Latest / Logosofia no Dia a Dia / When Manifestos Actually Work for Voters
Transcript
- [Prompt] custom: We talked about some of the challenges in the political system here in Israel. The splinter parties | Hosts: corn, herman [Response] Corn: Daniel sent us this one — he's been thinking about the splinter-party problem we talked about, where factions form around internal grievances and can't articulate actual policy. But he's pointing at something bigger: the manifesto itself as a broken communication tool. His question is, these documents are supposed to be the voter's manual for deciding who gets power. That's their whole reason for existing. Yet they're mostly unreadable, jargon-filled, written as if the audience is other party politicians. And he's asking: are there any parties anywhere that have actually tried to solve this — not just better design, but fundamentally rethinking what a manifesto is for? Herman: The frustrating thing is, this isn't a niche complaint from policy wonks. The document that's meant to bridge parties and voters actively widens the gap. You've got voter trust in institutions at historic lows, coalition politics fragmenting across a dozen democracies, and the one formal mechanism voters have to evaluate what they're actually voting for is a document that reads like it was written to survive a committee vote, not to be understood by a human being. Corn: Which, to be fair, it probably was. Herman: That's the structural problem. But here's what makes Daniel's question interesting — he's not asking us to diagnose the failure. He's asking if anyone has actually fixed it. And there are examples, but they're rare enough that most people have never heard of them. Corn: We're going hunting for the parties that treated their manifesto like a product for voters, not a treaty between factions. And the answer turns out to be more interesting than "make it shorter. Herman: Because the real insight — and we'll get into the case studies — is that the best voter manifestos aren't summaries of the full document. They're entirely different documents, written from scratch for a different audience. And the parties that figured this out saw real results. Corn: Which raises the question: if it works, why doesn't everyone do it? Herman: That's where the incentives get ugly. And I think that's where we should start — because you can't understand the rare successes until you understand why the default is failure. Corn: Let's do that. Daniel's question is about who got it right. But to appreciate those outliers, we need to look at why almost everyone gets it wrong. Herman: Let's start with what a manifesto is actually supposed to do. In theory, it's straightforward — it's the party saying "here's what we believe, here's what we'll do if you give us power." It's a promise. It's accountability infrastructure. You vote for a platform, and later you can check whether they delivered. Corn: In practice, it's none of those things. Herman: In practice, the primary function of most manifestos is internal negotiation. You've got faction leaders, policy committees, lawyers, donor-aligned interest groups — they all need their paragraph. Every vague sentence is scar tissue from an argument that almost split the drafting room. The document isn't written to communicate outward. It's written to hold the coalition together inward. Corn: The manifesto is less a promise to voters and more a peace treaty between the people who already agree to disagree inside the party. Herman: And Daniel's Israeli example is almost a caricature of this. When a party splinters off around a personality or a single grievance, its manifesto isn't a governing plan — it's a statement of identity. "We exist because faction X betrayed value Y." The policy sections are filler because policy was never the point. The document's real message is "we are the true representatives of this camp," and everything else is decoration. Corn: Which means the voter who actually reads it looking for what this party would do about housing or healthcare gets nothing usable. The document wasn't written for them, and it shows in every paragraph. Herman: Here's the thing — this isn't just a fringe-party problem. The same dynamic operates in major parties, just with more sophisticated prose. The UK Labour Party's twenty nineteen manifesto was a hundred and seven pages. The Conservatives' was fifty-nine. Both were dense, both were written to satisfy internal stakeholders first, and neither was designed for a voter with fifteen minutes and a cup of coffee. Corn: The length and the jargon aren't accidents. They're features of a system where the real audience is the people inside the room. Herman: And that's what makes Daniel's question worth answering. If manifestos are structurally designed to fail at voter communication, has anyone actually broken that structure? Not just made a prettier PDF, but genuinely rethought who the document is for and what it's supposed to accomplish? Corn: That's the hunt. Who treated the manifesto like it was for voters, not for themselves? Herman: Let's