During an election campaign, it is rare for parties to tell voters that they should simply trust their instincts. This would be tantamount to giving them permission to vote with their hearts rather than their heads. Candidates tell voters that there is a 'right' or 'responsible' thing to do. This patronising approach implies that voters' own emotional judgements are less reliable than the knowledge of the political experts.
Liberal Senator Marise Payne has pointed out that men and women bring different skills to politics. Research suggests that IQ, the traditional predictor of aptitude and skills, should be supplemented by EQ. And while the correlation is not exclusive, men, whatever their intelligence quotient, seem less likely than women to have a high emotional quotient. Emotional skills include empathy, compassion, understanding, patience and respect.
Various arguments were employed during the torrid debates about women's suffrage across the English speaking world in the 19th century. Some opponents insisted that women would vote twice because they could hide extra ballots in their voluminous clothing! (This seems silly today, and yet a conservative politician recently said something similar about Muslim women's clothing and weapons.) Other opponents reckoned that women would be hysterical or irrational.
The debates over legally enfranchising women are long over. Yet if we denigrate voting according to the heart, we could debilitate a special female skill and so disadvantage women electors particularly. In the 21st century we know that while men and women might have strengths in some gender-specific areas, men do not dwell exclusively in the head nor women in the heart. Most men have well-developed emotional lives and any process that disparages allegedly 'feminine' skills debilitates male electors as well.
When experts tell us that the only sensible vote is a vote for them, they face a potential paradox. In an increasingly complex world, neither major party takes a neat ideological position. To attract sufficient support to form a government, the parties compromise, move towards the centre ground, and sometimes adopt policies more traditionally associated with their opponents.
Because electors face a variety of issues, it is impossible to assign these a weighting that facilitates a rational choice among them. Consequently, the experts try to make electors forget some issues and cast their ballots according to others — forget the environment for example, and concentrate on economic management. The head, then, is constrained, contained and confused.
By contrast, the heart