Political parties in the US and UK apparently used to be broad coalitions but have become (at least on the right) ideological sects. And that certainly seem confirmed in the nominations presented yesterday for the UK Prime Minister – a position which has become vacant due to Boris Johnson’s long-awaited resignation.
As readers know, I try to avoid comment on so-called “current affairs” but it is simply worth noting that the extremist faction of the Conservative party (very much encouraged by Johnson) has now gained such a powerful hold on the party that all eight candidates who yesterday secured nominations are devotees of the “small state” idea.
More in Common is an interesting organisation with teams in France, Germany, UK and US which develop communication strategies that can help unite people across the lines of division and strengthen people’s sense of belonging and common identity. One of their recent reports divided the UK population into the following 7 groups (with the percentage indicating the importance of the group)
-Progressive Activists (13%): A powerful and vocal group for whom politics is at the core of their identity, and who seek to correct the historic marginalisation of groups based on their race, gender, sexuality, wealth and other forms of privilege. They are politically-engaged, critical, opinionated, frustrated, cosmopolitan and environmentally conscious.
–Civic Pragmatists (13%): A group that cares about others, at home or abroad, and who are turned off by the divisiveness of politics. They are charitable, concerned, exhausted, community-minded, open to compromise, and socially liberal.
–Disengaged Battlers (12%): A group that feels that they are just keeping their heads above water, and who blame the system for its unfairness. They are tolerant, insecure, disillusioned, disconnected, overlooked, and socially liberal.
–Established Liberals (12%): A group that has done well and means well towards others, but also sees a lot of good in the status quo. They are comfortable, privileged, cosmopolitan, trusting, confident, and pro-market.
–Loyal Nationals (18%): A group that is anxious about the threats facing Britain and facing themselves. They are proud, patriotic, tribal, protective, threatened, aggrieved, and frustrated about the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
–Disengaged Traditionalists (17%): A group that values a well-ordered society and takes pride in hard work, and wants strong leadership that keeps people in line. They are self-reliant, ordered, patriotic, tough-minded, suspicious, and disconnected.
–Backbone Conservatives (15%): A group who are proud of their country, optimistic about Britain’s future outside of Europe, and who keenly follow the news, mostly via traditional media sources. They are nostalgic, patriotic, stalwart, proud, secure, confident, and relatively engaged with politics
Each of these groups tells – or frames - a story of the world as it understands it. And human beings have told stories since Adam and Eve. But it’s the modern world – and the advertising of the past century – which has really made us aware of this. And it was sociologist Erving Goffman’s “Frame Analysis” of 1974 which introduced the term. It was a decade later before I heard the term for the first time – when I was taking the UK’s very first course in Policy Analysis. I can still remember the impact it made. But somehow its secret was guarded in the halls of marketing power for another couple of decades and it was 2004 before “Don’t Think of an Elephant – know your values and frame the debate” by George Lakoff made an appearance - Lakoff was an undergraduate at MIT under Noam Chomsky, and was already well established as a linguist by the mid-1970s when he was one of a handful of pioneering academics establishing the foundations of cognitive linguistics, a discipline that brought an understanding of the brain to bear on theories of language and meaning. In cognitive linguistics, the meaning of a word is not just a simple dictionary definition but a cognitive frame associated with a particular word in a particular language community. Other mechanisms, such as metaphor and prototyping, can also be involved
Framing Public Issues (US Frameworks Institute 2006) quickly followed. But it is Finding Frames – new ways to engage the UK public (2010) which I find the most satisfactory account of the meaning and development of Frame Analysis. It’s a 120-page report issued by Oxfam and the Department for International Development on how a more effective marketing strategy could be used by charities in their funding appeals to the general public. And it’s linked to another report Common Cause – the case for working with our cultural values (2010). The second chapter of “Finding Frames” looks at social values -
Perhaps the best known and certainly the most widely applied and validated of the values frameworks, comprises 56 principal value ‘labels’ that can be boiled down into just ten value types (Schwartz and Boehnke 2004) which can best be understood in terms of the degree to which they are compatible or in conflict with one another. People find it difficult to hold certain combinations of values at the same time, whereas other combinations are relatively easy to hold simultaneously - eg people who rate wealth and status as important tend not to rate social justice and living in a world at peace as equally important.
Storytelling – bewitching the modern mind by Frenchman Christian Salmon (2014) puts the issue in the wider political context it needs.
The more recent Framers – human advantage in an age of technology and turmoil K Cukier, F de Vericourt and V Schonberger (2021) initially disappointed me since it didn’t seem to offer the analytical elements I had been expecting. It seemed simply to string a series of stories together in a rather undisciplined way. And then, as I flicked to the middle of the book, I alighted on a story which made me realise that the story-telling was in fact a far more powerful method than the analytical approach. As the intro puts it -
Framing is so fundamental to human cognition that even those who study the workings of the mind rarely focused on it until relatively recently. Its importance was overshadowed by other mental capabilities, such as sensing and memory. But as people have become more aware of the need to improve their decision-making, the role of frames as fundamental to choosing and acting well has moved from the background to center stage.
