Category: Public opinion

The long, painful recovery from bad election defeats

~ Andrew Norton ~ 53 Comments

The 2007 federal election wasn’t the rout I feared , and so we are (probably…) not in the situation in which an unelectable opposition rather than good performance keeps the government in power. But a poll in today’s Sydney Sun-Herald shows the unfortunate long-term consequences of such defeats, in this case the 1999 NSW state election.

According to the story accompanying the poll:

Three-quarters of voters think the health system is poor or just fair, and almost two-thirds have no confidence that the Iemma Government can make improvements….

Only one-in-five gave the Government a tick, with 18 per cent saying its performance over the last year had been good, and 2 per cent saying it had been excellent. In contrast, 39 per cent said the Government’s performance was just fair and 38 per cent declared it poor.

But how will they vote?:
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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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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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What does it mean for a political party to ‘own’ an issue?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

I’m writing the public opinon chapter for a forthcoming book on the Liberal Party’s future, and in the process trying to think more systematically about the concept of ‘issue ownership’ – discussed here before in the context of Mummy party/Daddy party thesis. Rather surprisingly (or perhaps not, for those who always thought it was dubious), I can’t find anything about it in the Australian academic literature, though there is a fair amount in the international political science journals.

In the US, issue ownership analysis is part of broader theories about voter ignorance. We know from many surveys that the general public has very limited knowledge of political institutions and policies. They tend not to know very much about broader social trends either. This means that electors draw on various informational short-cuts to make political decisions. This includes stereotypical views of political parties, based on assumed previous policy success or failure, or on perceptions of how political party members feel about an issue, on the assumption that interest or sincerity will translate into successful policy.

According to the American literature, some issues are not owned by any party but are ‘performance’ issues. The economy is put into this category, as whether or not it is going well is sufficiently obvious to voters, from regular news reports and everyday experience, for them to form their own views directly on the issue without going via a prior party stereotype (in one paper, parties can have a ‘lease’ on the economy as an issue, but one which would end with their recession or another party’s boom).

Even where issues are ‘owned’, the standing of parties is not immune to very salient contrary information, such as debacles and scandals. Continue reading “What does it mean for a political party to ‘own’ an issue?” →

Partisan pessimism

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

Newspoll regularly asks voters whether, in the next six months, their standard of living will improve, stay the same, or get worse. Their results always show that supporters of the political party in opposition federally are more pessimistic than supporters of the governing party.

As I noted a couple of years ago, at most times the causes of this are hard to disentangle. Some of it is probably real. Living standards of opposition supporters may genuinely be negatively affected by the government’s policies – eg Labor supporters relying on handouts that may not be so readily available under the Coalition; Liberal supporters suffering from increased tax and regulation under Labor. And people whose living standards have declined may blame the government, and therefore appear as supporters of the opposition in the polls.

These factors are least likely to apply as a new government begins; voters cannot blame its past policies for their current problems, and the inevitably slow-moving machinery of government means that few objective changes are likely to occur within six months. But as a Newspoll conducted in mid-December, and reported in the Australian this morning, shows this doesn’t stop reversals in who feels optimistic about their future living standards and who feels pessimistic.
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The end of WorkChoices

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

Today the Coalition’s Shadow Cabinet officially declared WorkChoices dead. With coincidental but good timing, my Policy article on the ugly WorkChoices polling went online this morning.

Polling published since I wrote the article confirms the findings I report. In the Weekend Australian last Saturday, George Megalogenis cited surveys by left-leaning pollster Essential Media Communications that anti-WorkChoices opinion was stable across 2006 and 2007. The huge sums of money spent by both sides on WorkChoices propaganda had little if any net effect on the basic yes/no question.

My reading is that the anti-WorkChoices campaign was able to tap into set public opinion that labour market institutions should protect low-paid and vulnerable workers, and so it all it had to do was convince people that WorkChoices was contrary to their beliefs. That was accomplished by the time polling started in mid-2005.

What we still can’t be entirely clear on is whether the Coalition’s backdown on AWAs and the introduction of a ‘fairness’ test – a major watering down of WorkChoices on a key aspect of public concern, rather than just an advertising campaign – made any difference to the basic yes/no question (Megalogenis’s article doesn’t say when in 2007 Essential Media polled).
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The real greenhouse denialists

~ Andrew Norton ~ 36 Comments

Greenpeace says that its Newspoll on greenhouse issues shows Kevin Rudd would make himself popular by taking radical steps to reduce Australia’s greenhouse emissions:

[Greenpeace head of campaigns Steve] Campbell said that this week Mr Rudd had the opportunity to show leadership at the Bali climate talks and help gain consensus on the 25-40% range of reductions.

“This poll shows that such a move would be extremely popular with the people of Australia, who delivered Mr Rudd a firm mandate at the last election, and want him to take even stronger action by reducing Australia’s emissions within his first term,” he said.

Actually, the poll (which to Greenpeace’s credit they make available in full) again shows how tricky this issue is for any governmment.

There is the usual overwhelming endorsement of action to reduce greenhouse emissions. It’s when we get to how this is to be done that, also as usual, things start to get complicated.

One question asks:

Do you agree or disagree that government should begin phasing out existing coal-fired power stations and replacing them with renewable energy generation within the next three years?

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Is the Howard government running against the issue cycle?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 17 Comments

In the Liberal election post-mortem, I think at least three levels of factors will need to be considered: the transitory, the cyclical, and the structural.

The media puts most emphasis on transitory factors, because these generate the material needed to fill the space and time allocated to Australian politics. Into this category I would put things like leadership issues, interest rates, various stuff-ups, and the campaign strategy. Most what-ifs belong here – what if Howard had left in 2006 and allowed Costello to establish himself as PM, what if Howard hadn’t promised in 2004 to keep interest rates low or if interest rates had stayed low, etc?

There will be some lessons for the future in all these experiences, but at least in principle things could fairly easily have turned out differently, and could turn out differently in the coming years. Analysis of these factors will have only modest value for the Liberals in planning their next move. Howard will be gone, and interest rates will be Kevin Rudd’s problem.

My main interests are in the other two sets of factors. Various aspects of public opinion in Australia are cyclical, with people’s views going back and forth without any long-term trend. Some of this opinion is of the what-is-to-be done variety. We have several decades of data, for example, showing that the public changes its mind over time on the balance between taxing and spending and on the right level of migration to Australia. We also have about 25 years of reasonably consistent survey questions on which issues people think are most important. The public’s basic stance on these matters may be stable – unemployment bad, hospitals good etc – but what varies is the emphasis placed on them as issues affecting votes.
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Interest rates and the vote

~ Andrew Norton ~ 2 Comments

Those commenters stressing that interest rates could be a signifcant factor in the election, even if most people don’t think the government is to blame for them, get a boost from polling reported in this morning’s Sunday Age.

In a Taverner Poll of Victoria and NSW, 21% of those polled blamed the government for the increases in interest rates. That’s a lot more than the 12% blaming John Howard in a Galaxy Poll earlier this month. Is that because there has been an increase since, opinion is different in NSW and Victoria, or the question wording affected the result? Unfortunately, The Sunday Age has kept up with its very poor opinion poll practices, and published nothing about question wording or sample size.

But some evidence for the vote-changing case:

The latest Sunday Age/Taverner Research poll shows that 57% of the key mortgage-holder demographic will be voting for Labor, compared with only 43% for the Coalition.

This is a complete reversal of the 2004 campaign, when a Taverner poll conducted then showed the Coalition enjoying an 8-point margin over Labor among mortgage holders.

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