Chico Khan-Gandapur is a managing partner at Metrica Consulting.
Modern political parties are built around people who live and breathe politics, all competing for the support and attention of voters who may give them only a few distracted minutes of their precious time each week.
This attention and mindset difference between the two groups creates deep disconnects. Parties routinely design policies and messages for the world as seen from their perspective of the activist meeting, think‑tank seminar, or political social media.
In contrast, most voters encounter politics as a noisy, peripheral background to their otherwise very busy lives. This fundamental difference in approaches can lead directly to mismatches in both what is prioritised in policy‑making and how it is marketed.
Unless they adapt to this challenge, parties will waste considerable effort and time in failing to reach those people they most need to win over.
Two Political Worlds
Extensive research consistently shows political engagement is highly uneven. Only a very small minority of citizens are politically active or intense, whether by joining parties, campaigning, or consuming news daily.
A very much larger group are Voter Specialists or Inactives who do little more than vote occasionally and glance at headlines on screens, or newspapers. Studies of Low‑Information Voters and Issue Publics (a heuristic meaning single issue voters, or issue based groups) underline this point. Most people know very little about day‑to‑day politics, and when they do care, it is only about a very narrow set of issues which touch their lives directly.
The politically active live in a very different information environment. They seek out detailed coverage, follow parliamentary manoeuvres, share long threads, and consume arguments at a level of granularity which would baffle or bore most of their fellow citizens. Their social circles and online networks are disproportionately filled with similarly engaged people, which reinforces their sense that everyone is talking about the same controversies. For them, a leadership election, a committee vote or an intra‑party row can feel like a defining national moment.
But most voters experience politics in a radically different way. They give it only Incidental Attention – just picking up fragments from television, radio, social media and conversations, often without seeking them out. Their knowledge is patchy and highly uneven across topics, and many feel under‑informed or overwhelmed rather than empowered.
Politics competes with their work and family, entertainment and any personal worries; it is a low‑involvement category. Just a few minutes a week, a headline here, a clip there, is all it gets. And most political experts don’t factor in this reality of relative indifference in their conferences, policy prescriptions, and communications, giving rise to Expertise Disconnect.
How the Disconnect Skews Policy‑Making
This structural difference in attention can lead to parties overweighting the preferences of the hyper‑engaged, and underweighting the needs and perceptions of the lightly‑engaged majority.
First, issue agendas drift toward activists’ priorities. Party members, donors, campaign volunteers and aligned interest groups are far more likely than average voters to contact representatives, attend consultations and respond to internal surveys. Their concerns therefore risk dominating the internal conversation.
The result is that parties spend disproportionate time on issues that mobilise their activist base – symbolic cultural fights, internal rule changes, niche regulatory reforms – while under‑investing in the Bread‑and‑Butter concerns – prices, public services, local conditions – that low‑attention voters say matter most.
Second, policy design might presume a level of voter knowledge and trust that is not there. Detailed, multi‑pillar programmes make sense to those who follow politics closely, but to someone catching a snippet in the school‑run traffic, the nuances are invisible. Low‑information voters often rely on simple cues – perceived competence, values, or leader character – rather than fine‑grained policy distinctions. A party that crafts intricate policy offers without a clear, simple narrative of, what this means for you, are likely to find those offers drifting past unnoticed. This challenge grows with the complexity of the topic and message.
Third, extreme or highly ideological positions can be adopted under the radar of most voters. Empirical work in the US, for example, shows that party activists tend to be more polarised in their policy preferences than the broader electorate, and they exert pressure on candidates and platforms. Because most voters are not watching closely, they may only realise how far a party has moved when extreme positions lead to visible consequences – at which point trust has already been damaged. Parties can thus end up with platforms optimised for internal applause rather than general‑election viability.
Finally, the disconnect can mask policy failure. When voters are poorly informed about complex issues, such as corruption or the performance of distant institutions, incumbents are often not punished even when outcomes are bad. That reduces incentives for parties to correct course, because the only people loudly complaining are those already engaged and often already aligned with one side.
