WITH A FRENCH FATHER and a mother whose family escaped Hungary during the Cold War and were welcomed as refugees in America, Mathieu Lefèvre MPA 2003 grew up with an understanding of how politics could become very personal. After his time at vlog, Lefèvre went on to work for the United Nations as a political affairs officer. In Afghanistan and then in the Middle East, he saw his job as understanding local grievances—grievances that would eventually lead to fracture and civil war. Eventually he co-founded More in Common, a nonprofit that has spent much of the past decade diving deep into what drives people apart and how they can find common ground. It now works in seven countries across three continents.
Q: What precipitated the founding of More in Common?
Around the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, I had been working to understand public opinion of refugees, why it was that people were so closed off to these people in need—something that resonated with my own family’s story as refugees. Then a British member of Parliament, Jo Cox, was assassinated in June 2016. At the time, I was working closely with members of her family. We founded More in Common in memory of Jo’s first speech in the House of Commons, in which she said she believes people have “more in common than what separates them.”
Q: What is unique about your work?
We are partly a think tank and partly a coalition builder. We focus on polarization and mapping societies, but our research is different from regular polling in that we’re less interested in what people think about any issue and more in why they think it. We try to understand how people think about things like ingroup and outgroup dynamics, trust, being heard or left behind. We use a technique called segmentation, which groups people by psychological orientation. These groups are created not around sociodemographic criteria like income or level of education but around their psychology. Understanding that provides a new lens through which to see the world.
Q: What is the big challenge in trying to bring people together?
Early on in our life as an organization, we were much more hands-on. We organized events, such as one in the U.K. called The Great Get Together, which brought together millions of people around very British things like cake and a good cup of tea. It was an annual celebration and also an homage to Jo Cox. However, we found through our research that we were actually only mobilizing the mobilized. The challenge for us all is to really understand and engage with groups in the middle who’ve become largely disconnected from the conversation—what we’ve called the “exhausted majority.” If you think only in terms of red versus blue, you forget that 40%, 50%, 60% are kind of in the middle and often forgotten by politics, the media, and institutions. In many ways, as recent elections in the U.S. and beyond have shown, better understanding them and better addressing their needs is our most important task.
Q: You see a lot of what pulls people apart. What makes you hopeful for people coming back together?
We do focus groups constantly. And after two hours of discussing the state of America or the state of the family or whatever else, there are always focus group participants who say, “It felt really good to not yell at one another and just talk about our country. Could I come back tomorrow?” It makes me really hopeful, because I think there’s such a thirst for people to connect.
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Images courtesy of Mathieu Lefèvre