Political Emotional Labour
“I think that MPs are more at risk to themselves, and more exposed, because the very skills that enable them to perform […] to make their way through politics, are the very same behaviours that could see them come undone emotionally, particularly when it’s a very high-pressured environment.” – Former member of the UK House of Commons explained to the Silent MP.
Politicians, as employees of the public, must be able to manage the emotions and expectations of others. By its very nature, the relational work of politics means politicians must take into account not only the thoughts and emotions of colleagues and citizens they meet, but also the thousands of people that they represent that they have never met.
Political anthropologist Emma Crewe believes that politicians are similar to mental health workers, often absorbing the negative emotions and subsequent mental health issues that frequently present themselves when dealing with problems in constituency surgeries, for example.
This means that politicians must be able to manage the emotions and expectations of others. Politics is an emotional labour, there is no doubt about it. As a politician, it is your job, in fact, to institutionalise citizen experiences into policy processes to ensure governments deliver for them as promised in the election campaign. Emotional labour is, simply, a facet of popular sovereignty in action.
Looking at other state roles requiring a significant amount of emotional labour, individual and systematic support structures exist to enable these professionals to perform sustainably. In the UK at least, mental healthcare professionals are offered on-going counselling, managers are prompted to check-in systematically, and systems are in place to provide extra-support and temporary time outs when need.
At the individual level, public servants in high emotional labour roles tend to take advantage of what is known as absence behaviour or time abuse, for example taking longer to do a mundane task or taking longer breaks. This works to limit the amount of emotional labour they have to perform and, in a sense, recharge. These workers are also often able to take advantage of sympathy and support from others, both internal and external to the workplace.
Politicians, meanwhile, cannot do this. Round the clock public scrutiny results in politicians having to ‘perform’ more often than not. Dr James Weinberg found that 58% of politicians reported regularly feeling as though they had to be ‘artificial’, or ‘professionally friendly’.
On top of this, support networks in parliament and politics in general are notoriously poor. Peer support is also a risky business. Sharing feelings in politics is often characterised within the cutthroat sphere of governance as a show of political vulnerability (more on this to come…). As one politician explained “it is a highly untrusting world, there are very few people you can genuinely trust. Because all experience shared, at a certain time, is a tradeable commodity”.
What this points to is the danger of emotional labour in politics. Emotional labour risks the emotional and mental wellbeing of politicians. Every individual has the agency to self-care. Every individual has the agency to develop appropriate wellbeing strategies to sustain their professional performance. Yet, the reality is that alongside greater levels of emotional risk, political agency for self-care and wellbeing has many more barriers than for ordinary individuals, and yet they are not ordinary citizens.
It is in everyone’s interest, not only for the individual politician, for us to raise awareness of this special category of political emotional labour, to try to understand it more comprehensively, and in turn create a tailored approach to encouraging and systematically enabling emotionally and cognitively sustainable high quality political performances.
