Psychologist’s analysis of 2013 election says ‘empathy’ key to Labour victory

Over and above the Labour Party’s subsequent track record in government, a new book suggests that Joseph Muscat’s ‘movement’ won the hearts of the electorate through a careful and considered strategy that valued social inclusion above all. 

In a book that is in fact entitled ‘Winning People’s Hearts’, psychologist Paul A. Bartolo runs the gamut of the 2013 election run-up narrative – familiar to us journalists, of course, but whose dramatic twists and more prosaic details may be fading in the public memory – giving a potted history of the events that led to the Labour Party’s electoral victory by a landslide 53% majority vote.

More importantly however, Bartolo’s findings suggest that this political triumph cannot be separated from the persistent raison d’être of the Labour Party’s political campaign that year. 

A focus on social inclusion of various groups – planned in such a way so as not to appear contrived, and taking full advantage of the Nationalist Party’s discomfort with dissent at the time – was, according to Bartolo, the deciding factor in securing Labour’s landslide victory, as epitomized by the slogan ‘Malta Taghna Lkoll’ (Malta For All) but also in real terms on the ground, as exemplified by the PL’s outreach to previously ‘neglected’ social groups such as the LGBTIQ community. 

By contrast, the Nationalist Party digging its heels in the name of ‘values’ on matters such as divorce fomented an exclusionist atmosphere, practically making good on the criticism that it’s being run by elitist ‘cliques’.

Meanwhile, Bartolo writes that while Alternattiva Demokratika’s campaign appeared to be pushing exactly the kind of social-democratic principles that would promote equality for all – with a special emphasis on minority groups – their outreach on the ground fell short of these intentions, with the green party failing to meet the electorate half way. 

While these observations are hardly groundbreaking in and of themselves, Bartolo’s research sheds an interesting light on the psychological dimension of these ‘electoral truisms’, bolstering his ‘inclusivity’ theory with relevant scholarship on the matter, and drawing a pertinent comparison between Joseph Muscat’s campaign and that of US President Barack Obama in the run-up to his own – and also ultimately (twice) victorious – electoral history. 

Taking it personally 

Bartolo lays down his theoretical groundwork by emphasising just how deep-rooted feelings of social inclusion and exclusion can be, and that the same emotions we feel in this regard in our personal lives could be transposed to how we relate to the political sphere. 

To illustrate this, he refers to the computerized research experiment ‘Cyberball’, which was originally tested in a real-life context.  

A participant was invited to an experiment but the real experiment took place while he or she was waiting to be called. Two other participants, who were in fact collaborators of the experimenter, joined the first participant in the waiting room. One of them picked up a ball from a shelf and started tossing it to the others. Eventually the tossing was either inclusive of the participant or excluded him or her. In the computerized version of the game, the participant is made to believe that the two other players are controlled by other human participants, when in fact, they would be pre-programmed to either include the participant or simply pass the ball between them – excluding the participant altogether.  

According to the ensuing research, “even a mere two to three minutes of ostracism in the Cyberball game produce strong negative feelings such as hurt, sadness, anger and general upset or distress”. Consolidating additional research, Bartolo explains how “even the brief experience of an averted eye gaze from a computerized confederate, rather than direct eye gaze, led participants to feel excluded and to experience the effects associated with ostracism: a lowered satisfaction of basic human needs, a lowered experience of how they compared to others, more negative moods, lower self-esteem, and enhanced temptations to act aggressively”. 

Bartolo goes on to suggest that these findings could easily be applied to the local political scene, which due to Malta’s size allows for close interaction between politicians and the electorate, and in which “one can expect myriad opportunities for people to enact and experience processes of inclusion and exclusion that can influence their voting”.

Given that one’s ‘social identity’ – as determined by various factors; some deliberately cultivated, others less so – becomes particularly pertinent when voting in general elections in Malta’s highly polarized political system, Bartolo homes in on the parameters of an individual’s identity as it relates to this mindset. 

