Listening while on the stump
As nearly half of humanity holds elections this year, voters seek to be heard in order to place their trust in democracy.
India’s opposition Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi, left, interacts with a voter in Kalpetta, Kerala state, India, April 3.
AP
For many voters around the world, trusting an election result matters almost more than who wins. A December poll in the United States, for example, showed that a large majority of Republicans and Democrats worry about inaccurate or misleading election information in 2024.
Recent state-level reforms in the U.S. could help assuage those concerns. But the main need, argues Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and author of the new book “How To Steal a Presidential Election,” is for something softer. Dissolving distrust, he told NPR, requires that “people face to face, one to one, begin to just talk to each other and engage on – about – this reality of our division and how we need to get beyond it.”
The idea of listening to those with whom we disagree is seldom measured in global surveys on democracy. Yet that solution keeps cropping up around national elections this year. In Mexico, the ruling party’s candidate for the presidential election in June, Claudia Sheinbaum, has instructed her campaign workers to “go and listen!” In South Korea, President Yoon Suk Yeol said after his party lost an April 10 parliamentary election that he would listen to the public “with a more humble and flexible attitude.”
In a February survey of 24 countries, the Pew Research Center found that 74% of people say their elected officials don’t care what they think. That desire to be heard underscores a democracy’s requirement that citizens be treated with equality.
“If democracy is to function well, listening must also be supported and defended – especially at a moment when technological developments are making meaningful listening harder,” filmmaker Astra Taylor wrote in The New Yorker in 2020. “Deciding to listen to someone ... accords them a special kind of recognition and respect.”
Listening may not always change the course of elections, but it can replace enmity with empathy across social and political divides. In Britain, during the run-up to local elections on May 2 that may force a change in national leadership, two mayors from opposing parties have formed a close friendship over infrastructure plans. One praised the other as “decent and caring and compassionate.”
In India last year, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi walked the length of that country to listen to voters ahead of national elections starting this month. Humility, he said in a speech at the University of Cambridge, requires deep sacrifice and perseverance.
Such qualities help instill trust in elections and improve civic participation. With dozens of national elections worldwide in 2024, more politicians may be catching on that listening may be as critical to winning as speaking.