In this blog, I introduce political intelligence. The past 2016 presidential election demonstrated the power of data to influence election in unexpected ways. The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed the growing trend of data-driven campaign strategies for targeting voters with customized political ads. This practice, which started with marketing in the corporate world has made its way well into political campaigning. Now politicians can optimize their hard-won campaign dollars into efforts that are more likely to turn up the vote for them.
It would be great if such optimization would also diminish the need of money in politics but that has not been the case. I digress. No, this blog is not about using data for better campaign targeting. Quite the opposite, it is about flipping the table and delivering intelligence not candidate but to the electorate. What if election was less about self-promotion and frivolous attack but a true debate on ideas and practices informed by data? What if our political electoral process was more intelligent?
Defining Intelligence
Let me take a step back. It is important to better define intelligence here. For the purposes of this blog, I do not seek a general definition of intelligence that could apply to animals, humans and computers. Instead, I want to borrow the term from the business world. In business analytics, we often use the term business intelligence (BI) that encompasses all the ways in which you present data to business audiences. That is, it includes graphs, dashboards, reports and tables. If Data Science is focused on analyzing and producing insights, BI focuses on delivering those insights in a way that non-technical audiences can understand and take action on it – hence the term actionable insights.
Developing actionable insights has become the goal of every analytics department. Data is not good unless it can guide the direction of a business. It requires a fair amount of distilling, curating, formatting and presenting in a way that helps executives make better decisions.
BI also requires triaging and prioritization. With the abundance of data flowing into a business, it is crucial to decide what to track and what not to track. Picking the right measures is an important step in the process of developing actionable insights. What does not get measured, does not get the attention of management.
Learning from this parallel, intelligence means the process of selecting, tracking and analyzing key measures that give an overall picture of the challenges and opportunities a business face. Could that be applied to government?
Introducing Political Intelligence
Clearly the government sector could learn a lot from the business sector in how to better run their operations. Yet, what I propose here is not about simply producing dashboards for lawmakers. Instead, I propose we leverage this practice to help voters vote more intelligently.
Of the many ills of political campaigning, and there are many, one of the worst is the absence of reliable data. It is not that this data does not exist, it just simply not part of the political discourse. This is a tragic outcome, as data is the best way to provide evidence-based feedback from policies.
Let me break this down a bit. When candidates are not busy attacking each other characters, the best we get today is a debate of ideas. Political parties put out platforms based on principles and ideologies. This is helpful but falls short for at least two reasons. First, untested ideas do very little against real-world, entrenched, long-lasting social problems. They may sound appealing at face value but often times produce many unintended consequences. Second, a debate that lives on abstract discussions will most often lose voter engagement. Voters are looking for pocket-book issue solutions and have little patience for drawn-out discussions on political philosophies.
I believe data remediates both of these problems. 1) It grounds political proposals against real-world results; 2) it quantifies complex issues into easily digestible set of metrics. For example, for those concerned with poverty in their community measures such as unemployment rate, households living under the poverty line and percentage of population in government assistance are good beginning points to have an informed discussion.
A Good Start
Will this settle all political disputes? Absolutely not. Political intelligence does not mend political divides but it does improve political discourse. When we force those running for office to explain their proposals with data, we now have a way to check on their progress. This is much better than what we have now where elected officials spin the results of their efforts to maximize their accomplishments and minimize their shortcomings. On the other side, opponents inflate government failures while also overstating their own abilities to solve it. Both sides portray a distorted view of reality. Agreeing on a set of metrics up-front give us a tool against political propaganda that keeps both major parties in US accountable to the same standard.
Finally, a robust discussion on metrics can further localize a conversation that is often dominated by national issues. Most of politics is local but that rarely comes through the prevailing media sources. A vigorous debate on the metrics that matter for a particular community allows them to focus on local issues rather than transposing national ones into theira community. This improves the political discourse of local elections and allows voters to engage deeper into government decisions that directly affect their lives.
Empowering voters with political intelligence: that is what I call a good start to reform our democracy.
