At this point, a temptation arises.
If elections are better understood as value reconfigurations than meaning expressions, and if post-mortems systematically reconstruct meaning after the fact, then it is easy to conclude that the entire semantic framing of elections is simply mistaken—a persistent category error sustained by intellectual inertia.
But this would be too quick.
The more difficult question is not why the explanation is wrong, but why it is so stable.
Because it is.
Across jurisdictions, institutions, and media ecosystems, elections are consistently narrated as if they were fundamentally processes of meaning: persuasion, belief, interpretation, mandate, mandate failure, message resonance. Even when analysts acknowledge the importance of “non-policy factors” or “structural forces,” the explanatory centre of gravity almost always returns to meaning.
This persistence suggests that the fiction is not accidental.
It is functional.
To see this, we need to distinguish between two levels that are often conflated:
- the operational dynamics of electoral systems (value distributions, coordination thresholds, institutional cuts)
- the legitimation regime through which those dynamics are rendered acceptable, intelligible, and governable
Meaning belongs primarily to the second level.
Its function is not to describe what elections are doing, but to make what they do socially inhabitable.
A system governed by shifting, partially opaque distributions of value is difficult to live inside. It is difficult to stabilise trust in such a system if outcomes appear to emerge from processes that are diffuse, non-transparent, and not readily reducible to shared reasons.
Meaning provides a stabilising interface.
It performs three key functions.
1. Compression of complexity into narrative form
The pre-election field is high-dimensional, distributed, and only partially legible even to participants. Meaning compresses this into sequences of causes and reasons that can be publicly discussed.
What cannot be coordinated through shared understanding is translated into something that can be talked about as if it were coordinated through understanding.
This is not epistemic accuracy. It is communicative stabilisation.
2. Legitimation of the cut
The election, as a cut, produces exclusion. It deactivates trajectories of value and authorises a single configuration of coordination.
For this to be socially tolerable, the cut must appear not as arbitrary resolution but as meaningful outcome. The language of mandate, preference, and democratic expression functions here as a retroactive justification of discontinuity.
The system does not merely select; it must appear to have been selected for reasons.
Without this, the cut risks being perceived as sheer imposition.
3. Restoration of agency to participants
Perhaps most importantly, meaning restores a sense of agency to voters.
If outcomes are understood as effects of value dynamics that are only partially accessible to individuals, then the role of the voter becomes structurally ambiguous. They participate in a system whose global behaviour is not reducible to their intentions.
Meaning resolves this discomfort by reasserting a familiar model: individuals form beliefs, evaluate arguments, and choose accordingly. Even if imperfect, this model preserves the sense that agency is located in conscious interpretation.
In other words, meaning sustains the fiction of transparent agency within a non-transparent system.
Taken together, these functions explain the resilience of electoral meaning far more effectively than any account based on epistemic error alone.
The fiction persists not because it is needed to understand elections, but because it is needed to stabilise the relation between participants and a system that does not operate at the level of their understanding.
Meaning is not the engine of the system.
It is the interface layer that makes the system socially survivable.
From this perspective, post-election narratives are not failures of analysis. They are acts of maintenance. They repair the gap between what the system does and what participants can meaningfully say about it.
And so we arrive at a reversal of the usual critique.
It is not that analysts wrongly impose meaning on elections.
It is that elections require meaning in order to function as legitimate social operations at all.
Which leads to an uncomfortable conclusion:
If we removed the fiction, we would not simply obtain better understanding.
We would expose the system in a form that may no longer be narratively—or politically—stabilisable.
The question, then, is not whether the fiction is true.
But what would happen if it stopped being available.
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