Selecting Political Leaders

It is well known that the political process does a poor job of selecting the best people to govern a governmental body. There are few proven solutions to this problem, although arguably strong civil service protections for all but the most senior civil servants help.

Mounk: Why is it that the incentives of the system are rewarding the worst kind of behavior and bringing out the worst in people and, when I look at the history of the United Kingdom for the last ten years, not rewarding the people whom I think we would agree would be better in public service?

Stewart: Well, I think it’s partly that you’re not selecting for somebody’s ability to govern a country. You’re not trying to find people who are strong at critical thinking, or who are skilled managers, or who have particularly impressive ideas. It’s not a selection process like you would select a CEO or a university professor. You’re basically selecting through a party system, so that the first thing that matters is what kind of people impress the party. And the people that impress the party in the UK system tend to be people who have been engaged with party politics from a very, very young age, who have demonstrated their loyalty out on the street by campaigning, delivering leaflets, or have worked as a special advisor or assistant to a minister or a Member of Parliament.

When you enter politics, there are strong pressures to demonstrate loyalty to the party and the leader, and equally strong pressures to establish your name in the media and through social media, often through making very provocative comments, creating a very binary black and white vision of the world. The combination of party media and campaigning means that the system selects for somebody who is going to very naturally produce very binary options in very clear colors, who doesn’t admit any form of complexity, doubt, or humility; who’s perpetually confident in their vision of the world. Perhaps this is the sort of mask which they put on in order to get elected. But the problem is, the mask is painted with a poison. And when they take off the mask, the poison is still corroding their face. So when they sit around the cabinet table, they have to demonstrate critical thinking, and critical thinking is the opposite of all those things. Suddenly, they have to think about complexity, they have to be humble, they have to be open to other people’s ideas, they have to be able to change their minds. They have to be interested in nuance and detail. None of those things are the things which enable a Donald Trump or Boris Johnson to flourish in the first place.

I think it is particularly corrosive on the right.

From here.