“Crisis Tribes”: Using Societal Challenges to Understand Public Political Discourse and Voting
2024 is the year of elections. Around the world, 40% of people are headed to polling stations to vote on their political representation. This offers a huge moment both for the public to express and give mandate for changes they want to see, and for broader reflection on where democracy has succeeded and underperformed, and signs of where it is heading next.
In Europe, in addition to national-level elections, one of the biggest moments of the year of democracy is the European elections in June. This sees EU citizens across all 27 member states choose who will represent them as Members of European Parliament (MEPs). European elections occur every 5 years, making this a significant shaping moment for the trajectory of Europe’s legal, budgetary, and trade approach in the remainder of this critical decade.
This bumper year for elections comes at a time of great change and uncertainty. The world is changing and new pressures to the way we organise our lives, communities, and societies are growing ever greater and more acute. Key commitment milestones, like 2030, are coming closer into view every day. Within this, there are clear signs that people feel deeply affected by major challenges, for example, related to health, economics, climate and environment, security and geopolitics, equality and justice.
The political discourses, narratives, and traditions that have evolved, emerged, or grown over the last centuries are being fundamentally challenged. After all, no creed of political party has yet managed to govern in a manner which has produced sufficient responses or approaches to the societal challenges we are facing.
This introduces a key question that 2024’s high concentration of elections brings into focus: is the way we look at, gauge, and understand the public’s views and sentiments suited for the time we are in? Do we need additional ways to better understand and anticipate how the public will vote for political representatives and react to proposed policy?
Beyond the Left-Right spectrum?
The Left-Right political spectrum is possibly the most dominant way of classifying political parties, actors, and viewpoints in order to compare and differentiate them according to how progressive or conservative they are.
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ first originated in how different political parties in the French Assembly physically sat during the French Revolution. The terms evolved and spread, solidifying into political and public discourse throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Still today, this physical differentiation spectrum is seen in many chambers of political representatives.
However, like any framework, it is a simplification and generalisation of reality. There are many aspects of political views and traditions which do not easily — or at all — fall into the wings of left and right. For example, populism, nationalism, liberalism, feminism, and other philosophies, traditions, and movements are present in varying ways on both the right and left.
Furthermore, in recent years we have seen multiple examples of voters flipping rapidly from one side of the spectrum to the other. This would typically be unexpected as it is often assumed someone’s political identity is resolvedly solidified somewhere on the political spectrum and would only shift gradually, not suddenly and seemingly idiosyncratically between consecutive elections. However, key issues or challenges have acted as ‘overrides’ to this assumption. To give one example, in Britain, one trend has seen many working class voters in historically solidly left-voting regions flip rapidly to the right due to a shift in where their identity and concerns related to key challenges (e.g. job and economic security, culture and identity, migration, Brexit) have been most emphasised.
This is a sign that the left-right spectrum does not fully capture or explain some of the shifts we are seeing in public opinion and voting behaviour over the last few decades. Specific kinds of pressing issues — often with a strong link to people’s concerns over the trajectory of society into the future — are acting as overrides as people’s sense of urgency for action on them grows. This suggests we need a new perspective to understanding public sentiments as our political and societal reality has changed.
Why not look at public viewpoints from the perspective of the very societal challenges we now face?
At the start of this year, the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) released the analysis of a survey they conducted across nine EU member states (accounting for 75% of the EU’s population) — Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Romania, Portugal, and Estonia — and two non-EU European states, Great Britain and Switzerland. The primary lens of analysis was to look at viewpoints in European politics according to the major simultaneous crises Europe has been grappling with in recent times and will continue to do so. This produced some interesting results.
In their survey, ECFR’s analysis reveals the scale of voter blocs according to five key crises Europe faces which are profoundly affecting how people perceive their present and future. These five crises are: climate change, the war in Ukraine, Covid-19, immigration, and global economic turmoil.
Taking this lens is agnostic to voters’ left-right positioning or view on how to tackle the crisis, and instead powerfully shows the landscape in a radically different way. This helps make sense of one reason voters and their support may shift. Furthermore, if we consider the implications of this, it opens up many possibilities.
