Politics - now it's personal
At a time when Hong Kong is fretting about its lack of political choice, analysts in the west are wringing their hands about how people use it. Not so long ago, westerners voted strictly according to their role and place in society: a middle-aged lawyer was almost certainly further to the right than an unemployed single mother.
No more. Knowing what a person earns, their level of education, age and gender tells you almost nothing about their political views. Give them a personality test, on the other hand, and you have a pretty good idea who they will vote for in the next election. The change is what some psychologists call the 'personalisation of politics'.
Notions about personality are fairly universal, at least as far as the 'big five' traits are concerned. These describe how extroverted, friendly, conscientious, emotionally stable and open to experience a person is. But this mental shorthand is condensed still further when applied to complex situations and restricted choices, as in politics.
Voters in western democracies now tend to boil down their opinions about politicians to two essential traits: energy and friendliness.
People do not believe that a politician's traits are direct predictors of his or her ability and future performance. When asked, they claim to vote along ideological lines. But, actually, research suggests that they rely on character. This is not because personality traits are more important to them than values; they are not. But, they fall back on character because ideological distinctions have blurred and because those differences that remain only emerge through a detailed knowledge of a candidate's world view in changing, complex situations.
So, voters have become intuitive psychologists. They take traits as signposts for the combination of off-screen people skills, emotional intelligence, technical abilities and underlying values on which they want to base their judgments but, realistically, cannot. Character 'stands for' that knowledge. Hence, today's successful politicians have learned the 'language of personality'. They try to convey the right trait at the right time. Spin doctors conjure the appropriate scenarios through which they can do so. Hence, the slickness of a Tony Blair against the bumbling of a Tung Chee-hwa.
To some extent, this indirect method of judging politicians works. For example, relatively speaking, energy is valued above friendliness on the political right and friendliness above energy on the left. Energy is linked to social order and to the values of power and security. Friendliness is linked to social justice and to the values of universalism and benevolence.
Part of the personalisation phenomenon comes down to a simple matching process. The closer the match between a voter's own character and the personality they perceive in the politician, the more they conclude that similar values underlie those similar traits. They want to personally like and trust their leader; this happens most readily when he or she is perceived as just like them.
Character has always been important in political leadership, and people have always seen their leaders in sharply reduced, polarised terms. But leadership once resided in role, in actions and their symbols. Perhaps one of Mr Tung's mistakes was to imagine that it still does. Or, should I say, that it still does entirely.
Hong Kong appears to lie somewhere between that world and the individualistic west, where leadership is perceived less in what a person does or symbolises than in what he or she is like and what that implies about his or her values.
Acting Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen may represent just the right balance.
Jean Nicol is a psychologist specialising in issues of cultural identity and change in an era of globalisation
