Month: September 2009

How much did people trust the bank deposit guarantee?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

Despite the federal government’s bank deposit guarantee, the RBA’s annual report showed that there was a run on the banks last year, requiring it to print more $50 and $100 notes.

Though demand has since eased off, the growth in currency in circulation at the end of the financial year was still about three times what would otherwise have been expected (even the usual annual 5% growth is surprisingly high, given the massive increase in use of electronic transfers).

It’s easy for voters to say in surveys that they don’t trust politicians, but here was a case when they were backing their opinions with real costs and risks to themselves. They would rather sacrifice the interest they might have earned and take the 3% or so risk of being burgled than believe either the banks or Wayne Swan.

Empty pews, 1967-2007

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

The Coalition has a stable advantage over Labor among churchgoers. But Pentecostals aside, is this a diminishing asset? The figure below shows that it is.

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Sources: 1967-1979, Australian National Political Atttidues Survey; 1984-88 National Social Science Survey; 1990-2007 Australian Election Survey.

I’ve recorded the answers as given in the surveys, but I think the rise of ‘never’ attend actually occurred in the 1970s. The difficulty is the 1979 ANPA poll, which I suspect is a bit of a rogue survey. In addition to the ‘never’ response, it has a huge 25% ‘not applicable’ response, which matches the proportion in the previous question saying they have no religion. But this no religion response is much higher than the 1981 census or the 1984 NSSS, both of which have about 10% of the population without any religious affiliation. My estimate is that about 25% of the population never attended a religious service in the late 1970s, up from 16% in 1967.

The trend towards lower weekly religious attendance seems to have slowed to a near stall in the 1990s and 2000s, while the never attending group has continued to grow. They now outnumber regular attenders by more than three to one. These are the electoral realities of religion today, not a much smaller number of enthusiastic Pentecostals.

Were the Pentecostals important to Howard?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 16 Comments

Last week, commenter Krystian suggested that flat figures on party support by religious attendance suggested that groups like Hillsong had little influence on support for the Howard government. In the data I have, I can’t directly examine Hillsong, which is buried in the broader category of Pentecostal. But we can roughly estimate the electoral impact of Pentecostal churches.

As the figure below suggests, Pentecostal numbers have been increasing. Between 1996 and 2006, Pentecostal numbers increased by 26%, compared to a 10% increase in other religions. However, they are still a small proportion of all those declaring a religion in the census. In that decade, their market share went from 1.07% to 1.23%.

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Source: ABS, census, various years. Continue reading “Were the Pentecostals important to Howard?” →

Which party do churchgoers support?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

People who regularly attend church (or synagogue, mosque etc) are likely to be more influenced by religion than those with only a nominal religious affiliation. On the theory that most religions tend towards cultural conservatism, I’d expect frequent churchgoers to be more likely to support the Coalition than Labor.

The figure below, which looks at people who say they attend a religious service once a week or more, confirms this hypothesis. The more interesting aspect of it is that there appears to be almost no trend in this over 40 years.

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Sources: 1967, 1979, Australian National Political Attitudes Survey; 1990-2007 Australian Election Survey.

If we put the 1967 Labor result down to the complexity of dealing with the DLP in that year (broken down results: 30% Labor, 9% DLP), and put the 1990 Coalition result down to some rogue factors, we have virtually flat lines over four decades.

Given all that’s been going on in changing religious observance, along with wider social and political changes, this aspect of religion and politics seems extraordinarily stable.

A better higher ed prediction

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

Though my prediction on science applications wasn’t on target, my prediction on low SES enrolments is doing better.

The basic theory is that low SES applicants are disproportionately affected by movements in the number of places in the higher education system, so that when the number goes down they get a declining share of the total, and when it goes up they get an increasing share.

This is because low SES school students tend to get lower average Year 12 results, the currency for ‘buying’ admission to university. Other things being equal, a contraction in places causes admission requirements to rise and prices low SES applicants out, while an expansion causes admission requirements to fall and allows low SES students to buy more places.

