Politicians’ family as signalling
In the US, if you look at political candidates in public view, they often appear with family in tow. A candidate’s family plays an important role in the election campaigns. I’m from India. There, the politicians’ family play little role in election campaigns (unless the family member herself is actively involved in the party and politics, which is often). But, the relative importance of family (relative to other aspects like money, education) in the cultural value system of India is significantly greater than its relative importance in the cultural value system of the US. So why the inverse relation?
I think it may have to do with signalling (inspired by Hanson, Zahavi). Maintaining a stable family is considered to be less of a status quo situation in the US, when compared to India. So in the US, maintaining a stable family is a signal of your management skills at the level of family, because you had to spend effort to obtain that signal. But in India, the family does not have signalling value, because it is much more common to have a stable family. So having a stable family did not require an ‘extra’ effort (extra compared to society’s default).
What would this imply? How would one test such a theory?
I’m not sure this is entirely capturing the issue. To take one example, Howard Dean appears to have a stable marriage, but the fact that his wife planned to continue her own career as a doctor rather than just being a politician’s dutiful wife was much remarked upon in 2003-2004. I’d lean toward the general phenomenon being less about signalling one is not divorced or adulterous, and more about the fact that traditional ideas about gender roles are still pretty well-ensconced in 21st century US society. (Note that the husbands of female US politicians are not subjected to an equal expectation of following their candidate/officeholder wives around.)
I’m not sure how true this is. Bill was a major force during Clinton’s campaign, and when you look at Britain Denis was pretty clearly a dutiful husband to Thatcher. I don’t have much data about the legislative side of things, though. Looking at Paul Pelosi, it looks like he might choose to stay in the shadows to leave more room for Nancy in the spotlight, but also looks like he’s active in business now (rather than being full-time support).
I know among business executives, women’s husbands are employed full-time about 75% of the time whereas men’s wives are not employed about 75% of the time, so I’ll believe those expectations exist in general, but those seem like the sort of expectations I would expect to be weaker in politics.
Test by looking at other countries and see if the obvious prediction from the hypothesis holds? Divorce rates are easy to obtain, but it might be tough to come up with objective ways of measuring how much family members are involved. Alternatively, pick a single country like the US where the divorce rate has gone up a lot over the last hundred years and see if the amount of emphasis on family members has changed.
Very interesting—although I’d note that politicians signal for ‘normality’ too: ‘I like football and pubs’, etc.
Another issue is what would happen if a politician in India didn’t have a stable family?
Normality might have a cost too: the cost of forgoing advantages which your high status affords you. Though what feature/advantage does normality exactly signal is not very clear to me.
That is interesting. Though it is not obvious that it would be a negative signal. I suspect that it might be somewhere close to neutral. Because, infighting families don’t seem to make the news so much during elections. Atleast that’s what seems to me from the few examples that pop up in mind.
Anybody familiar with Indian politics care to comment?
I think signalling normality helps give the impression of understanding ‘the common man’, ergo ‘me’. So you believe that they’re ‘in touch’ and that they would take similar things into account as what you take into account.
This is mostly about what people like and their day-to-day life. People don’t object so much to someone being exceptionally talented etc. although sometimes even the fact of being obviously intelligent or obviously financially succesful can be seen as meaning someone is out of touch.
What is a “stable family”? Care to operationalize?
Well, it would atleast include two things:
a) Very low probability of divorce (1% in India compared with 45% in the US). Marrying more than once is very rare.
b) Much longer time periods for parents and children living together. Many parents stay with their children for their entire lives.
My first thought at noticing this was that seeing evidence of family probably increases oxytocin in the crowd and therefore makes them more likely to trust the politician.
So why not the same effect in India?
Politicians are all signalling.
Any asset of a politician that is not about signalling will be used as a metric for the quality of his character, since it has not yet been gamed and provides a better metric. As soon as politicians realize that people are using that asset as a metric, they will start gaming it, making that asset less useful as a metric. Over time, a politician’s entire existence becomes a game of trying to achieve perfect signalling.
What makes you so surprised that a politician might choose his/her spouse based on signalling? It may even be a mutually knowing arrangement (Hillary and Bill Clinton).