Team efforts

Adam Radwanski's post on politics as a team sport is definitely worth a look. But it should also be asked whether the way politics are treated in the media exacerbates the rooting-for-laundry mentality.

When it comes to reporting on the views of voters generally, we see constant polls about who supports who for the moment. But only a small fraction of that amount of attention seems to be dedicated to figuring out why respondents prefer the party that they do. And it's a rare poll indeed that raises even the issue of second-party preferences and likelihood of a respondent's vote switching, let alone the reasons why such a switch might or might not take place.

And coverage of the political scene may raise similar issues. Part of the problem likely lies in the false balance issue: where stories are designed to simply present the position of two opposed parties rather than to evaluate the strength of those positions (much less the possibility of different ones not represented by the parties named), it's easy for readers to find something which supports the team mentality and move on.

That in turn rewards parties who value message consistency over accuracy and substantive content by reinforcing their positions, while punishing those who have internal differences of opinion which reflect the process of actually deliberating to reach better results. Which means that parties are left encouraging their supporters to be parrots rather than thinkers, focusing on spreading the core message rather than raising questions about what the party ought to be doing.

Of course, the same problem may exist to an even greater extent outside media channels. And it's entirely possible that peer-to-peer persuasion (via party talking points) will only become more significant in at least the near future as citizens tune out the he-said, she-said media battle. Which raises the question of whether those covering politics will see value in offering up information which pushes observers to examine their underlying assumptions, or whether they'll continue to reinforce the team-based model.