The 2008 enrolment statistics released yesterday show that commencing domestic undergraduate numbers were up 1.5% on the previous year, allowing a modest increase in low SES* share from 16.95% to 17.01% (overall this series is very stable; most years rounding makes it flat).

Breaking the statistics down further, in the public universities 17.3% of commencing undergraduates are from low SES backgrounds, compared to 15.2% in non-public university providers- even though most of these students are paying full fees.

* This is using the postcode measure of low SES; permanent residence in a postcode in the lowest 25% according to the ABS Index of Education and Occupation.

Which party do Catholics support?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

Pollytics blog today reports on an Essential Research survey on religion and party affiliation. It finds that the religious divide in Australian politics, with Catholics tending to favour Labor, and Protestants tending to favour the Coalition, remains alive. According to this survey, 50% of Catholics support Labor and only 29% support the Coalition.

Other surveys, however, find that among Catholics the Coalition has been catching up on Labor. The chart below tracks 40 years of data using the party id (”think of yourself as Labor, Liberal…etc”) question rather than which party the respondent supports at the current time. Pollytics says that Essential’s question was which party the respondent felt “closest to”, but perhaps this is building in too much of the Rudd bubble.

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Sources: 1967*, 1979, Australian National Political Attitudes Survey; 1987-2007 Australian Election Survey. Continue reading “Which party do Catholics support?” →

Famous writer mistakenly impressed

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

As regular readers know, I think the literati are typically poor analysts of political and policy matters.

Though Nobel-prize winning author J.M. Coetzee’s style suggests to me a more analytical mindset than is usual among literary figures, comments in yesterday’s SMH on books and writers on Australia he has found interesting are not encouraging me to revise my theory:

Other writers I was impressed by included Mark Davis, Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe, who try to place recent developments in Australia in a world context.

I gave up on Davis’s book, but I did finish and blog on Boucher and Sharpe’s book on ‘postmodern conservatism’ in Australia.

One of my criticisms was that is that it doesn’t place recent developments in Australia in a world context, but rather confuses recent developments in world politics with an Australian context.
Continue reading “Famous writer mistakenly impressed” →

Can public intellectuals be used to assess partisan media slant?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

Andrew Leigh and Joshua Gans have a new paper out on media ‘slant’ (which they prefer to ‘bias’, given that reporting can be negative or positive for reasons unrelated to prior partisan feelings).

One of their methodologies for assessing ‘slant’, getting five people to code article and editorial content, seems sensible – though it would be good to extend the analysis beyond the 2004 election campaign, given that it would be quite possible that leadership issues in that campaign made some papers appear more anti-Labor than they are on ideological grounds alone.

But another methodology using public intellectuals, as Sinclair Davidson has argued at Catallaxy, just isn’t going to work.

They’ve rated the partisan nature of various public intellectuals according to whether they are most mentioned by Coalition or Labor politicians in a positive or neutral way. As Sinc points out, this immediately starts to get some very counter-intuitive results:

Does anyone really believe that Philip Adams (26 mentions, 65% Coalition) is a right-winger? Other right-wingers include Eva Cox (9 mentions, 56% Coalition), Germaine Greer (4 mentions, 75% Coalition) and Hugh MacKay (18 mentions, 78% Coalition). Kevin Rudd’s best friend Glyn Davis (18 mentions, 56% Coalition) looks to be a tory too.

Continue reading “Can public intellectuals be used to assess partisan media slant?” →

Australia’s not so large education export industry

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

Reporting of Julia Gillard’s India trip has regularly mentioned Australia’s ‘$15 billion’ international education industry.

Eighteen months ago I claimed that these figures were inflated, and while I was away last month Bob Birrell offered the most detailed substantiation yet of this argument.

In addition to the point I made about the need to deduct earnings by overseas students while in Australia, he adds that estimates of their spending while here are too high. I think he’s right, though a new survey of international students is needed to arrive at a more defensible number.

Universities Australia boss Glenn Withers wrote an article for the Higher Education Supplement defending the $15 billion figure, but though making a couple of good points it is unconvincing overall.
Continue reading “Australia’s not so large education export industry” →