How to Think About Politics: In Favour of Studied Ignorance

Or: taking a step back

This is the first in an occasional series of posts I’m planning, sharing some of my thoughts on how best to think about electoral politics.

I’ve worked in and around politics for just over a decade, and like to think I have a reasonable understanding of it. Yet I find that many otherwise smart people seem clueless about how politics works in practice- even more bafflingly, many of these people seemingly spend hours of their week talking about politics!

This series aims to share some of the heuristics and tools I try to use for thinking about electoral politics, in the hope that they will be useful for others.

While I’m broadly a market liberal on the right of the political spectrum, some of the people I most respect for understanding how politics functions are on the left. I hope that, whatever your politics, you’re able to find something of use in these posts.

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And so Mr Toad has poot-pooted off into the distance, and Liz Truss has been appointed the 56th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

She steps immediately into an energy crisis, with bills for households and businesses forecast to continue to rise over the winter. For all her talk of growing the economy, it’s by far the most pressing issue in her in-tray, and her response will set the mood music for her premiership.

So it’s not hard to understand why there’s been such breathless coverage in most media outlets, with briefing after briefing written up about what the Prime Minister will do to deal with the crisis. The only problem is that loads of it is wrong.

If you were to read all the coverage over the last few days, it still would not be entirely clear what is due to be announced. The level that bills will be capped at; how long the cap will last; the cost; and the way it will be financed all differ depending on which article you read. Couple that with the contents of the hundreds of different debates and threads on Twitter, and it’s pretty hard to understand exactly what is about to happen.

This means that someone who has spent ages reading up and arguing about the announcement is functionally in no better place than someone who just waits for it to take place and reads up on it then.

This unveils a weird paradox in politics, in that sometimes the more you read, the less well informed you get. If anything, reading up partial information in advance makes it harder to appreciate or understand the reaction of a normal voter to a policy announcement.

This is phenomenon that repeats itself over and over again. If you had spent the period 2017-2020 paying attention to every single moment of the Brexit negotiations, you would have found yourself more confused than the person that waited for the final outcome (or at least the outcome of each stage of the negotiations).

This means that If you want to understand what is going on in policy as a spectator, you’re often better off practicing studied ignorance by taking a step back and waiting for an announcement to happen. This will be more productive, less confusing and help you tune into the actual political effect of an announcement among the wider electorate, rather than the noise generated by the seemingly well-informed.

There are caveats to this. If you’re an active participant in politics, staying at the cutting edge so as to influence, or campaign against, policy is obviously important. An energy executive would be failing in their job if they tuned out of politics this week.

Nor is this a call for practicing actual ignorance, or just taking a policy announcement at face value and trusting Government. In my view, its easier to avoid getting wrong-footed with a critique if you have all the details to hand.

Instead, by following studied ignorance, you can keep yourself informed without further facilitating the self-sustaining rigmarole of briefing and counter briefing that defines much of 21st Century politics. I wish I could say I stuck to this principle 100%.

Next time you hear of a big complicated policy announcement coming down the line, don’t be afraid to take a step back and wait for it to happen before digging into the details. By practicing studied ignorance, you might just end up more informed.