dig into why the default is failure. The first thing to understand is that a manifesto has what political scientists call a two-audience problem — though honestly it's more like three. It has to function as a binding internal contract between factions, a signal to journalists and opposing parties, and a guide for voters. Those three groups need completely different things from the document. Corn: Two of those audiences can punish you immediately if you get it wrong. The third one — voters — they might punish you eventually, at the ballot box, but that's months away and mediated by a thousand other factors. Herman: That's exactly the asymmetry. The faction leader who didn't get their paragraph on agricultural subsidies knows by lunchtime and is already on the phone. The journalist looking for a contradiction between your housing policy and your tax policy files the story by evening. But the voter who couldn't understand your education section? You might never know they tried to read it. The feedback loop for voter communication is broken, so parties optimize for the audiences that give immediate feedback. Corn: The manifesto becomes a document written to survive internal scrutiny and media cross-examination, and voter comprehension is a distant third priority — if it's a priority at all. Herman: You see this in the language choices. Precision for insiders means using terms like "fiscal headroom" and "supply-side reform capacity." Clarity for voters means saying "we'll have money to spend" and "we'll make it easier for businesses to grow." Those are in direct tension. You can't serve both audiences with the same sentence, so someone loses. And it's never the insider. Corn: The insider is in the room when the sentence is drafted. The voter is an abstraction. Herman: And this gets compounded by the cognitive reality of how people actually make voting decisions. There's solid political science research on this — the average voter spends seconds, not minutes, evaluating a party before forming a judgment. This isn't laziness. It's what researchers call rational information avoidance. When the cost of processing a hundred-page document exceeds the perceived benefit of being slightly better informed, the rational choice is to not read it. Corn: Because my individual vote has a near-zero chance of changing the outcome, but reading a hundred and seven pages of Labour's twenty nineteen manifesto has a very real cost in time and mental energy. The math doesn't work. Herman: And parties respond to this by... doing nothing to reduce the cost. The format itself signals "not for you." Dense prose walls, no hierarchy of priorities, no plain-language summaries, no visual structure. They're indistinguishable from government white papers. A voter opens a typical manifesto and sees something that looks like it was designed to be filed, not read. Corn: Which is its own kind of communication. The document is saying, before you even get to the first sentence, "this was not made with you in mind. Herman: In the Israeli context Daniel's describing, it's even starker. With ten plus parties in a typical election, manifestos aren't really voter guides at all — they're coalition negotiation documents. The twenty twenty-two election had multiple parties release what they called platforms, but if you actually read them, they were lists of grievances against other factions, not governing plans. The unstated message was "here's who we're against," not "here's what we'd do. Corn: Which is useful information, I suppose, but not the kind the voter was looking for. Herman: It makes the manifesto functionally useless for the one thing it's supposed to do: help someone decide whether this party represents their interests. You end up with a document that satisfies the faction leaders, gives journalists enough to write about, and leaves voters exactly where they started — relying on headlines, vibes, and whatever their friends are saying. Herman: That's the problem — manifestos written for everyone end up serving no one. But Daniel's question was whether anyone has actually cracked this. And there are three examples worth looking at, each trying something different. Corn: These aren't just parties that hired a better graphic designer. These are parties that rethought the whole premise. Herman: First one: the Swedish Social Democrats in twenty eighteen. They did something that sounds obvious but almost nobody does — they released a separate document alongside the full manifesto. A twelve-page booklet they called "manifesto in plain Swedish." One policy per page. Plain language throughout. And crucially, each page had a section called "what this means for you. Corn: Which is the question the voter actually showed up with. Herman: It wasn't organized by ministry or budget category. It was organized around voter concerns. "Here's what we'll do about schools. Here's what it means for your kid." The full manifesto still existed for journalists and policy wonks, but the voter-facing document was designed from scratch for a completely different reader. Corn: Did it