I’ve been wondering myself, recently, about the significance of Labor’s unbroken lead in the polls, which if memory serves, has persisted for over three years now. There’s little doubt that it’s Rudd’s election to lose, but, conversely, big Labor victories in both seat and vote terms have been rare at federal level. Labor’s vote in the 2007 election was also lower than its poll lead had been in the run up, on most measures.
Fortunately, psephological bloggers are on the case!
Both Antony Green and Possum have written thoughtful and well informed posts on just this topic.
I’d add a couple of points:
(a) It’s quite right to be a tad suspicious about whether polls are measuring something slightly different from voting intention. To me, the biggest gap in the polls we have is always the lack of any data on intensity of interest in politics, which could, I think, usefully be correlated with strength of commitment to a particular voting preference. Part of the advantage to incumbents, I suspect, comes from the fact that a lot of the people, a lot of the time, are just not thinking much about politics;
(b) As I’ve commented on and off again and again for years, politics is not amenable to prediction in quite the same way other forms of behaviour are. (A good contrast is with consumption, where the aggregation of individual purchases makes more sense, I’d suggest, than the aggregation of individual votes; the frequent conflation of political behaviour with marketing terminology is misleading – ‘brand loyalty’ is just not the same thing with political parties as with mobile phones or flavoured milk.)
Part of the whole “death of the newspaper” narrative arc (though not the current focus on Google as a supposedly evil aggregator, driven by the commercial interests of 
Of media narratives, truth and narratologies
It would be interesting to study the role of the economics editor. In Australia, at least, those papers and media outlets which employ such a person appear to see the role as enforcing the BCA line on liberal economics, even if sometimes the actually existing BCA companies have their hands well and truly out for the largesse of the state. There’s a bit of a story about ideology here, and the neo-liberal whip gig only really works if one is not too partisan about it – so Paul Kelly’s portentous ponderings fit the bill exactly. At The Australian (and here, the broader tale is one of the trajectory of that paper overall), Michael Stutchbury has taken the commentary in a more openly pro-Coalition direction. Witness, as they say on the op/ed pages, his latest rather unfocused piece – decrying Labor governments (and social democrats, and Rudd advisor Andrew Charlton) for mixing politics with economics. Magically, of course, blatant political fixes by conservative administrations never seem to attract the same opprobrium. It’s as if the “reform test” constantly being applied to Kevin Rudd (despite what he himself has said about his own views on economics, and perhaps it were better had he been taken at his word) were one of complete purity in adherence to the gospel according to the Productivity Commission, or whoever represents the yardstick for this stuff at any particular point in time.
It would be possible to expose any number of non-sequiturs, rhetorical moves, sophistries, and general incoherence in Stutchbury’s article.
But there’s a broader point here.
We live, we’re told sometimes, in an age of story-telling. Continue reading ‘Of media narratives, truth and narratologies’