This post is something of an addendum to my previous one on AES data on issue salience in the 2007 Australian federal elections. As I argued then, what good social science research shows about the influences on voting paints a very different picture from either the day to day commentary in the media or, for that matter, even longer length and more reflective journalism. Perhaps one reason why there’s little appreciation of some basic patterns - some of which are quite distinct to this country - which shape voting intention and voting is the fact that academic research is often hidden by pay for view firewalls - though fortunately some universities (and I’m happy to say QUT is taking a lead by requiring all academics to publish their research as e-prints under Creative Commons licences) are trying to recover the function of the dissemination of knowledge from the commercial rapacity of academic publishers.
Anyway, having given up on what was perhaps a naive hope that the mainstream media might learn something from getting things so wrong last year, I think it’s time that we took a lead in disseminating insights from academic research - something I think can be another string in the blogosphere’s bow to add to the talents and insights of the pseph bloggers. So, as part of that, and happily I can provide a link because Taylor & Francis do publish some of the content of the Australian Journal of Political Science for free (I’m not entirely sure whether you have to register to get through to the link, but if you do it’s not a particularly intrusive or onerous process), here’s some research from Phillip Senior and Peter Van Onselen on leadership effects in Australian elections.
They establish that the comparatively small influence leadership has on voting in Australia hasn’t grown over the six federal elections from 1990 to 2004, as it might have been expected to do so given the accentuation of trends such as partisan de-alignment which have been common in countries where it has become more salient, and I’d note that the AES data now available for 2007 confirms that. Given that, most of what is written about leadership and federal politics in the med is pure drivel, a point that as I noted, Possum has made with regard to the focus on Brendan Nelson’s leadership (or lack thereof). It is, of course, appropriate to discuss the quality of political leadership, and there are obvious reasons why it receives so much attention, and it does have some effect (and Senior and Van Onselen’s paper is suggestive about some of the factors which make it more or less relevant, though more research is needed). But we should be clear that what we’re talking about is rarely the most important factor that actually shifts votes.
The information I picked up from the ANU document was that policy matters (at least for the moment) more than who leads the party. There are two exceptions to this, as far as I can tell; Mark Latham (who was perceived as thuggish) and Brendan Nelson (who is perceived has having no unifying vision). Liberal policy at the moment is a grab bag of populist measures with a few nuggets of sense hidden down the bottom.
The big thing I took away from the document was that who the local candidate is only really accounts for 6% of the vote. Now, this is enough to swing a marginal seat (such as Bennelong) but to me it’s an indication that we might be better served with a system that reflects the will and intention of the voters. With people voting based on the party’s platform and the party as a whole, it would make sense to introduce a proportional representation system. If people vote for parties, let’s elect parties.
mark says:
Good to see LP catching up with the Strocchi-verse on psephological principles. I have been banging on for years about the irrelevance of leadership in contemporary AUS partisan cotests. Now it seems that LP’s are finally about to climb aboard the Strocchi-verse express, “direct to reality”, but only after rubbishing the station-master for giving them early warning!
Mark has suffered from a particularly acute case of “leadership-itis”, especially over the Latham episode. He was all over him in the leadup to 2004. And then, when things did not turn out so well, turned on him like a disappointed lover.
I ignored leadership factors in recent elections, particularly 2004 when neither Beazley, Crean or Latham would have made much of a difference. I have been pouring cold water on the “leadership” theory of post-partisan alignments for years:
ALSO, I love the bit where mark intones on the decline of leadership power as “expected…given the accentuation of trends such as partisan de-alignment”. Talk about brazen about-faces! I have been banging on for the better part of a decade on the implications of “partisan de-alignment”.
The phenomenon of “rusted-off voters” is directly associated with a fracturing of partisan bases along different ideological axes, most notably “economism” and “culturalism”. Which is why we see tactical voting when leaders “triangulate” polities (tendentiously called “wedging”) around “cross-wired” policies. It is all part of what I call “the Great Covergence” of major parties towards the populist Centre.
