Month: February 2008

Self-interest and public opinion

~ Andrew Norton ~ 16 Comments

Being a longtime political junkie and occasionally involved in campaigns I suggest that, putting the ideologues aside, the driving force in voting behaviour is perceived self-interest.

– commenter Graham today

I’m not so sure. Though there is a complex relationship between opinion on issues and voting behaviour, a self-interest hypothesis at best seriously under-explains opinion on numerous issues, and in some cases people hold opinions that seem contrary to their self-interest.

Self-interest under-explains opinion because there are many issues in which the voter (or poll respondent) has no personal material stake. People are passionate about the ‘sorry’ issue though, as the ‘practical reconciliation’ critics point out, it in itself will make no material difference to anyone. The republicans don’t argue that doing away with monarchy will make us richer, but that it will somehow make us feel more independent. The gay civil union/marriage issue cannot materially affect more than 2-3% of the population, and probably much less, yet most people seem to have a view on it. The government’s Tampa exercise was very popular, though most Australians live many hours flying time from where the boats come in, and most will probably never meet a refugee. The Iraq war is unpopular, even though few Australians know any soldier serving there and the cost has had no impact on daily life back home.
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Do ignorant voters matter?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 23 Comments

Over at Club Troppo, Ken Parish is lamenting the risks caused by voter ignorance. In his 2007 book The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan was even more pessimistic. According to Caplan, somewhat informed voters could be even worse than ignorant voters, because they indulge their wrong theories about the world – that tariffs create jobs, for example – and encourage politicians to implement bad policies.

That many, indeed most, voters have a poor grasp of politics and policy is an impossible-to-dispute proposition in political science. As Ken’s post indicates, the debate surrounds how much this matters, and he reports some of the research suggesting that voters use ‘heuristics’, information short-cuts, to arrive at conclusions that tend to be correct despite being based on minimal information.

I tend towards the more-optimistic democratic end of this debate, provided we start with a realistic idea of what kinds of questions voters can sensibly answer, and design institutions that limit voters’ capacity to provide policy answers to questions they don’t know enough to answer.
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Do conservatives dislike women’s shoes?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 50 Comments

A common trope for the conservative sophist is to claim that all the miseries of modern life were absent in the Edenic golden past, and therefore a return to living in the manner of our ancestors (eg. women barefoot and pregnant),…[emphasis added]

– LP blogger Mercurius

The claim that conservatives want to keep women ‘barefoot and pregnant’ is a feminist-leftist cliche, but it is a rather puzzling charge. The pregnant part I understand; that it is women’s role to have and raise kids is a reasonable caricature of conservative views. But barefoot? Despite having spent much time in my 20s reading conservatives, I recall no passages on the dangerous properties of women’s footwear. (Indeed, it was the feminists themselves who turned women’s shoes into something of a political issue, and in my student politics days it was lefties who used to wander around barefoot.)

Nor do conservatives typically idealise an ‘Edenic golden age’ before the ‘miseries of modern life’. According to another leftist cliche, they want to take us back to the 1950s, which is well into the period of ‘modern life’. (And indeed it is leftists who who get taken in by ‘noble savage’ stories about an idyllic life before the corrupting materialism of modern life, and condemn conservatives for their lack of sympathy for traditional Aboriginal life, in which women really were barefoot.)

My many books of word and phrase origins fail to help explain ‘barefoot and pregnant’, but Wikipedia suggests that:
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Is education really Australia’s biggest services export?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

According to reports in this morning’s papers, drawing on Monday’s ABS international trade figures, education is now Australia’s biggest services export, overtaking tourism by nearly $1 billion for 2007 ($12.5 billion vs $11.5 billion).

But as the ABS doesn’t follow tourists or students around counting how much they spend, both these figures are estimates of their expenditure while in Australia. The tourism figures are based on the International Visitor Survey, which asks departing international travellers various questions, including about their spending. It is an on-going survey.

The student data, by contrast, is updated much less regularly. It is based on the Survey of International Students Spending (pdf), last conducted in 2004-5, and updated according to the CPI.
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The Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow, entrant two

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

Though not quite in the same league as my Ernie, my friend Simon Caterson is the first entrant in Lavartus Prodeo’s Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow. The idea is to highlight arguments built on tenuous links, and Simon is entered for managing to jump from a discussion of factual errors in Ishmael Beah‘s book about his time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone to the overwillingness of baby boomers to believe the Samoan research of Margaret Mead.