The Marketing Mismatch
The same divide distorts political communication and campaign strategy.
Campaign professionals, themselves highly politicised, can slip into designing messaging ecosystems for people like them, not voters. Online campaigns become dense with policy detail, insider references and attack lines that resonate in a narrow, politicised audience but barely register for casual observers. The logic of political marketing – segmenting voters by issues and tailoring messages – clashes with the reality that most people do not have stable, detailed issue positions and are not shopping for micro‑policies.
Research shows that less‑engaged voters rely heavily on heuristics: leader image, party reputation, simple value signals. Yet campaigns often saturate marginal voters with material that presupposes familiarity with legislative histories, ideological labels or institutional jargon. The more a message depends on prior knowledge, the less likely it is to land with someone giving politics three minutes on a Sunday evening.
At the same time, parties over‑react to the noise of the permanently online. Social media storms and activist controversies are taken as indicators of public opinion, when in reality they often reflect a small, unrepresentative slice of the electorate. Liz Truss’s election illustrates this, pushed by a minority of more right wing and activist party members. Strategic decisions – from policy shifts to personnel changes – are made to calm or excite the hyper‑engaged, even though the median voter either missed the row or found it baffling. The result is a kind of political vertigo: parties lurch from message to message while most citizens perceive only incoherence and squabbling.
How Should Parties Respond ?
Parties that want to reconnect policy and politics with the lightly engaged majority need to adjust both how they make decisions and how they communicate.
First, they should institutionalise the perspective of low‑attention voters. That means treating representative survey work, ethnographic research and ongoing listening in key communities as core inputs to policy‑making, not as occasional campaign extras. The aim is to expose leaders and activists to how politics looks from the periphery: what cuts through, what is ignored, and which problems people actually want solved. Internal processes should deliberately counterbalance activist and donor influence with evidence about the wider public.
Second, parties need to design policy around outcomes and experiences, not internal debates. For a low‑attention voter, the question is not, …does this align with framework X ?, but …will this make my life, my family, my place, measurably better ?…
Policies should be built around a small number of clearly defined problems, with success metrics that can be communicated simply: waiting times, bills, crime levels, visible investment. Detailed white papers are necessary, but they must be anchored in a narrative that survives the translation into a 30‑second clip.
Third, they should simplify and discipline their messages. Rather than chasing every news cycle, parties need a handful of enduring themes and stories that can be repeated without boredom, especially to those who are only half‑listening. Political psychology suggests that, for low‑information voters, consistency and clarity are more persuasive than constant novelty. Each major policy initiative should reinforce the same core answer to “…whose side are you on ? and …what are you trying to get done ?
Fourth, parties must retrain themselves to reading the room correctly. That involves:
- Distinguishing between the metrics of activist engagement (clicks, sign‑ups, donations) and the metrics of broad resonance (name recognition, basic perceptions of competence and care)
- Stress‑testing messages with genuinely disengaged citizens, not just with party members and politically interested panels
- Treating social‑media storms as hypotheses about public reaction, to be checked against representative data rather than obeyed as a reflex action
Finally, they should invest in Political Literacy and trust‑building, especially among younger and marginalised groups who currently feel politics is …not for people like them. Evidence suggests that feeling informed about politics is strongly associated with willingness to vote and trust in political institutions. Over the long term, a more politically literate electorate reduces the gap between the engaged inner circle and the wider public, making it easier to align policy with real preferences and to explain difficult trade‑offs honestly.
The disconnect between those who live inside politics and those who only glance at it will never disappear; attention is a scarce resource, and most citizens will always care more about their immediate lives than about Westminster, Holyrood, Cardiff Bay, or Stormont.
But parties that recognise this reality – and consciously design their policy‑making and communication for an audience that is busy, sceptical and half‑listening – stand a better chance of building durable support.
The task is not to drag everyone into the world of the political obsessive, but to bring politics back into alignment with the everyday concerns and limited attention of the people it is meant to serve.