A case study in empathy: Anglu Farrugia and Franco Debono

Fences mended: Joseph Muscat makes up with Anglu Farrugia, who had been sacked as party deputy leader

The idea of recognition is key, since voters would expect that a politician would acknowledge their needs in a very genuine and consistent way. But this isn’t just limited to the relationship between politicians and voters. The drama surrounding rebel PN backbencher Franco Debono and the Nationalist Party in general (and then Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi in particular), Bartolo suggests, is also pertinent. 

In December 2012, Debono brought down the government by voting against the budget. Declaring that with this act, Gonzi had relegated Debono to a “closed chapter”, Gonzi salted the wound by adding that, “Franco Debono is irrelevant”. 

Bartolo describes this as “the most hurting and ostracizing comment possible to one aspiring to share power”, which apart from only serving to stoke Debono’s fire, hardly helped to disprove the backbencher’s characterization of the PN leader in the eyes of the electorate. By contrast, Joseph Muscat’s own ‘calculated’ dismissal of then deputy leader Anglu Farrugia serves as an object lesson in how to handle a similar situation in a way that causes the minimum damage possible.

Having been forced to resign abruptly in December 2012, Farrugia was visibly hurt by the move, but Muscat’s public declarations on the matter were the polar opposite of Gonzi’s treatment of Franco Debono. Also, Muscat was neither combative nor dismissive of Farrugia’s hurt feelings, acknowledging them as an understandable human reaction, while crucially turning Gonzi’s misguided missive on its head by adding that Farrugia remained “a very relevant person who still has a lot to give to the Labour Party”. 

By exhibiting a “combination of cold calculated political strategy with a simultaneous understanding of the hurt suffered by Farrugia,” Bartolo suggests that Muscat wedded his political nous to that other crucial aspect of inclusivity – empathy, particularly of the kind “faced by leaders in politics and management where hard decisions are taken but with consideration of how to still show respect to the people concerned”. 

 A ‘movement’ for election season

In light of this, it feels significant that the PN’s own post-election report characterized Labour’s victory as stemming principally from a ‘human relations’ failure on the PN’s part. Bartolo flags up the influence of Barack Obama’s electoral campaign on Joseph Muscat’s own – one made both by the media at the time, as well as explicitly by Labour MP Leo Brincat – to discuss how issues of empathy, compassion and inclusivity were played out throughout the course of the 2013 campaign. 

Just as Obama played up his mixed-race origins (white mother, black father) to assure voters that his political mission would be one of pluralism and unity, so Muscat made it a point to mention that his family was non-partisan (Labourite father, Nationalist mother). But according to Bartolo, the comparison doesn’t stop there. Because of their shrewd decision to appeal to as many groups within society as possible – thereby eroding, however temporarily, any sharp political rifts – both Obama and Muscat succeeded in being ‘entrepreneurs of identity’ throughout the course of their respective campaigns. 

Obama publicly recognised that slaves helped build the White House, defended the right of Muslims to build a mosque in lower Manhattan and supported gay marriage; Muscat, meanwhile, appealed to various members of civil society to form a ‘movement of liberals and progressives’ which, however vaguely defined, did its work of giving the party a friendly and inclusive face – a natural home for disgruntled Nationalists and switchers, and one that had shed its retrograde and violent past. This would, of course, come to full fruition with the Labour Party’s most prominent civil liberties victory: the courting, and subsequent embrace, of the LGBTIQ community.

By comparison, Bartolo argues, the Nationalists were made to look stultifying and antiquated, not least because of Gonzi’s misreading of the public mood during the divorce referendum. Though their economic record was sound – not insignificant given they were in power during the global economic recession – Bartolo suggests that the PN’s attitude towards the electorate remained somewhat condescending. In other words, that it missed the crucial elements of empathy and inclusiveness. 

“The PN had consistently presented itself as an elite party with the right decision-making skills for Malta and distanced itself from the ‘shameful’ record of the PL, associated with violence and ‘disastrous’ national policy decisions, that could not be an alternative government,” Bartolo writes, adding that such a stand was rightly viewed as problematic even by non-partisan media commentators, who interpreted it as implying that those who vote Labour are by definition wrong-headed. 

“At the same time,” Bartolo writes, “the PL underlined the divisiveness of the PN and interpreted its ‘elite’ branding as tribal, non-egalitarian and anachronistic”.