Category: Political parties

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.

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?” →

Tony Abbott’s big government conservatism

~ Andrew Norton ~ 17 Comments

Tony Abbott’s book Battlelines is part personal memoir, part Howard goverment history, part conservative philosophy, part analysis of current politics. I don’t think the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but the parts are interesting enough.

For me, its main value is in being a relatively detailed statement of ‘big government conservatism’, from the perspective of a supporter.

Even coming after the big-spending Howard years, there are several proposals for more spending still, including teacher salaries, dental care, and yet more family spending (I laughed out loud at the sub-heading ‘how families have been forgotten’). Luckily there are also some proposed cuts, from a higher retirement age and to superannuation concessions.

Though there is an ideological element to the family spending idea, Abbott’s plausible claim that the Howard government was a problem-solving government rather than one that was highly ideologically driven also helps explain why government grew under Howard.
Continue reading “Tony Abbott’s big government conservatism” →

What constitutes successful working of a policy integrity system?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

I’m one of the few people who thinks that regulation of political donations already goes too far, at least for NGOs. But I think there is some common ground that nobody – whether donors or not – should get special treatment that would not be given to other persons or organisations with the same relevant characteristics.

However, differences arise on this issue because I, like Mark Latham, see the central problem as inappropriate levels of political discretion. If discretion exists, we can hardly blame constituents for trying to take advantage, or politicians hoping to win support from offering advantage. We cannot be surprised when people follow the incentives a system creates. To the extent that constituents attempt to win special favours by donations this is a symptom of a deficient system rather than the cause of a deficient system.

This is why I think that Joo-Cheong Tham, writing in The Age this morning, is mistaken in arguing that the fact that John Grant did not get special treatment does not make a significant difference to how we should assess the case. When Treasury can repeatedly raise a particular case (indeed, cases) with a company seeking financial guarantees from the Commonwealth and get nowhere it suggests that the policy integrity system is working. Continue reading “What constitutes successful working of a policy integrity system?” →

Assorted links

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

1. This week is the 100th anniversary of the ‘fusion’ of the Protectionists and Free Traders, establishing a forerunner of the Liberal Party and the party system we still have today. It was effectively the end of economic liberalism for 60 years. Charles Richardson has a very good account of what happened in the current issue of Policy.

2. A SMH opinion piece by former WA Premier Geoff Gallop on the merits of federalism. Against the centralisers, he says

Political philosophy and a serious discussion of checks and balances, creativity and innovation and accountability and control are sacrificed on the altar of “efficiency” and “uniformity”.

In well-timed evidence of the merits of federalism, Tasmania’s parliament is going to debate euthanasia legalisation.

3. For Sydney readers not already bored of my views on higher education, I will be giving a seminar on the Gillard reforms at the CIS on 4 June.

What will stop Liberal demographic decline?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 16 Comments

Recently commenter Robert asked about my views on Scott Steel’s demographic political analysis. Using 2007 polling data, Steel finds what several others – including me, Andrew Leigh, and Ian Watson – have found before: that the Coalition relies heavily on older voters.

While I agree with the broad thrust of Steel’s analysis, I have a slightly different way of looking at it. The 2007 polling results he reports are for me the combination of three different dynamics – long-term trends in party identification, medium-term trends in the issue cycle which affect what those with weak or no party affiliation want out of the political system (which I have discussed before), and shorter-term factors that may affect particular polls and elections but don’t necessarily in themselves affect long-term perceptions of parties (for examples, pick any newspaper from any day at random).

On party ID, as can be seen below the trends are very much against the Coalition, making elections increasingly difficult to win because base support is too low. On the other hand, the arguments that the Greens would emerge as the new third party don’t seem likely either. Even in the most indoctrinated and fashion-prone age group, the 18-30s, the Coalition has nearly three times the base support of the Greens. Labor’s security as the natural party of government comes not from an increase in its base, which apart from the Labor-leaning forty-somethings is consistent across age groups, but from its two major rivals hating each other more than they hate Labor.

partyidage
Question: ‘Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as Liberal, Labor, National, or what?’, in the Australian Election Survey 2007 n=1,711
Continue reading “What will stop Liberal demographic decline?” →

Does Turnbull’s strategy make sense?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 15 Comments

Scott Steel at Pollytics blog does lots of good work crunching the pollsters’ numbers, and there is another interesting post today on the relationship between PM and Opposition Leader satisfaction and support for their respective parties. It’s worth reading in full, but the key findings include:

* the PM’s satisfaction rating has a much stronger relationship to the PM’s vote than does the Leader of the Oppositions satisfaction rating to their primary vote;
* PM satisfaction historically explains just over 50% of the variation of the Opposition’s primary vote – as the PM gains higher levels of satisfaction, the Oppositions primary vote starts dropping;
* the satisfaction rating of the Opposition [leader] has a pretty weak relationship to the government primary vote, explaining only 8% of the variation in the last 23 years worth of data.

