Put any sports event in front of me, a football match between two clubs I’ve never heard of or a fencing bout at the Olympics, and I’ll pick a side within seconds. I have no stake in the result, and yet by the end, I care who wins. I became a lifelong Urawa Red Diamonds fan at Saitama Stadium and cheered at the top of my lungs for the Washington Wizards at Capital One Arena, yet 20 minutes before either game, I couldn’t have named a single player on either roster.
In 1970, Polish-born British psychologist Henri Tajfel [1] studied how easily people favour their own group. In one experiment, he asked schoolboys whether they preferred Kandinsky’s or Klee’s paintings. Their answers were then ignored when the boys were randomly assigned to groups. When asked to distribute rewards to other boys, many favoured their own side, sometimes prioritising the gap between the groups over the total rewards distributed. There was no competition, no history of hostility, no personal ties, and nothing to gain. Yet they stayed loyal to a group that existed only because a researcher said so.
Picking a side makes things fun. A random match between strangers becomes entertainment as soon as you want one of them to win. The same happens with party politics.
As Spain heads towards general elections at the end of November, I can already hear the hooligans filling the stands. Debates are matches, polls are scoreboards, and voters become fans.
This defeats the purpose of politics. Democracy rests on the idea that people remain open-minded, that an argument can persuade them, and that a failed policy can change their vote. But you can’t debate a Barça fan into supporting Real Madrid. Hooligan loyalty doesn’t bend to facts and figures. That is why politics should be boring. The more entertaining we make it, the more we invite people to treat it like a sport. The spectacle keeps people hooked and agitated, and that is a poor state for weighing arguments. Just as I pick a fencer within seconds, voters pick sides and stop listening.
I like my sports fun and my politics boring. The latter should be fairly technical, unglamorous, and open to debate. Democracy shouldn’t encourage people to buy their party’s home jersey.
[1] Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in intergroup discrimination. Scientific American, 223(5), 96-103.
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