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30 years ago in May, I stood for election—and was crushed. With the benefit of time, I can now joke that I owe a debt of gratitude to the 95.9% of voters in North Belfast who chose someone else, thereby liberating me to pursue my subsequent career.
Those were extraordinary days. Northern Ireland was in the midst of a peace process that would ultimately bring an end to decades of political violence that had shaped political life for as long as I could remember. My own party was committed to bridging the divide between the two main communities. In a context defined by polarisation, that proved a difficult sell, the result was, inevitably, disappointing.
Years later, I came across a novel set in mid-1990s Belfast in which one character serves as campaign manager for my then party at the time, and another stands as its candidate in North Belfast. In reality, in 1996, both of those people were me. My fictional counterparts fared rather better than I did.
Not everyone aspires to enter frontline politics—particularly at a time when, in many countries, it appears more polarised and more vicious than ever before. Nor does every system offer genuine opportunities for open participation. Most of us contribute to society in other ways: through our professions, our communities and our families. That is both meaningful and, for many people, sufficient.
Yet, democracies depend on people being willing to step forward and operate the system. Those who do so deserve recognition and respect, even if my own campaigning days are long behind me. Participating in an election campaign does something unique: it brings you into direct contact with the full breadth of society. It exposes you, quickly and sometimes brutally, to the diversity of views, priorities and frustrations that shape public life. It is, in a very real sense, a refining fire.
That experience proved invaluable in my subsequent career in public affairs. Our work is often framed in terms of ideas and alliances. We seek to persuade political stakeholders through argument—demonstrating the merits of a course of action—and through coalition-building—showing that credible actors support it. Both are essential. Policymakers want to reach sound conclusions, and they want to do so in the company of trusted voices.
But there is a third dimension that is sometimes underappreciated: the electoral reality. Elected officials are not simply arbiters of competing arguments; they are individuals whose authority ultimately derives from voters. Most are thinking, at least in part, about reelection. Those who have lost their office often hope to return. This does not diminish their integrity—it reflects the system within which they operate.
Understanding that system from the inside shapes your engagement with it. Campaigning offers a practical education that no briefing note can fully replicate. It teaches message discipline: the ability to distil complexity into something that resonates beyond policy circles. It provides grounding in public sentiment that polling alone cannot capture. It reveals the importance of timing, narrative and local context, factors that frequently shape political decisions as much as, if not more than, abstract argument.
It also builds a degree of empathy that is difficult to acquire otherwise. Knocking on doors, participating in debates, meeting voters in all settings—these experiences leave an imprint. They remind you that political choices are made under pressure, in public and often with incomplete information. They also remind you that voters are rugged individuals who rarely fit into neat analytical categories.
For those working in public affairs, this perspective can be invaluable. It sharpens strategic judgment and can make engagement more effective. Being able to look an elected official in the eye and say, truthfully, “I have been there” helps to establish a different kind of conversation, one grounded not only in persuasion, but in shared experience.
None of this suggests that people should seek elected office simply as a training ground for advisory work. Nor does it diminish the importance of strong arguments or credible coalitions—they remain essential. But in a field where success often depends on understanding how decisions are made—not just how we may think that they ought to be made—lived experience of the electoral process can provide a distinctive edge.
Democracy, at its best, is a system that connects decisions to the lived realities of citizens. Campaigning—whether successful or not—forces you into that connection. It exposes you to its pressures, its unpredictability and, occasionally, its disappointments. But it also leaves you with something more durable: a clearer sense of what politics looks like from the inside.