These points should resonate acutely with Kemi and the Shadow Cabinet who, despite seeing the odd green shoots of recovery in her personal leadership ratings, or in the Westminster and Wandsworth local authority wins, or the South Aberdeen by-election are still wrestling with national polling levels which are bumping along their bottom, and only level with a Labour government in disrepute. The disconnects need to close.
Chico Khan-Gandapur is a managing partner at Metrica Consulting.
Modern political parties are built around people who live and breathe politics, all competing for the support and attention of voters who may give them only a few distracted minutes of their precious time each week.
This attention and mindset difference between the two groups creates deep disconnects. Parties routinely design policies and messages for the world as seen from their perspective of the activist meeting, think‑tank seminar, or political social media.
In contrast, most voters encounter politics as a noisy, peripheral background to their otherwise very busy lives. This fundamental difference in approaches can lead directly to mismatches in both what is prioritised in policy‑making and how it is marketed.
Unless they adapt to this challenge, parties will waste considerable effort and time in failing to reach those people they most need to win over.
Two Political Worlds
Extensive research consistently shows political engagement is highly uneven. Only a very small minority of citizens are politically active or intense, whether by joining parties, campaigning, or consuming news daily.
A very much larger group are Voter Specialists or Inactives who do little more than vote occasionally and glance at headlines on screens, or newspapers. Studies of Low‑Information Voters and Issue Publics (a heuristic meaning single issue voters, or issue based groups) underline this point. Most people know very little about day‑to‑day politics, and when they do care, it is only about a very narrow set of issues which touch their lives directly.
The politically active live in a very different information environment. They seek out detailed coverage, follow parliamentary manoeuvres, share long threads, and consume arguments at a level of granularity which would baffle or bore most of their fellow citizens. Their social circles and online networks are disproportionately filled with similarly engaged people, which reinforces their sense that everyone is talking about the same controversies. For them, a leadership election, a committee vote or an intra‑party row can feel like a defining national moment.
But most voters experience politics in a radically different way. They give it only Incidental Attention – just picking up fragments from television, radio, social media and conversations, often without seeking them out. Their knowledge is patchy and highly uneven across topics, and many feel under‑informed or overwhelmed rather than empowered.
Politics competes with their work and family, entertainment and any personal worries; it is a low‑involvement category. Just a few minutes a week, a headline here, a clip there, is all it gets. And most political experts don’t factor in this reality of relative indifference in their conferences, policy prescriptions, and communications, giving rise to Expertise Disconnect.
How the Disconnect Skews Policy‑Making
This structural difference in attention can lead to parties overweighting the preferences of the hyper‑engaged, and underweighting the needs and perceptions of the lightly‑engaged majority.
First, issue agendas drift toward activists’ priorities. Party members, donors, campaign volunteers and aligned interest groups are far more likely than average voters to contact representatives, attend consultations and respond to internal surveys. Their concerns therefore risk dominating the internal conversation.
The result is that parties spend disproportionate time on issues that mobilise their activist base – symbolic cultural fights, internal rule changes, niche regulatory reforms – while under‑investing in the Bread‑and‑Butter concerns – prices, public services, local conditions – that low‑attention voters say matter most.
Second, policy design might presume a level of voter knowledge and trust that is not there. Detailed, multi‑pillar programmes make sense to those who follow politics closely, but to someone catching a snippet in the school‑run traffic, the nuances are invisible. Low‑information voters often rely on simple cues – perceived competence, values, or leader character – rather than fine‑grained policy distinctions. A party that crafts intricate policy offers without a clear, simple narrative of, what this means for you, are likely to find those offers drifting past unnoticed. This challenge grows with the complexity of the topic and message.
Third, extreme or highly ideological positions can be adopted under the radar of most voters. Empirical work in the US, for example, shows that party activists tend to be more polarised in their policy preferences than the broader electorate, and they exert pressure on candidates and platforms. Because most voters are not watching closely, they may only realise how far a party has moved when extreme positions lead to visible consequences – at which point trust has already been damaged. Parties can thus end up with platforms optimised for internal applause rather than general‑election viability.
