‘Take Two and See me in the Morning’: Reflections on the Political Placebo Effect

Abstract

The use of medical metaphors in politics is a well-honed rhetorical strategy. We talk of ‘diagnosing’ political and social ills; of governments having to ‘prescribe tough medicine’; and of politicians ‘sugar coating’ policies the public doesn’t want to swallow. Sometimes these metaphors help clarify the political world. Other times the rhetorical comparison hides more truth than it reveals. We ask whether the idea of a ‘political placebo’ — or more precisely, a political placebo effect — can be usefully applied to the social sciences. Up to this point, the idea of a ‘political placebo’ has been used only haphazardly (and with little conceptual clarity) to describe cynical political efforts to sell snake oil to the masses. In contrast, we argue that a more refined conceptualization of a political placebo effect — one which understands the placebo effect as a phenomenon in which certain actions and words by medical or scientific authorities lead to an observable effect other than those that would have been predicted on the basis of the dominant predictive scientific and medical models — would be a useful tool for social scientific reflection. When applied to the political realm, such a concept (with its attentiveness to the multi-faceted effects of structures of meaning, emotions and the complex interaction between mind and body) helps us understand a wide variety of situations in which primarily mental stimuli — e.g. language, concepts, policy ideas — have important and observable effects other than those that would be predicted by the dominant predictive rational-actor theories. This article develops this conceptualization of the political placebo effect by (a) synthesizing three of the main findings of contemporary scientific explanations of medical placebos; (b) identifying how these characteristics should also define the concept of a political placebo effect; and (c) demonstrating with reference to two examples how such a concept can help us understand specific political events and situations more convincingly than would otherwise be the case.