Cowley Philip - Sex, Lies and Politics: the Secret Influences That Drive our Political Choices

Philip Cowley and Robert Ford

E lections are important. But that isnt the only reason some people spend their lives studying them.

Elections are also, at least some of the time, interesting, fun, shocking and exciting. Yet thats not why you should study them either.

Elections are always revealing. Those willing to dig into the detail of elections and voting will find human nature, in all its dizzying variety, contained within. That is why they are worth studying.

This is a book about elections not as a means of choosing governments but as a means to learn about the human condition, and about what makes us tick. If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, claimed Mark Twain, we need only observe it at election time and the only thing that has changed since Twain wrote that in 1885 is that the more we learn about elections, the more we realise how accurate he was.

Like all things involving human beings, the reality of elections is often a long way from the myth and it isnt always uplifting. It can, for example, be a bit depressing to learn that candidates with surnames that begin with a letter that comes early on in the alphabet have an advantage over those lower down. Or that better-looking candidates will out-perform the ugly ones. Or that both Leave and Remain voters think Postman Pat is one of their own. All this is true, and is discussed in what follows.

But at the same time it is uplifting to discover that, for all the criticism voters can get (and give), they havent completely lost faith in politics despite all its flaws; they respond fairly coherently to what governments do, even if they dont know the details; most of them will get off the couch and vote if only someone asks them nicely; and they really do try their best, most of the time, to make sense of a difficult and confusing political world and vote in accordance with what they value most.

The genesis of this book lies in two earlier volumes, Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box and its imaginatively named follow-up, More Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box. Both books were well received and sold well enough. (By this we mean they sold well for books on how people vote, not that J. K. Rowling became unduly concerned for her sales by the appearance of a rival.) This volume contains a combination of chapters from the two earlier books revised, where appropriate along with many entirely new chapters, largely, but not exclusively, dealing with Brexit. Indeed, so much has changed since the first book came out in 2014 that even some of the revised chapters have been so thoroughly altered that they are essentially new. Whatever ones views on Brexit, both the referendum and events since have been full of what educators call teachable moments, things that perfectly illustrate how people, on all sides, are not quite as rational or all-knowing as they like to think they are.