What factors determine political affiliations? Photo credit: Joshua Sukoff via Unsplash
The body politic
The political spectrum consists of axes that represent political dimensions, with the overall intention of visualising different political orientations relative to each other. How these are visualised plays a role in how we perceive politics.
With a long history in Western political thought, the “body politic” is a metaphor that represents a state or society as a biological body. The monarch or ruler is considered the body’s “head” and the citizens are organised as the rest of the body. There are three dimensions to this metaphor: biology’s influence on political orientation, the role of metaphor in our understanding of politics, and finally, the different geometrical concepts used in political models.
The monarch or ruler is considered the body’s “head” and the citizens are organised as the rest of the body.
Where politics and biology converge, we may ask, ‘What compels us to hold certain values?’ and ‘What leads us to vote for a particular party?’. Politics is, therefore, not only a sum of social and environmental influences, but a thought influenced just as much by biology.
The first dimension: neurology and political affiliation
Biology is a science imbued with historical context and ideology. An example of this is biopolitics, an ideological framework entailing (bio)power over life. Individual bodies are valued based on merit, and the collective population is regulated in this biological re-articulation of sovereign power. We see how politics can “make live or let die”, while the contrary opens up an investigation into how our biology can influence our politics. The question is not who we are governed by––but what.
Political ideology can be mapped onto a conservative-liberal axis. Determining an individual’s placement on this axis involves more than differences in learned attributes and socioeconomic or cultural environments. Delving into our biological makeup, the interaction between genetics and culture is one key source of understanding political behaviour. There is also evidence that neurobiological factors also mediate political affiliations. For example, neuroimaging studies suggest political ideology involves conservative-liberal differences in the amygdala, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex areas of the brain.
Understanding the cognition underlying political thought may help elucidate unwavering party loyalty.
Understanding the cognition underlying political thought may help elucidate unwavering party loyalty. Furthermore, we can recognise evolutionary origins to political affiliation implied by our genetics and likely related to our need to belong to a group. This provides a gateway to addressing the negatives of partisanship, such as disagreement and conflict.
The second dimension: how language shapes space and politics
Informing our perception, but often overlooked, is our “parlance” –how the metaphors we weave into language and thinking help us understand reality and shape our political leanings. We use space to inform a variety of non-spatial concepts, which facilitate understanding of abstract or unfamiliar ideas. A 2012 study by the University of Cambridge on the use of spatial metaphors in political reasoning demonstrated how these metaphors provide frames of reference for visualising varied political beliefs. They are thus likely to play a critical role in the political decisions taken by citizens, as they facilitate public understanding of politics. In turn, our use of spatial metaphors invite us to think once more about the dimensions of political orientation.
The third dimension: locating political orientation
How the political dimension is understood and mapped spatially, is, therefore, at once biological, political, and geometrical. Developing this understanding takes place in our minds, out loud, and is drawn up into models. Yet, despite our spatial inclinations, voters tend to assume one-dimensional thinking. There are many routes to a more useful depiction of political views, that encourage a geometrical, multidimension approach to making sense of the political spectrum. In turn, this would promote a multi-faceted understanding of its philosophies.
How the political dimension is understood and mapped spatially, is, therefore, at once biological, political, and geometrical.
This “problem” of the one-dimensional political spectrum has been addressed by political scientists, with its multitude of graphs, or “spectrograms”, and in statistics, where models have been created to underscore the importance of multidimensional opinion representation.
The bodily politic?
Politics takes up cognitive and linguistic space. The facets characterising political ideologies lend themselves to multidimensional visualisations, on paper and in our minds, and perhaps confront us not with biological determinism, but biological determinants, in tandem with our social and environmental influences. In language, the metaphors we draw on require sources, from which we model our metaphors. We consistently turn to the body itself as a source in our imaginings of the unfamiliar from the familiar, shaping how we conceptualise the political spectrum: now the body as a source of political behaviour itself emerges.
