Comments on: When do voters make their decision?

By: Sacha

Sacha — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 01:27:23 +0000

“These people are the know-nothings, which is why the campaign is important because it uses other ways of communicating with them: advertising in TV shows they do watch, direct mail, telephone. These methods are only occasionally used outside the campaign.”

TV political advertising in the weeks leading up to the election is probably targeted towards the “know-nothings” - which explains its often blunt crassness.

By: David Rubie

David Rubie — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:43:09 +0000

Peter hindrup wrote:
Is what we are seeing the beginning of the reaction against anything branded Liberal?

Not by a long shot. The NSW liberals need to find a moderate leader like Brogden - he’d have romped it in. They have made themselves unelectable with branch stacking tactics reminiscent of the worst of Labor and are now paying the price.

By: peter hindrup

peter hindrup — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:32:33 +0000

Not too sure about that last post, Andrew. You could not possibly vote for Labour this election. (NSW) And the Libs? More or less invisible.
What is left? I haven’t seen any publicity in our electorate from whatever/whoever else is running.
Therefore I will decide when I see the names on the form.
First vote will go to whoever I think least likely to recoup their deposit. Libs/Labour, Labour/Libs will go on the bottom.
When the choice is disaster vs disaster there is no point in being interested.
However a question: the polls are predicting a Labour win. By any rational measure Labour is unelectable. And while the Libs are not offering anything, they do not come across as that much worse — how could they be?
Is what we are seeing the beginning of the reaction against anything branded Liberal?

By: Andrew Norton

Andrew Norton — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 02:12:26 +0000

“Also, as the campaign for 2007 started about a month ago, the traditional questions about voting behaviour due to ‘the’ campaign are becoming more irrelevant.”

Lisa - I don’t agree with this. Certainly, as I argued in the post, most people have already largely made up their minds before the campaign. But the campaign is important for reaching those with little interest in politics who will not being paying too much attention to who Kevin Rudd has lunch with or what shares Santo Santoro owns, even if the political class is whipping itself into a small frenzy.

If you do an AES cross-tabulation, you will see that 40% of those who claim their interest in politics is ‘not much’ or ‘none’ say they decided their vote in the last week, compared to 13% of those who say have a ‘good deal’ of interest in politics. 70% of those with little interest in politics say they paid not much or no attention to election news on TV.

These people are the know-nothings, which is why the campaign is important because it uses other ways of communicating with them: advertising in TV shows they do watch, direct mail, telephone. These methods are only occasionally used outside the campaign.

By: Lisa

Lisa — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 01:32:17 +0000

It has taken me two years to master the crostabulation of the AES studies. They are the only ones worth looking at for study on national voting behaviour.
Also, as the campaign for 2007 started about a month ago, the traditional questions about voting behaviour due to ‘the’ campaign are becoming more irrelevant. It is great to see this being discussed as I study the value of preferences and they hype behind so called ‘backroom deals’. The campaign will be running hot this week in APH, now that’s entertainment!
with respect
Lisa

By: conrad

conrad — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 20:26:12 +0000

I wondered a bit more about that Boris, so I looked at the relationships between the absolute swing with the absolute liberal/labor vote (i.e., whether electorates evenly split had a bigger swing) in the recent Vic elections. I chopped out the greens. THe overall swing wasn’t huge, so there could be better data sets to look at.

http://www.vec.vic.gov.au/electorateswing.html

We might expect a negative correlation if more marginal electroates have greater swings (i.e., the closer to a 50-50 split, the bigger the swing will be). There is such a relationship , but its basically just noise r = -.11.
The distribution looks a bit better than the number suggests, with all the extreme values in the right places, which suggests to me that there are few very blue ribbon electorates that don’t have many of these voters, but as for the rest, the swinging voters are nicely distributed.

By: Boris

Boris — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 06:00:56 +0000

Conrad, I disagree with your first sentence but agree with the last one. This is what I meant: if you see in successive elctions that the overall voting pattern changed by only, say 0.1%, this means that few voters changed their mind. Of course, it could be that 25% changed their vote, but this was precisely cancelled by another 25% whose vote changed in an opposite way. But statistically this is extremely unlikely.

By: conrad

conrad — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 01:57:50 +0000

Actually, I’m not sure that variability amongst voters and the stability of an electorate have much to do with each other. One is to do with the means and the other the SD (or whatever measure of spread you like). It would be quite possible to have quite decent spreads in many blue ribbon electorates, but as long as there is a big enough group of people that vote one way, it doesn’t matter. The amount that the means shift from election to election is probably a more worthwhile measure to look at (particularily when you get landslides for one party, in which case most of the “undecided” voters are voting one way, so you should be able to get an estimate of the real number that are willing to change parties, vs. the number that claim they do in polls).

By: Andrew Norton

Andrew Norton — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 21:12:36 +0000

Bryan - Your substantive point was correct - there are flip-floppers who make life very difficult for pollsters. I was just putting an argument as to why there are fewer of them than many people believe. I saw Andrew L’s comment, but I think he understates the between-election ‘volatility’ while again being substantively correct that most people vote consistently - which is why we get the stability that Boris noted. Another point to keep in mind is that volatility in the actions of individual voters does not translate into election day results volatility on the same scale, as to some extent voters changing in opposite directions cancel each other out. I wrote a post on this last year.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 14:10:11 +0000

Andrew - I suspect you are right in your analysis, The Newspoll question turns on the word “finally”, as in finally decided. I suspect that many people have a tendency, perhaps a strong tendency to vote for a party, but at the same time reservations about some elements of what that party stands for, or the personalities within the party. Hence in prospect they indicate a strong likelihood to vote a particular way, and in retrospect a late final decision.

Andrew Leigh has already pinged me for that paragraph in my post. I should explain, I was not seeking to make statement about the importance of the campaign. I was seeking to explain some of the contributors to volatility in the polls.

In retrospect, I may have over-reached in using the broad Newspoll statistics to support my argument. Perhaps the more meaningful figure for my argument would have been the AES 20% who do not align themselves (even provisionally) to a particular party. It is these people (and perhaps others with a weak party alignment) whose indeterminate (perhaps flip-flopping) state between elections contributes to the volatility of the polls.

Let me finish with an anecdote. Last election, someone in my workplace told me on the Friday night immediately before the election that s/he planned to vote Labor. On the Monday morning immediately after the election, s/he told me that s/he had voted Liberal. This sort of person, who can change their mind within 24 hours and largely on whim, is a nightmare for pollsters.