Over at The Oz there’s a pretty funny Editorial, where yet again the owners of Newspoll are getting all confused about the reality of their own product – seemingly now choosing to ignore everything it has, or has ever had, to say. The first line of the article sets the scene:
The next election is wide open and will be won or lost on a single issue — economic management credentials
Yeah, I know – the Op-Ed pages are turning into a fruit machine, where you whack in your coin, pull the handle and get the same old lemons every time.
As far as public opinion is concerned, “Economic Management” as an electability issue doesn’t behave as a continuous variable with transitive qualities – the party that scores 50% on “better economic manager” is not statistically more likely to win an election than a party that scores only 45% on the same question. The party with the best score may happen to win more elections than the party with the lower score on this vague concept, but there is no statistical evidence of causation – which can be clearly seen by looking at what happens when governments change at both the State and Federal levels. As some of you may remember, we went through all this in 2007 with a fine toothed comb and were shown to be correct, even though we didn’t own any pollster at all.
However, there is evidence to suggest that the better economic management question does behave as an ordinal variable on electability, where the order is defined by being above, at, or below some required community threshold of economic credibility – where as long as a party is perceived to be above that threshold and are seen as credible at managing the economy, seen to be trusted enough to manage the economy, the contest over economic management credentials ceases to be one defined by the importance of magnitudes.
A basic credibility on the economy, in one sense, can be seen to be a pre-requisite for an election victory as opposed to the size of the economic management gap between two parties being a deterministic indicator of an election victory.
The reason the Oz gets it wrong on this and most of the rest of its public opinion prognostications for that matter – yet only ever in the Op-Ed pages mind you – seems to come back to the inability of the Editorialists to come to grips with the actual political reality of the Australian population.
The article pushes the central theme that the ALP must move to the center to be successful. Well.. er, “Yeah” I here you say – and the sun rises in the East! Espousing ‘median voter theorem’ isn’t exactly profound.
But it’s where the Oz Central Command believes the center of Australian politics actually resides which is worth a giggle – they spend too much time looking in the mirror, mistaking their own reflection for political reality.
We actually know where the mean of Australian public opinion sits, as well as where the Australian public believes the major parties sit in terms of their left/right political perceptions and relative distance from the political center – we have the Australian Election Study to tell us. The two relevant questions in the survey are:
1. In politics, people sometimes talk about the ‘left’ and the ‘right’. Where would you place yourself on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means the left and 10 means the right?
2. Using the same scale, where would you place each of the Federal political parties?
We can tally the results for the 2007 Election survey up in a diagram and look where the actual centre of Australian politics resides, where the actual public perceptions of the major political parties reside and compare it to where Oz Central Command apparently reckons the public centre sits.
And they wonder why they get it wrong so often.
29 Comments
Wow, that editorial is a truly hilarious piece of work!
A great analysis Poss. It demonstrates the power of statistics to disassemble humbug.
Whoever wrote the editorial seems to be a Howardite. It reads like a promotional piece for Peter Costello, whom the writer seems to believe can win the next election by a return to Howardism and the policies of ‘the good old days’ of unending prosperity. The impact of the GFC seems to have largely escaped the writer’s attention.
We can expect to see more of the same – the Oz demeaning Turnbull’s approach while extolling Costello’s. Anything to get the LNP back to its rightful place at the centre of power. The Oz has picked its winner.
Just one thing. Are you sure The Australian wonders why they get it so wrong. Nothing I see in Oz supports that view.
Thanks Poss, I want more of this kind of analysis please
. I’ve often thought that the News Ltd stable in Australia to far right in their articles, which doesn’t really reflect the majority of Australians views. If they started writing articles on the premise of facts – without ideologue – then The Oz would be the like their banner suggests, ‘heart of the nation’, right now, there’re getting into Faux noows territory. One point though, even in the presidential campaign, even Fox news presidential polls were clear of ideologue.
Great work Possum, I gave up reading the Oz a while ago and this just confirms why.