This kind of “trans-political” grass roots politics is either ignored or abhored by the partisan dinosaurs still lumbering around both the MSM and the Blogoshpere. They avert their maidenly gaze from the fact that the voters are way ahead of the pundits when it comes to political wheeling and dealing. That is when they are not openly barracking for one of the nags (what kind of “commentary” is that?).
That is why both the Oz and much of the Left Ozlogosphere were off-track in the 2007 election. The former expecting Howard to just win whilst the latter eg mark were talking up the likelihood of a Rudd-slide. Mark expected the LN/P to “lose big”.
Now mark turns around and tells us that he knew about this all along.
Full marks for chuzpah but a question mark on intellectual transparency.
mark says:
And who might these “talented and insightful” pseph bloggers be, who accurately predict the final ourcomes of elections to a percentage point, correctly specify the psephological causes of the partisan re-allignment and properly discount spurious leadership factors. One name is on the tip of my tongue, but for the life of me I just can’t seem to spit it out…
mark says:
Apologies I misconstued this par as meaning that partisan de-alignment was expected to make partisan leadership less important, missing the “hasn’t” disqualifer. The par, we can agree, left something to be desired from a grammatical pov, with a key subordinate clause tacked onto a long sentence.
That only raises the obvious question: why do academics and commentators expect leadership to be more important now that parties are less important? I do not accept the lazy assumptions about politics implicit in this arugment.
The obvious implication is that “de-paritisan” politics is now mostly about promoting celebrity political personalities. WIth all the attendant spin-doctoring and razz-a-ma-tazz. THis interpretation has superficial appeal given the vast sums spent on promoting popular personalities. But campaign marketing of political identities is only the tip of the political iceberg.
The “politicians trump parties” conclusion only follows if one believes that parties are the sole vehicles of policies that voters are fit to ride on. But that is not the reality of “trans-political” cross-wired politics in the age of major party policy convergence.
Voters have more sophistication than partisan spin doctors and pundits give them credit for. They now angle for better deals on different issues from both sides of politics. Much as they do as consumers playing off mobile phone carriers. Who cares who the CEO of Optus is so long as you can get a plan suited to your comm needs?
This forces both parties to cherry pick the best policies of the other parties in a race to the middle to get the median voter. Thus we get Howard promoting massive welfare spending, centralised health care. Whilst LN/P adopts stricter immigration rules and paternalist indigenous policies.
Leaders do not play a big role in this process since the system is driving it. The AUS political system is working smoothly, pretty much on auto-pilot now.
Leaders are only important when the system is in crisis and system managers do not have a clue how to fix it. Then there is a call for a man on a white horse to ride in and set matters straight. eg FDR for the USA thru the thirties, CdG for FRA thru the forties or EGW for the ALP thru the sixties, RR/MT for the US/UK in the eighties.
Jack, the difficulty you have in making your argument is that I didn’t write the article you linked to. I first wrote for New Matilda in 2007. So whoever that was touting Latham in 2004, it wasn’t me. I think the Back Pages archives have disappeared, but anyone around back then should be able to confirm that I was anything but a Latham fan. To the degree that Labor had a chance in 2004, it was despite Latham not because of him, and that’s what I was saying at the time. If you have a look at the AES data, interestingly, you’ll find leadership was at its most important in 2004 of all the elections where they survey question was asked from 1996 onwards. That tends to support what I’ve consistently argued.
http://assda.anu.edu.au/aestrends.pdf
By the way, you won’t like the findings on social issues very much. It’s a little bit of a mixed bag, but you’d have to do a lot of violence to the results to sustain your cultural dry stuff.
And once again the SS Strocchi sails right past reality while Jack paces the deck, hectoring his imaginary crew about why it’s really the other way around and demanding a full spread of canvas.
“Um, we don’t actually have any masts.”
“Alright then, full steam ahead!”