Politics is as much a game of psychology and neuroscience, as economics. In a recent article that briefs upon the victory of AAP in the Delhi elections 2020, it was indicated that this could be due to classical conditioning. In classical conditioning you pair a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus (US) that elicits an unconditioned response (UR). But after repeated pairing this neutral stimulus will now become a conditioned stimulus (CS) that can elicit a conditioned response (CR) from the subject.
So the take away being, repeated pairings of effective policies on water, electricity, school and healthcare with the neutral stimulus (AAP), the public has been conditioned to turn to AAP when it comes to the above mentioned public issues. While I agree the association is extremely important to win the voter’s choice, it does not completely explain what tipped the scales decisively.
AAP is a fairly recent entry into the game, how is it that none of the other parties have tapped onto these obvious voter reservoirs. AAP planned their missions and executed them periodically and made sure that the benefits of the schemes percolated to a large population of the public. This kept them fairly popular and immune to response extinction.
The more AAP managed to associate themselves with these indispensable commodities, the stronger their associative strength became. Hence according to the Rescorla-Wagner Model the prediction has been acquired and established. When there are multiple/compound stimuli (other parties) then the weights have to be distributed. The weights almost equating to ‘trust’ the public has on the different parties implementing schemes. Since AAP has increasingly been showcasing results popular among the public (no prediction error), there requires no more learning what the other parties have to offer, similar to the results of compound stimulus in Kamin’s blocking effect.
While this victory could be layered with several conditioning paradigms, it can be misleading to attribute this alone as a factor. At the end of the day there are several other ‘affectively charged’ factors that play in to seal the deal.