work? Herman: Post-election surveys showed measurably higher recall of policy positions among swing voters. Not a revolution, but a real effect. People who got the plain-Swedish booklet could actually name what the party stood for, which is more than you can say for most elections. Corn: They separated the internal document from the voter document, and the voter document actually did its job. That shouldn't be revolutionary, but apparently it is. Herman: Second case takes this even further. New Zealand Labour in twenty twenty. They produced a single A-four page — one sheet of paper — called a policy pledge card. Ten bullet-point commitments. Each one had a measurable target and a timeline. Not "we care about child poverty" but "we will lift X number of children above the poverty line by Y date. Corn: It's a contract, not a mood board. Herman: They distributed it door-to-door and online. The full manifesto existed — all the detailed policy work was there for anyone who wanted it — but the voter-facing document was radically simplified. What made this particularly interesting is that Jacinda Ardern's government then explicitly tied each budget line item back to those ten pledges. The pledge card became the accountability framework. Corn: Which closes the loop. The voter doesn't have to cross-reference a hundred-page manifesto against three years of budget announcements. The party did that work upfront and made it trackable. Herman: That's the move that separates a communication gimmick from a genuine structural fix. The simplified document wasn't just marketing — it was the architecture for governing. Every spending decision got measured against those ten lines. Corn: Far we've got two parties that solved the problem by creating a separate voter document. What about the third one? I'm guessing it's not more of the same. Herman: The third one is the cautionary tale. The German Pirate Party, active roughly two thousand nine to twenty thirteen. They pioneered what they called liquid democracy manifestos — policy positions drafted and voted on by party members through an online platform. Anyone could propose language, anyone could vote. The resulting documents were radically transparent. Corn: Radically unreadable, I assume. Herman: They solved the "written for insiders" problem completely — the documents reflected what members thought. But they created a new problem: no coherent narrative, no prioritization, no sense of what the party actually stood for above all else. A voter opening a Pirate Party manifesto got raw, unfiltered internal democracy. Which turns out to be about as appealing as it sounds. Corn: Transparency without editorial judgment is just a different kind of noise. Herman: That's the lesson. The Pirate Party proved you can't crowdsource your way to clarity. The Swedish and New Zealand examples worked because someone made decisions about what mattered most and how to say it. They treated the manifesto as a communication product that required curation, not just a policy document that required accuracy. Corn: Which connects back to what we said earlier about the two-audience problem. The Pirates eliminated the insider audience entirely by making everyone an insider. But that just meant nobody was thinking about the voter at all. Herman: That's the thread that ties all three cases together. The successes — Sweden and New Zealand — didn't just simplify. They separated the internal document from the voter document entirely. The full manifesto handles internal alignment, legal precision, media accountability. The voter document handles one thing: helping someone decide if this party represents them. Corn: Which means the best voter manifesto isn't a summary of the real manifesto. It's a different species of document. Herman: That's the counterintuitive insight. Most parties, when they try to improve, produce an executive summary of the full document. But a summary still inherits the structure, the priorities, and the language of the original. It's still organized around ministries and policy areas, not around voter concerns. The Swedish and New Zealand examples worked because they started from scratch with the voter in mind and built backward to the policy, not the other way around. Corn: The fix isn't "make it shorter." It's "write it for someone who isn't you. Herman: If you're a voter staring down an election and you actually want to know what a party stands for, the single most useful thing you can do is check whether they've produced a separate voter-facing document. If the only thing that exists is a fifty-page PDF written in committee-speak, that's not just bad communication — it's a signal. It tells you how that party sees you. Corn: The absence of a readable version is itself a piece of information about the party. It says "we didn't think you were worth the effort. Herman: If you're on the other side — if you're inside a party or advising one — the operational takeaway is uncomfortable for a lot of organizations. The voter document can't be written by the policy team. It has to be written by communicators