in the public's mind long-term values that contradict the aims of the policy.

Cognitive policy comes first. It is comprised of ideas, frames, and arguments. It forms the basis of what the issue is, how it is understood and what should be done about it. The material criterion is comprised of mechanisms for achieving the goals that emerge from the cognitive criteria.

This can be seen in the Endangered Species Act (ESA). It was based on the fundamental progressive values of empathy and responsibility: empathy with all forms of life, a sense of their inherent worth, and a responsibility for maintaining them and the habitats they depend on. The material policy had specific cognitive dimensions: (1) an understanding of the human activities that place species in jeopardy and of the role of habitat protection in species protection, (2) an understanding of how government agencies could play an effective role, and (3) a legal strategy based on the Constitution's interstate commerce clause to give the federal government not only the authority, but the responsibility, for protecting endangered species and their habitats.

Such moral and practical understandings guided the formulation of material policy -- the legal guidelines of the ESA. A material criterion that emerged through this understanding is that any land development project that places an endangered species in jeopardy must halt until the Department of Fish and Wildlife assesses the situation.

Over the years, the conservative think tanks working on cognitive policy have succeeded in getting into public discourse and the public mind a set of general cognitive policies that conflict with the Endangered Species Act:

1. The idea that nature is a resource for human use that habitats and species are such resources, and that human beings have a natural right to the use of such "natural resources."
2. The metaphor that markets are both natural and moral, and that government regulation is an unnatural and immoral interference with the operation of markets.
3. A special case of (2) is the idea that the potential for development of real property is a form of "wealth," that governmental regulations restricting development is a "taking" of that "wealth," and that such "takings" should be illegal or that property owners should be compensated for the loss of that "wealth." This is, of course, an extended metaphor, but one capable of being made into law.
4. Jobs are at odds with environmental protection. Inevitably, specific constraints on development can result in the lost of specific jobs, though overall habitat protection can lead to the creation of other, often more attractive, jobs. But conservatives rally political support by pointing to the specific jobs.
5. When habitats are in a single state, endangered species do not cross state lines, and hence do not fall under protection of the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution.

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