Holistic Demographics and the Future of Politics

Who you think you are matters more than who they think you are

We’ve all checked our fair share of check boxes. Ethnicity. Race. Gender. Age range. Swearing that we’ve read the 30 pages of plain language legal documents that came with our video game or software. If you’ve managed to avoid ever checking one (doubtful — we do so love checking stuff), you’ve still probably seen these tidy little traps on applications documents for educational institutions, surveys on the internet, or lawn signs come election time. We like to think we’re describing ourselves, but really what we’re doing is being tricked.

If you’ve put pen (or pencil, can’t let our #2 HB leaded friends down) to the area of paper defined by the sharp, clean edges of one of those little checkboxes or clicked down on that mouse button with the cursor hovering in that blank space, then you’ve been swindled. They didn’t take money from you, or your reputation, or even your identity. You got robbed of your self-sovereignty and you probably didn’t even know it.

For those of you who already have my direction figured out, feel free to skip ahead a paragraph or two. For the rest of you going, “huh,” and scratching your proverbial noggin, don’t stress. If you haven’t perceived what’s actually going on yet, it’s likely because nobody ever taught you how to ‘frame’ concepts. By looking at a concept (it can be anything from a mascot to a complex closed system) from a perspective other than our own we can often learn about it in ways we hadn’t considered before.

Framing is important because it changes the reality (which we’ll define as the combination of subjective and objective contexts surrounding and influencing/influenced by a thing) of what those little checkboxes on demographics forms are really about. When you stop looking at them as anything other than what they are — a series of categories for self-selection based on binary gender concepts, skin colors, and ethnonationalism — you can examine what this does in terms of information exchange dynamics and then start to extrapolate on some intriguing and (let’s be honest) neat possibilities and interactions.

So, what next? I’d like to prevent this from becoming a clinic on critical examination, so I’m going to do a quick walk through to get us to our point faster. I’ll outline the basic nature of what we’re examining, ask questions, let you fill in the blanks. You understand that checkboxes for demographic information are going to be categorical (who made them? how were the categories generated? where are they typically used? voluntary? required?), instruments for self-selection (why are you selecting? does it accurately reflect who you are when you think of yourself? is there an option to skip or not disclose?), meant to generate demographics information (why? what will the information be used for? what information is being collected? how does it relate to the collecting entity’s interests?) about a target population (who is that population? what can they offer to the collecting entity?).

Now that you’ve got the basics out of the way, feast your mental chompers on this: for politicos, how credible is information gleaned from documents that force people to box themselves into broad, often arbitrary, categories of personal definition and identification? How useful is it if you’ve got a large subset of your set that identifies in a way that’s not on your handy form that’s been passed down and patched up since the 1920s? Who are you going to successfully reach if, after gathering your data, you’re addressing subgroups the wrong way?

And now, at long last, I’ve come to my point: When we define classifications for a group we’re studying, it’s best to use the terms of the subject group. If we label them, we risk losing vast quantities of useful information about that group, its workings, its communications, its goals, and its design. When we define people as we want them to be, rather than how they see themselves, we generate data that is not necessarily credible and will not likely result in an accurate or objective analysis.

Poor methodology hurts in the long run, too. Your strategies? Based on the bad data. Your platform? Again, based on the bad data. Your advisors and allies? Chosen based on bad data. Starting to see a trend here? The 2012 Romney Presidential campaign is a great study on the cascade effects that can happen if you start from a place where you assume the objective landscape is much different than it actually is.

So, pundits, wonks, and pollsters — wake up! Improve your information-gathering strategies. Find some unique ways to allow your respondents to start identifying themselves. Sure, it means a more rigorous systemic design for your collection instruments or it might mean some additional work after collection, but you’ll be accurate.