Finally, the disconnect can mask policy failure. When voters are poorly informed about complex issues, such as corruption or the performance of distant institutions, incumbents are often not punished even when outcomes are bad. That reduces incentives for parties to correct course, because the only people loudly complaining are those already engaged and often already aligned with one side.
The Marketing Mismatch
The same divide distorts political communication and campaign strategy.
Campaign professionals, themselves highly politicised, can slip into designing messaging ecosystems for people like them, not voters. Online campaigns become dense with policy detail, insider references and attack lines that resonate in a narrow, politicised audience but barely register for casual observers. The logic of political marketing – segmenting voters by issues and tailoring messages – clashes with the reality that most people do not have stable, detailed issue positions and are not shopping for micro‑policies.
Research shows that less‑engaged voters rely heavily on heuristics: leader image, party reputation, simple value signals. Yet campaigns often saturate marginal voters with material that presupposes familiarity with legislative histories, ideological labels or institutional jargon. The more a message depends on prior knowledge, the less likely it is to land with someone giving politics three minutes on a Sunday evening.
At the same time, parties over‑react to the noise of the permanently online. Social media storms and activist controversies are taken as indicators of public opinion, when in reality they often reflect a small, unrepresentative slice of the electorate. Liz Truss’s election illustrates this, pushed by a minority of more right wing and activist party members. Strategic decisions – from policy shifts to personnel changes – are made to calm or excite the hyper‑engaged, even though the median voter either missed the row or found it baffling. The result is a kind of political vertigo: parties lurch from message to message while most citizens perceive only incoherence and squabbling.
How Should Parties Respond ?
Parties that want to reconnect policy and politics with the lightly engaged majority need to adjust both how they make decisions and how they communicate.
First, they should institutionalise the perspective of low‑attention voters. That means treating representative survey work, ethnographic research and ongoing listening in key communities as core inputs to policy‑making, not as occasional campaign extras. The aim is to expose leaders and activists to how politics looks from the periphery: what cuts through, what is ignored, and which problems people actually want solved. Internal processes should deliberately counterbalance activist and donor influence with evidence about the wider public.
Second, parties need to design policy around outcomes and experiences, not internal debates. For a low‑attention voter, the question is not, …does this align with framework X ?, but …will this make my life, my family, my place, measurably better ?…
Policies should be built around a small number of clearly defined problems, with success metrics that can be communicated simply: waiting times, bills, crime levels, visible investment. Detailed white papers are necessary, but they must be anchored in a narrative that survives the translation into a 30‑second clip.
Third, they should simplify and discipline their messages. Rather than chasing every news cycle, parties need a handful of enduring themes and stories that can be repeated without boredom, especially to those who are only half‑listening. Political psychology suggests that, for low‑information voters, consistency and clarity are more persuasive than constant novelty. Each major policy initiative should reinforce the same core answer to “…whose side are you on ? and …what are you trying to get done ?
Fourth, parties must retrain themselves to reading the room correctly. That involves:
Finally, they should invest in Political Literacy and trust‑building, especially among younger and marginalised groups who currently feel politics is …not for people like them. Evidence suggests that feeling informed about politics is strongly associated with willingness to vote and trust in political institutions. Over the long term, a more politically literate electorate reduces the gap between the engaged inner circle and the wider public, making it easier to align policy with real preferences and to explain difficult trade‑offs honestly.
The disconnect between those who live inside politics and those who only glance at it will never disappear; attention is a scarce resource, and most citizens will always care more about their immediate lives than about Westminster, Holyrood, Cardiff Bay, or Stormont.
But parties that recognise this reality – and consciously design their policy‑making and communication for an audience that is busy, sceptical and half‑listening – stand a better chance of building durable support.
The task is not to drag everyone into the world of the political obsessive, but to bring politics back into alignment with the everyday concerns and limited attention of the people it is meant to serve.
These points should resonate acutely with Kemi and the Shadow Cabinet who, despite seeing the odd green shoots of recovery in her personal leadership ratings, or in the Westminster and Wandsworth local authority wins, or the South Aberdeen by-election are still wrestling with national polling levels which are bumping along their bottom, and only level with a Labour government in disrepute. The disconnects need to close.