The Fiction of Electoral Meaning — Part II: Value as the Currency of Coordination

If elections are not governed by meaning, then what does govern them?

To answer this, we need a term that has been consistently misused, moralised, and semantically overloaded to the point of near uselessness: value.

So let us strip it back.

Value is not what people believe.

It is not what people care about.

It is not what people mean.

Value is differential capacity to coordinate action.

That is: the extent to which an actor, position, or configuration can organise, stabilise, and propagate patterns of behaviour across a social field.

This definition has a number of consequences, all of which cut against the grain of standard political analysis.

First, value is operational, not interpretive. It does not reside in propositions, arguments, or beliefs. It resides in the ability to make things happen—to align actions, to attract support, to persist as a viable trajectory within a field of competing possibilities.

Second, value is relational. It is not a property of isolated individuals or ideas, but an emergent effect of positioning within a network of interactions. An actor has value only insofar as others are disposed to coordinate with it, defer to it, or align around it.

Third, value is gradient and distributed. It does not appear in discrete units, nor does it accumulate in a linear fashion. It flows, concentrates, dissipates, and reconfigures across the field. It is continuously in motion, even when it appears stable.

If we take this seriously, then much of what is conventionally described in terms of meaning can be reinterpreted more precisely as movements of value.

Consider polling.

Polling is typically treated as a measurement of opinion—as a snapshot of what voters believe or intend. But its functional role in a campaign is quite different. Polling acts as a signal of viability. It indicates which configurations of coordination are becoming more or less likely to actualise. A rise in polling does not simply reflect support; it generates further alignment by altering perceptions of what is possible.

In this sense, polling is not descriptive but performative. It redistributes value by reweighting expectations.

Consider endorsements.

An endorsement is rarely persuasive in a semantic sense. Voters do not typically adopt the reasoning of the endorser. What occurs instead is a transfer of coordination weight. The endorser lends their accumulated capacity—trust, recognition, network position—to the endorsed. This is not an exchange of meanings but a reconfiguration of value.

Consider media coverage.

Its influence is often analysed in terms of framing and narrative. But its more immediate effect lies in the distribution of attention. To amplify something is to increase its weight within the field—to render it more available for coordination. To ignore something is to reduce its effective value, regardless of its semantic content.

Across all these cases, meaning appears as a surface phenomenon—a modulation that may or may not affect the underlying dynamics. What matters is not what is said, but what shifts.

This is why campaigns that are semantically incoherent can succeed: they manage to accumulate and stabilise value despite the absence of a clear meaning structure. And it is why semantically coherent campaigns can fail: their meanings do not translate into coordination weight.

The analytic mistake, then, is not that meaning is irrelevant. It is that meaning is treated as primary. In practice, it is at most one mechanism among many for modulating value—and often a weak one.

To think in terms of value is to reorient analysis toward the conditions of possibility for coordination.

Which actors are becoming more or less viable?

Which alignments are stabilising, and which are fragmenting?

Where is value concentrating, and where is it dissipating?

These are not questions of interpretation. They are questions of distribution.

And once posed, they begin to reveal a different picture of the electoral process—not as a contest of meanings, but as a shifting topology of weighted potentials, in which some trajectories become increasingly capable of actualising, while others fade into irrelevance.

The language of meaning struggles here, because it seeks clarity, coherence, and articulation.

Value, by contrast, is indifferent to all three.

It does not need to make sense in order to operate. It only needs to hold.