On polling history,

Turnbull – like nearly all Opposition Leaders before him – is effectively a slave to the Prime Ministers own personal standing with the electorate.

This analysis seems right to me. But I am not at all sure that his conclusion about Turnbull’s leadership is the right one:
Continue reading “Does Turnbull’s strategy make sense?” →

A defence of political partisanship

~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

Light posting due to a do-nothing weekend, but I liked this defence of political partisanship by Nancy Rosenblum at Cato Unbound.

Though the book on which it is based on sitting in my daunting pile of unread books, Rosenblum has more than any other political theorist I am aware of been a defender of voluntary assocations, finding what good they do (if only for their members), rather than finding them wanting against an abstract standard, as tends to be the case in the work of others. In a much less comprehensive way, I try to do something similar in my criticisms of anti-discrimination law and arguments against political expenditure laws.

Australia’s party identification figures (largish pdf) are fairly resilient, and this is broadly healthy for our political system which relies on there being an alternative government. The problem is that partisanship rarely converts to party membership, which means both major parties are suffering from shrinking and ageing memberships, narrowing the pool of candidates and affecting campaigning capacity.

The Victorian Liberal Party is experimenting with pre-selection primaries, an idea I converted to last year. I’m not sure how successful it will be in attracting Liberal partisans into the party, but given the dismal alternative of slow but steady decline it is worth a try.

The resilience of party stereotypes

~ Andrew Norton ~ 2 Comments

The Newspoll results reported in this morning’s Australian show the Coalition’s lead over Labor as the party which would best handle the economy has been reduced to a statistically insignificant 1%.

While the paper’s article on the poll rightly sees this as bad news for the Liberals, putting it in the context of other questions asked in the same poll it shows that there is some resilience in party stereotypes when questions are framed broadly.

When Newspoll’s respondents were asked whether the federal government was doing a good job handling the current economic crisis, 63% said yes. Even 31% of Coalition voters agreed. 57% thought that the stimulus would be good for the economy, with again 31% of Coalition voters agreeing. 48% of respondents thought they would be better off over the next 12 months due to the package. When asked whether the Coalition would do a better or worse job handling the crisis, more thought worse (39%) than better (33%). Only 28% of Newspoll’s respondents believed the Coalition would deliver a better stimulus package.

But though the Coalition is clearly well behind on the major economic issue of the day, on the more abstract question of who would better handle the economy they remain fractionally ahead, showing the reserve of credibility on this issue they have built up over many years.

(It would be interesting to know the question order in this survey; this result would be more interesting if this question was asked after rather than before the specific questions.)

Labor and ‘neoliberal’ policy

~ Andrew Norton ~ 31 Comments

One of the most difficult problems Kevin Rudd faced in writing his Monthly essay was the extensive, and indeed dominant, role of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments in implementing ‘neoliberal’ policies.

When he says that the political home of neoliberalism in Australia is the Liberal Party he is giving the Howard government more credit (from a reformist perspective) than is warranted by the historical evidence. While the Coalition moved further ahead on labour market deregulation, waterfront reform and the privatisation of Telstra than was likely under Labor, most of the major reforms had already taken place by the time Howard took office in 1996, and what the Coalition did was incrementally advancing or fine-tuning reform processes initiated by the previous government.

Apparently when the Coalition introduces a market reform it is ‘economic fundamentalism’, but when Labor implements a market reform it is ‘economic modernisation’.

The differences between social democratic market reformers and ‘neoliberal’ reformers are larger in their underlying philosophical perspectives than in their substantive policies. In The Australian this morning, Dennis Glover put it this way:

Rudd does not believe the free market is an end in itself; it exists to serve society. For Rudd greater social equality is a moral good.

Continue reading “Labor and ‘neoliberal’ policy” →