2024: votes and vibes
A synthesis of my writing this year to review the state of public opinion
We left 2023 knowing that 2024 would be a big electoral year. An estimated half of mankind within 76 countries had the chance to vote in national elections, thought to be the largest proportion in history. What happened, and what do election results and polling tell us about public opinion?
Votes
There is a difference between votes and free votes. According to Freedom House, the number of countries where freedom has declined has exceeded the number where it has improved in each of the past 18 years. Predictably, 2024 saw several sham elections. In Russia, Vladimir Putin triumphed with 88% of the vote while presidents Tebbourne and Kagame won in Rwanda and Algeria respectively with 95% and 99%.
Incumbents were more likely than not to lose in democracies — notably in Britain, France, the United States and South Korea — or were pegged back significantly — for example, in India, South Africa and Bangladesh. This year, governments fell apart in France and Germany or proved impossible to establish in the Netherlands.
Survival, let alone performance, has been difficult enough as established political parties have struggled to navigate complex territory and challenges from political ‘entrepreneurs’ on the left and the right. Two party hegemonies have been replaced by multi-party contests.
Even where electoral systems skew results — Labour won a ‘Ming vase’ landslide in Britain with a measly 34% of the vote — governments have faced the twin forces of fragmentation and voter impatience at stuttering economic performance. This has been amplified by a peculiar mix of a hyper-active attention economy and an easily distracted and inattentive population (‘brain rot’ was identified as Word of the Year 2024 by the Oxford dictionary!).
The State gets bigger in liberal democracies in response to wicked policy challenges including changing demography and climate, geopolitical fragility and a need to find stubbornly elusive economic growth and tackle growing inequality. But it seems to find getting things done ever harder.
In 2017, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker suggested:
“We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have
done it.”
The modern-day version is probably more pessimistic:
“We think we know what to do, but certainly don’t know how to get it done nor
how to get re-elected”.
A similar sentiment was evident in Sir Keir Starmer’s recent critique of description of a segment of the British civil service which he described as being “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”. All the talk was of Labour quickly becoming frustrated at the lack of levers to pull in office, and of cultural resistance (shades of Dominic Cumming’s ‘blob’).
Persistent populism
Failure to deliver feeds populism which itself feeds failure because it over-simplifies and exaggerates diagnosis and solutions. It avoids the necessarily messy and inconvenient business of real politics (although populism does, at least, possess the occasional quality of addressing issues that matter to people).
While nothing new, populism has been a “connective thread” across this year’s elections, according to Ipsos. As a backdrop to this year’s elections, Ipsos’ ‘broken system index’ ticked upwards across the board (‘country average’ in the graphic below). Populism is driven by distrust of established elites and a strong sense among large sections of the public that “the system is broken”.
In late 2023, three in five (57%) people across 28 countries felt the system in their country was broken, and 63% said their country needs “a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful”.
While most voters, and a growing group of non-voters, are not acquainted with the workings of political systems, they judge them by outcomes and are dissatisfied with what they see and experience. In Britain, polls have found record levels of dissatisfaction with the NHS and entrenched negativity about public services. These sentiments reflect realities and are not mere perceptions (‘false consciousness’ and the public just not ‘getting it’ is a convenient but inaccurate truth).
Vibes
During 2024, policy wonks and academics continued to debate the health of ‘deliverism’ — the idea that getting things done rewards incumbents. In their 2022 paper, Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams and Harry Hanbury used Bidenomics as a case study to illustrate the often-weak relationship between policy outcomes and public recognition of success.
The authors called for a less “economistic approach”, suggesting that delivery is insufficient on its own. Instead, they advised providing “the milk with the cloth — the material with the emotional” and “a more holistic approach to addressing people’s fears and anxieties.”
According to colleague Colin Strong, this fits with political sociologist Will Davies’ argument that there has been a shift away from ‘recognition’ to ‘reputation’ in shaping identities. This a “…form of value that we accumulate through public perception, often shaped by reactions, ratings, and feedback in digital and social environments”.
Reputations are shaped, and unshaped, by vibes and memes which can be as fleeting as they are powerful, summarised superbly by Colin. He referenced both ‘Brat’ summer (noting the rapidity of its rise and subsequent demise) alongside Donald Trump’s campaign tactics to argue that vibes and memes should not be underestimated as a component of understanding behaviour and, by extension, as a mechanism for influencing it.
The gap between emotional and rational worldviews is not an entirely new phenomenon — for example, I remember use of the phrase “you can’t fact check a feeling” to explain the drift towards Leave during the EU referendum — but the term vibecession emerged in the States as recently as 2022.
Two years ago, inflation was raging, and such sentiments were grounded in most people’s lived experience. However, while the term was subsequently mocked, the point was that a vibecession “can occur regardless of the actual state of the economy”. Thus, perceptions, and vibes, don’t always accord with reality but they can take hold and it is this that makes them powerful. Governments need to do more than ‘deliver’.
