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There is a common conception that floating voters are diabolically irrational; that they are so ignorant of policy that they wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait… and then simply plump for a candidate or party for superficial reasons.

There is some research from the US that floating voters are indeed the most irrational (that is, vote for the most superficial reasons). But there is also research which shows that they are more sensitive to policy detail than partisan voters. So a hung jury there.

I think it unlikely all floating voters are ‘irrational’. I think rather that many of them are ‘mulling’ over what is a very complicated choice: there are policy trade-offs, tactical-voting trade-offs and personality/character trade-offs. Not to mention trade-offs between these three sets of issues, as well as trade-offs around how long a party has been in power and whether this is healthy from a governance point of view.

In other words, voting is bloody complicated if you are not ideologically aligned. Waiting and mulling is a way of letting your automatic brain whir through all the possibilities and permutations below the surface of consciousness. The ‘hunch’ a floating voter may end up with as a result of this process can be a highly nuanced and intelligent decision. It’s just that the decision wasn’t a consciously controlled one. So what?

I’ve been reading Philip Blond’s Red Tory. It’s a bit disappointing to be honest. I liked Blond’s critique of state and private sector monopolism when it first appeared in Prospect, but there isn’t much more meat added to the bones in the book.

It’s not the implicit homophobia (implicit by same-sex relationships never being mentioned). Nor the implicit women-should-stay-at-home-and-raise-kids views. I knew to expect all that. It’s the sheer bloody one-sidedness of the polemic.

Take his argument that the welfare state has (disastrously) eroded the ‘little platoons’ of civic society that used to provide welfare. We can all agree that the welfare state has in some ways gone wrong. But to present civic society as the flawless solution is naive. A cursory read of Sennett’s Respect would have informed Blond of the potentially demeaning nature of charity dispensed by civic society, which was one of the reasons for getting the more neutral state to dispense welfare after WWII. Charity can be patronising, judgemental and patchy.

Then take mutualism on the part of the working classes (basically, looking out for one another through joining groups and pooling assets). Sure, who would argue against a return to more of that. But the problem in the past was that mutual forms of  organisation, welfare provision and asset-holding were the exception, not the rule. The state took over welfare provision not to destroy mutualism (although this might have been a side effect), but to make up for its rarity.

Finally, take the family. Blond is adamant that the decline of marriage causes broken homes and not the other way round. Let’s let that ride. My problem is that he doesn’t even consider evidence to the contrary of his theses in this area. Evidence like Demos’ report on character which showed no correlation between the acquisition of character capabilities and a child’s parents being married. Nor does he consider any of the downsides of a divorce rate of 10% (which is what it was prior to the 1960s, Blond’s preferred epoch). For example, unhappy spouses trapped in awful marriages; kids screwed up by constant arguing in the home.

In general there is a wilful lack of attention to anything that challenges Blond’s vision of the good society. This seriously undermines the book for me, which showcases Blond’s ambition to win power and influence, rather than his skills as a researcher and thinker. And I am still presuming he has some of the latter, although after reading the book I am not so sure.

One thing you’ll notice if you spend any time at the intersection of policy and social science is that ‘evidence based policy’ leads not only to distortions of evidence, but a focus on process rather than people. Take social workers. They have been given ever more complex form-filling processes in order to stop failures in monitoring and care. But as Madeleine Bunting said yesterday, failures will probably always occur, and anyway, the best way to stop them is not more form filling but a return to psychological astuteness and careful face-to-face interaction. The mistake is to think that because an extremely devious abuser can fool a social worker, we should retreat from fallible human contact to infallible process. This is a mistake because process is infallible as process, but is far more fallible as effective monitoring and care than old-fashioned face-to-face interaction.

With social workers the drive to process is created by a desire for infallibility. But there is a general drive to process across many professions and organisations (including, I have to say, the RSA) which comes out of the principles of social science. If some positive change is down to enthusiastic workers, a good leader, and an ethos of excellence this would be disregarded by social scientists as possessing no ‘external validity’ – that is, no validity outside the idiosyncracies of the lucky hotspot of comity and productivity. So the focus always shifts to process – what generalisable set of manipulations of variables and factors can we pick out and thus roll out more widely.

I am beginning to think that this is a wrong-headed and even pernicious mindset. Precisely what are needed to make positive changes in practices and organisations are what social science can’t measure: great people, in a happy and productive environment with an elusive ethos of excellence. These are what make most things work well.

This would have been obvious to an old-fashioned ‘paternalistic’ firm, or a medievel guild. But in the modern world, especially at the intersection of policy and social science, it is anathema. The story we tell about what makes things work is a story driven by an ever expanding army of consultants and technocrats. Yet the story is a falsehood we would do well to run out of town.

I’m currently waiting on the data to be analysed from some research workshops I’ve carried out recently. The workshops were on decision-making and the brain. I worked with quite a large group of people (who, now the data is in, I can say were a fantastic bunch), and we went through some simple rules on decision-making that come out of a better understanding of the automatic and social nature of how our brains work. I’m not going to second guess the data, but let me just say what the point of the research was.

There is a lot of talk in policy circles about changing behaviour – the wonks have got hold of ideas from behavioural economics, neuroscience and social psychology, and by golly do they want to use them. There has been a collective realisation across civil service/think-tank land (apart from HM Treasury) that everyone has been working with a far too narrow conception of what motivates and influences behaviour. Some in wonk land go further, thinking they have their hands on a new ‘model’ of behaviour they take to arise from these disciplines. This model, they hold, will replace the old one of  ’rational man’.

Herein lie several dangers. First, it is not clear there is anything like a ‘new model’ of behaviour, rather an emerging picture that is more accurate but still contested and limited. Second, there is a feeling amongst some in wonk land that they can now get people to do all the things they couldn’t before because they have ‘the right model now’. This is a classic psychological ploy – over-emphasise the things that give you control over a situation because that way you don’t have to face the hard truth that you have much less control than you would like. Third, all the knowledge is happily kept on the side of the wonks. They want to do loads of clever stuff to ‘nudge’ you into doing what they want. So the ‘new model’ is quite paternalistic.

What we tried to do with our research was to give some of the knowledge that the wonks have to people themselves. Would this empower them to be better informed about their own behaviour? Would they find the knowledge ‘common sense’? Watch this space to find out very shortly.