who can say no to jargon, and it has to be tested on actual non-political humans before release. If your neighbor can't understand it over breakfast, it's not done. Corn: Which sounds obvious until you remember that most of these documents are written by people who've spent years marinating in the terminology and can no longer tell what's jargon and what's plain speech. You need someone outside the bubble to tell you that "fiscal headroom" means nothing to a normal person. Herman: This pattern isn't confined to politics. It shows up everywhere institutions try to talk to the public. Corporate sustainability reports — written for ESG analysts and investors, then companies wonder why consumers don't engage. Government public consultations — written in bureaucratic legalese, then officials are baffled that only lobbyists respond. Academic policy briefs — dense with discipline-specific framing, then researchers are frustrated that policymakers ignore them. Corn: The same structural mistake every time. You write for the people in the room, then you're surprised the people outside the room didn't show up. Herman: The fix is always the same thing. Separate the internal document from the public document. Different writers, different structure, different purpose. Don't summarize — reimagine. Corn: We've got a diagnosis and we've got examples of the cure. But I want to push on the thing we've been dancing around. Does any of this actually change votes? Herman: The honest answer is: modestly, and only for certain voters. The Swedish and New Zealand evidence shows real effects on swing voters and undecideds — people who are actually shopping. For partisans, the format barely matters. They've already decided, and they'll find confirmation in whatever document you give them. Corn: Which means better manifestos aren't going to heal polarization or convert the base of the other party. That's not what they're for. Herman: What they do is lower the cost of entry for the people who are trying to make an informed choice. It reduces what you might call the information tax on democratic participation. Right now, voting responsibly means either spending hours decoding committee prose or outsourcing your judgment to headlines and social media. A good voter manifesto gives you a third option. Corn: It's not about persuasion. It's about access. Making it possible for a willing voter to actually understand what they're being offered without needing a political science degree and an afternoon to spare. Herman: That's the real value. And it's modest, but in a democracy where trust is falling and participation is fragile, removing unnecessary friction from the act of being an informed citizen isn't a small thing. It's just not the kind of thing that makes headlines. Herman: There's a question that sits underneath all of this, and I'm not sure we can answer it yet. If every party woke up tomorrow and released a voter-friendly manifesto — plain language, one-pager, written for humans — would it actually change anything? Or is the format just a symptom of a deeper trust problem? Corn: That's the uncomfortable possibility. Voters might not believe the simplified version either, because they've stopped believing the people who wrote it. The format is fixable. The credibility gap is something else entirely. Herman: That's where the next few years get interesting. AI tools can already generate plain-language summaries of any document in seconds. The technical barrier to producing a good voter manifesto is about to drop to zero. Any party that wants to do this can do it with almost no effort. Corn: Which means the question stops being "can they" and becomes "will they." And the answer tells you everything about who the party thinks matters. Herman: If they still choose to publish nothing but a sixty-page committee document when the cost of creating a readable version is trivial, that's not a capacity problem. That's a statement of values. Corn: Here's where I'd land with Daniel's question. Next time you encounter a party's manifesto — whether it's an election season or just some document they've put out — ask yourself one question: who was this written for? If the answer isn't "me," that's data. It's not neutral. It's a choice. Herman: Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact. Hilbert: In nineteen thirty-eight, a Tasmanian civil engineer named John McIlwraith built a mechanical tide-predicting computer out of brass and steel that could calculate tide heights for any date within a nineteen-year cycle in under three minutes. A modern laptop can do the same calculation in roughly zero-point-zero-zero-zero-zero-three seconds. Corn:...right. Corn: If manifestos were redesigned for voters tomorrow, the real test wouldn't be whether they're clearer. It would be whether anyone trusts them enough to read them. That's the open question we're left with — and it's bigger than formatting. Herman: This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it helps. We'll be back soon. Corn: I'm Corn. Herman: I'm Herman Poppleberry. Talk to you next time.