For example, each of these groups will contain people with highly varying viewpoints on what is a desirable solution to the crisis and how to achieve that. Yet they are all united by seeing it as highly significant to the future, thus bringing possibilities for opening up complex, challenging dialogues and the potential for collaboration and overcoming blocks to action. Talking with people who hold very different viewpoints can be very challenging but also very constructive as common understanding or even common ground can emerge. Recently, the space for these kinds of difficult conversations has almost disappeared, instead reducing dialogue to reductive, unconstructive arguments.
This ultimately could form one place that the beginnings of routes forward could be found while also contributing to a strengthening of dialogue across divides which is key to a strong, healthy, and innovative democratic environment. As ECFR says,
‘We think of these five groups as the different ‘crisis tribes’ of Europe. Like all tribes, they share a common origin story. They share forms of language and sensibilities. They have totems and leaders, and they have internal fractures.’
Breaking down Europe’s five crisis constituencies
Diving deeper, we also see some interesting variations in how different demographics’ perceptions of the future are impacted by these crises.
Some crises — such as Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine — relate to very present, current challenges which voters in specific countries feel more acutely than others. And other unexpected points emerge which also reveal interesting perceptions about the interconnections of these crises; for example, Poland is significantly concerned about the war in Ukraine yet far far less about immigration, despite them seeing a large influx of Ukrainian refugees.
Separating voter analysis from only geographical borders also brings to mind a new metaphorical map of Europe. ECFR offers something provoking this by, for example, suggesting the capital cities of each of these crisis tribes (based on which country has the largest percentage of people in that tribe).
What are the opportunities of seeing public political viewpoints through the lens of societal challenges?
As we look ahead at 2024’s many elections and beyond, there are various ways we can use, apply, and seek further insights into what this begins to suggest and reveal. Here are four initial, non-exclusive thoughts to start with:
- Using societal challenges as a new lens for public polling and voter analysis. This can supplement perspectives, such as the left-right political spectrum and show the power that different voter groups can have if they shift their support — either due to a conscious strategy or unconscious change in where they feel represented. If used openly (as in, if media analysis and dialogue explicitly refers to societal challenges as a premise for understanding perceptions, behaviour, and change in society), this can also raise key societal challenges into public discourse in a different manner.
- Basing electoral debates around societal challenges. Currently, key issues (e.g. health, policing, economy) link to crises but neglect to truly link them to the future to enable a more nuanced, productive debate around their interconnections and the trajectory of a country or region. Directly debating the challenges the public feel are most impacting their future could be powerful.
- Exploring how societal challenges can be used in citizen engagement initiatives. By gathering people who are united in equal concern over a challenge yet have diverse or even opposing views regarding it, we open a space for interesting, constructive, and challenging conversations where new insights and ideas may emerge. Of course, there are some existing examples related to this but further exploration specifically on complex, polarising issues could be valuable to both the societal challenges they would centre on and to broader democracy.
- Enabling further connections between civil society across countries. By revealing how key challenges are seen across countries and demographics, there is an opportunity to form new and unexpected connections and coalitions to encourage action and change. Many strong networks already exist but a new lens to this could provide new ground and be another site for bringing together actors with different views on an issue.
Of course, these don’t aim to be comprehensive, more to provoke reflection on how, as the times we live in change and people’s viewpoints of politics and the future are shaped by different dynamics, new questions and opportunities arise.
In a year with so many elections, taking a broader view to make sense of potential (and subsequently chosen) shifts has its advantages. Seen from this view, voter ‘crisis tribes’ become powerful blocs of opinion, narratives, tension, and convening. This opens the potential for disagreement, conflict over narratives and symbols within these tribes, and unexpected election outcomes. But it also brings the opportunity for influencing public discourse, election outcomes (if this collectivity is channelled in various ways), and even constructive collaboration. If voters within a crisis tribe realised the influence they could have collectively, there would be potential for great dialogue and movement as we move into the future.