The case of Germany
The British are famous for their exceptionalism, something which has probably been cause and effect of an island mentality and weaker eurocentrism. But in the period since Brexit, there has been some idle talk of Britain becoming more European for various reasons. These have ranged from the growth of ‘Bregret’, to the country’s newfound willingness to tax and borrow-to-spend and, much more flippantly during 2024, a wave of protests by farmers.
However, if a country ever has a case to feel different despite being at the heart of Europe, to claim a different feel, it has been Germany. Since reunification, it has had the largest economy in Europe and, this year, became the third largest in the world (although only because Japan slipped into recession).
For many years, global polls by Ipsos found Germans typically exhibiting a more positive outlook. I recall CEO Ben Page often concluding end of year presentations with a tongue-in-cheek “at least we’re not France” (Ipsos is a French company). He could equally have added “if only we were Germany”.
But Germany is, like its European and G7 contemporaries, stuck in its own vibecession. This became apparent to me when looking at the 2024 edition of the Global Infrastructure Index, the eighth survey of its kind since 2016. The country’s backlog and poor record on mega-projects has been noticed. Germans’ ratings of railways and digital infrastructure reached new lows; in our 32-country study this year, Germany came 30th and 32nd (rock bottom), respectively.
Another Ipsos source — the What Worries the World tracker — gives further evidence of Germans’ downbeat sentiment. For several years Ipsos has asked national samples whether they think their country is moving in the right direction or is on the wrong track. As the graphic below shows, the French have consistently been more negative, with the British and Americans more volatile (the impact of Liz Truss’ brief tenure in Britain is clear to see). But the Germans had been more positive, until recently.
In 2021, Ipsos found 47% of Germans agreed their country was in decline. The equivalent was 63% two years later at the end of 2023. On this measure, German opinion mirrors British sentiment which itself moved from 48% to 68% over the same period.
This is no coincidence, nor a manufactured meme. Germany has struggled to deliver. An over-reliance on imported energy, sluggish manufacturing and a constitution-protected debt brake, has helped to turn Europe’s powerhouse into something altogether weaker. It also lost the calming influence, competence and stability provided by ‘Mutti Merkel’ (‘Mother Merkel’).
The German economy joined the low-growth European mainstream. The Economist placed the country’s economic performance this year in twenty-third place, on a par with France and Britain, a long way short of Spain, Greece and Italy. Italy is interesting — there, the ‘system is broken index’ has fallen since 2022, the year Giorgia Meloni became Prime Minister after the centre-right coalition won the general election.
While it is difficult to draw direct comparisons, her approval rating is better than Macron’s, Starmer’s and Sholtz’s. Biden’s ratings were increasingly terrible as he reached peak un-electability, and Canada’s Justin Trudeau faces dwindling public support going into an election year.
At the coal face
What should mature liberal democracies do? Perhaps inspiration can be found in another word of the year (the Cambridge Dictionary this time) — ‘manifesting’. Defined as “to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief doing so will make it more likely to happen”, this global wellness trend is endorsed by celebrities and elite athletes.
While not a serious basis for lasting policy, some positive thinking might help a bit. In Britain, bleak messaging about the economy before the Budget was blamed for weak growth during Quarter 3, something Boris Johson had previously been fond of tackling, rhetorically at least (he liked to talk of doing battle with the “doomsters and gloomsters”).
A more useful source of inspiration could come in a landmark event in Britain this year — the closure of Britain’s last coal-fired power plant and the complete end to this dirty form of power generation. The discovery of gas in the North Sea helped, but the rapidity of Britain’s shift relative to other G7 countries was, according to The Economist, the “result of deliberate policies”.
On 19th December, Britain’s wind turbines set a new record for electricity generation, just days after the previous one was broken. They provided 68% of the country’s electricity and, for the first time, wind and other renewable sources generated more than half of the country’s electricity for the last four consecutive quarters. Britain has become exceptional, a world leader at generating offshore wind energy.
These shifts have been the product of judgement and not just topographical luck. The same could be said of Germany and its industrial strategy while Spain’s economy is “reaping the benefits of past reforms”.
While these initiatives took decades to plan and execute (and are hardly short-term crowd-pleasers or vote-winners), they demonstrate the impact of strategy, foresight, and effective policymaking. The ‘green’ and technological revolutions offer opportunities, if handled well.
Tough going
Politics and government are difficult, possibly harder than ever. People are not in a forgiving mood and want to see things getting better. However, despite being low in confidence, they tend to want more, not less government. In her film Democracy 2024, Margaret Atwood emphasised the importance of strengthening essential institutions which enhance democracy and the rule of law.
The best antidote to populism remains delivery of popular, well-articulated policies which make a tangible difference to people’s lives. This means blending more and better technocracy and democracy, putting politics and people back into political economy, and refreshing the social contract.
In the short-term, fiscal and political vulnerabilities will likely mean further unpopularity for governments during 2025, making it harder to deliver.
Uncertainty remains but surviving, and then thriving, will surely involve understanding and managing votes and vibes.