It is quite a leap, with the thread tying it together being that there are some stories people just want to believe. But the examples of fictional non-fiction given in Simon’s article are too varied to give the article the focus on readers it needed for the Mead case not to appear, at least to a certain kind of vigilant mind, as being there for some other reason. Most of the article is about authors, who range from outright frauds like Norma Khouri, to people like Ishmael Beah who get some details wrong but still have a compelling story, to Margaret Mead who it seems was more the victim of a hoax than a perpetrator.

But none of this is what really caused upset at LP. It was the suspicion that Simon thinks ‘sexual freedom is unnatural and wrong, and you should all stop it now’. And that required a leap in the argument worthy of making LP the second entrant in the Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow. So we go from these remarks by Simon:

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Will Labor pin inflation blame on the Coalition?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 54 Comments

Wayne Swan has been working hard over the last few days to blame inflation on the previous government. But will the public believe him?

In the Newspoll series of questions on which party is better to handle various issues, inflation has been one of the Coalition’s strengths. Of the 43 times Newspoll has asked about inflation since 1990, the Coalition has been rated as better 41 times, with an average lead of a huge 17.7%. One of the exceptions was the Downer leadership meltdown in late 1994 which affected all Liberal issue ratings, the other was a smaller wide dip in July 1992 (can anyone remember what was happening that month?).

If both Labor victories in Newspoll were because of self-inflicted Coalition political wounds, it means that Labor could not win the inflation issue on its merits despite having inflation below 2% for a couple of years in the early 1990s.

Though the Liberal winning margin seems sensitive to inflation performance – for example, it dipped when inflation spiked after the GST was introduced – this seems to be an issue that the Liberals ‘own’. They still had a big lead despite the GST effect.
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The Coalition’s self-defeating political expenditure laws

~ Andrew Norton ~ 16 Comments

If I am put in the dock for failing to disclose ‘political expenditure’ to the Australian Electoral Commission, it is comforting to know that every other editor in the country who published an article on the 2007 election will be there with me.

On Friday the AEC published the political expenditure returns (here, and a larger number here who submitted too late to be included in the database), and not a single newspaper or magazine has sent in its accounts. They must be banking on the AEC guidelines, rather than the strict letter of the law, applying to their ‘political expenditure’.

This legislation was set up as bureaucratic harassment of left-wing groups, and on that it has succeeded. Of the 49 political groups who have dislosed expenditure, 48 are left-wing. The one exception was ‘Friends of Indi’, a Liberal group that reported $14,263.42 in expenditure (pdf). Two pollsters also put in returns.

While I still believe that this provision of the Electoral Act should be repealed, the disclosures did generate media, and presumably public, interest (to be distinguished from the public interest, of course.) Melbourne’s ABC TV news led on Friday night with $20 million worth of union expenditure on their WorkChoices campaign. But of course the fact that unions spent huge amounts of money advertising against WorkChoices could only be news to people who exclusively watch the ABC, since it was unavoidable on all the commercial stations. (It’s a nice irony; right-wingers should have taken refuge from left-wing propaganda by switching to the ABC.)
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Does a ‘conservative’ argument make someone a conservative?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 15 Comments

Conservative isn’t a political philosophy. It’s a political position which is more about change (or the desire for none) which picks and chooses ideologies to suit its cause.

– commenter John Humphreys today.

If conservatism was just about change, then it could be found, and is found, in a range of ideologies. In 2006, for example, leftist intellectual David McKnight tried to make a case for parallels between the green political movement and conservatism.

While I argued at the time that a green-conservative political alliance was a fanciful idea, this wasn’t because the greens lack ‘conservative’ attitudes to environmental change. On that subject, there is no group in Australia more conservative than the greens. Indeed, many of them could be classified as reactionaries as well as conservatives, wanting to roll back industrial society as well as preventing it from expanding any further. But on other issues, the greens tend to adopt conventional left-wing goals of greater equality that are not ‘conservative’ in their implications.

Many others on the left take a ‘conservative’ position on some actual or proposed changes. Continue reading “Does a ‘conservative’ argument make someone a conservative?” →