Why the loudest voices don’t always define the electorate

By Maiesha Umair, PoliMonitor’s Client Services Officer

PoliMonitor’s new Client Services Officer Maiesha, explores the gap between political identity and policy preference and what it means for reading the public mood, in her first blog below.

It’s easy to think we’re living in an age of political extremes. Online debate certainly doesn’t make it feel any calmer, the loudness of which reinforces the feeling that politics is polarising everywhere.  And while this may be a compelling narrative, it risks painting a much more nuanced electorate in broad strokes. 

Even during my studies, I often wondered if this picture of extremes really matches how voters behave day to day.

Anecdotally, I often encountered people who described themselves in dramatic ideological terms, yet voiced views that were strikingly traditional or centrist when pressed. The contrast was often so stark it often felt less like inconsistency and more like performance for an audience. From there, a far more compelling line of inquiry emerged: the tension between political identity and policy preference, and the gap between the politics people show and the policies they quietly favour.

To make sense of this, it helps to picture what I’ve come to call the ‘hidden moderate’: not the radical voters who lose their nerve when policy specifics appear but those who speak confidently in partisan terms while quietly holding more measured views. And at the heart of this the difference between the political identity we project and the policies we actually want from tax to energy to public services. They operate in tandem, although not always in a way that produces a clean or predictable alignment.

Psychology offers a clue as to why. 

Political identity often seeps into personal identity, shaping how we see ourselves and, perhaps even more powerfully, how we hope others will see us. Our views also mirror those around us be it friends, family, colleagues, whoever we spend time with.  In that context, admitting to a moderate or cross-cutting view can feel less like nuance and more like a small act of personal defection. So, even when our instincts are measured, the noise stays loud.  Therefore what is seemingly a contradiction simply becomes the way social identity and political behaviour negotiate with one another - a natural choreography between the politics we show and the policies we quietly support. 

Finding a clear example is tricky: almost every policy has already been claimed by a party or ideology.  Mention tax, housing, climate or education and people fall back to their partisan script, even when their personal view is more nuanced. 

So the only way to see the underlying pattern clearly is to look at issues that identity has not yet fully captured.

Emerging tech like AI and digital governance is a rare window into views less shaped by party lines. Most people have not yet rehearsed a partisan script for them. Ask about guardrails for algorithms, data transparency or online safety and you tend to get answers that are thoughtful, fairly cautious and rarely rooted in ideological reflex. Add a party label and suddenly the answer isn’t about the policy but the camp. People begin responding to the tribal cue rather than the policy itself. Remove the cue and the reaction softens again. The scripted performance fades and the measured instinct underneath becomes visible. This doesn’t mean people are devoid of ideological commitments; it simply means those commitments can look different depending on the context in which they’re activated.

What makes this striking is how quickly this shift can occur.

The content of the policy rarely changes; only the identity cue changes and that alone can reshape the opinion people express and the confidence with which they express it. It suggests that voters are not driven primarily by fixed stances but by context, cues and the social meaning embedded in how a view is framed. This pattern also complicates how we interpret “public opinion” itself and it shows why polls can mislead: many views are more performative than fixed.

The implications of this are wider than they appear on the surface.

It suggests that much of what we call political division is less about deep ideological conflict and more about the social incentives that shape how we speak. It explains how online debate can feel violently polarised even when most people still hold a mixture of moderate, cross-cutting and context-dependent preferences. It also shows how easily political institutions, campaigns and even the media can misread the electorate, mistaking identity-driven rhetoric for settled belief.

If anything, this should prompt a rethinking of how politics is communicated. When political actors speak only to the loudest identities, they risk overlooking the quieter preferences that actually guide how people make decisions. Similarly, when campaigns rely exclusively on signalling allegiance, they may harden identities and shrink the space for nuance. 

And when you widen the lens further, it paints a very different picture of democratic life.

It challenges the assumption that we are drifting inevitably towards the edges. It suggests that the electorate is not losing its centre so much as hiding it in plain sight under layers of identity, expectation and noise. It reveals how social belonging, not just ideology, shapes political expression. And it hints that the health of a democracy depends not only on the policies it debates but on the social pressures that decide how freely people feel able to voice nuance.

Examining this lens is a reminder that when the moment feels overheated, much of that flame is fanned from the top, and beneath the noise, most of us are still seeking the same basic things, however differently we express them.  It offers a way of understanding voters that goes beyond the usual categories of left and right, or liberal and conservative. And more than anything, it captures something recognisably human in how we navigate politics. We want to belong. We want to be understood. We want to express who we are. Yet beneath all that, we also want to make sense of the world in practical, reasonable terms. The tension between those instincts is not a flaw in democracy.

It is part of what makes political psychology so endlessly fascinating and why it is an area I care about deeply.