Possum,
To be fair, the last bar is actually “your” perception of where you think the Oz think the public sees themselves.
er… i thought Howard lost the last election.
So yeah, the Liberals will be returned at the next election as the electorate realises what a mistake it was to elect this ‘leftist’/Whitlam style government. All Turnbull needs to do is fight the same fight as the last election. And so to complete the fail comes this…
It’s too bad that The Australian doesn’t own the Essential reports, because they clearly don’t understand figures like those form 16/2/9:
Who do you trust more to handle the economy during the financial crisis?
Rudd and ALP – 55%
Turnbull and Coalition – 25%
Don’t Know – 21%
And finally, i can’t help but think that whoever wrote this was receiving advice from Gerard Hederson.
A copy of this handbook, and all other leftist handbooks, can be found in Gerard’s ‘collections’.
Hmmm
So the public consider the Greens to be closer to the centre than the Liberal Party?
It’s astounding how much they make up as they go along. As Possum mentioned it was the same in 2007.
I posted this piece back in July 2007 dealing with the grand statements of Dennis Shanahan and Paul Kelly, regarding economic management and national security.
http://www.ozforums.com.au/viewtopic.php?id=148
I’d put the ALP as a 6 and the Libs as a 9… but that’s just me
I notice noone was willing to put their name to that Oz piece of nonsense.
Ben – closer to some theoretical centre at least. The Greens are 1.39 from the theoretical centre compared to the Liberal Party’s 1.85 from the same theoretical centre.
In terms of where each party is from the public, the Greens are 1.68 from the mean voter compared to the Libs 1.56.
That’s really a pretty small difference in terms of the gap between the Libs and the Greens – margins of error get awfully complicated with these sorts of scales, but taking that roughly into account, the Greens are about as far away from mean voter opinion as the Libs were in 2007.
Ta for pointing that out – I could have looked at that diagram for hours without what now seems to be obvious jumping out!
Umm, I agree with your opinion, but it is an opinion dressed up with stats. Clearly the Australian thinks the Liberals have to go to the right, therefor the Australian is somewhere past 6.85. The question is, where on the scale is “Leave deformed babies in the snow to die”, if it gives you a 9 your being a bit harsh, a 10 then yes perhaps the Australian has made it to 9 because the is dam close to supporting infanticide.
“Which politician is best to handle the tough economic times?”
Peter Costello 53%
Kevin Rudd 31%
Malcolm Turnbull 16%
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22073824-5013404,00.html
Don’t tell me that this an anti-Labor poll because Turnbull has scored the lowest not Rudd.
I’m sick of the Awfulstralian and their right-wing asshattery. Bad enough that they cheer for the Miserable bloody WorkChoices Liberal Party. It’s plain disturbing that they are in chorus with the economic ideology of neo-liberalism that all but wrecked the world’s economy, bringing despair to hundreds of millions.
Thanks for the link you’ve provided, Poss, but no way will I add to their internet circulation figures by giving them my click. Same with the papers employing the toxic hater, Piers Acherman, Andrew Blot and other Liberal stenographers.
Bree – please don’t post self-selecting online polls from media sites as serious representations of public opinion.
This isn’t the place for that piffle.
‘The party with the best score may happen to win more elections than the party with the lower score on this vague concept’
On the whole that’s right, but genrally its the tories that score higher. It is significant that Labor lead by such a big margin now.
I wonder if the issue becomes more of an important variable during low points of the business cycle? Would analysis of the 1990-94 period paint a different picture?
On a side point, has anyone ever done research on what punters actually make of that question (or on how it phrased in the surveys)? It is vague but can be interpreted as either how secure people feel about their earnings / employment or business consumer confidence. These two things are not always the same.
that poll of Bree’s is like the Vatican web site asking who is best suited to provide religious guidance… The Pope, Richard Dawkins, or the Dalai Lama… no pints for picking the result
The Australian is most certainly not biased. On the day before the last election, they recommended a vote for Rudd instead of Howard.
It obviously also proves how influential the Australian is, the majority of Australians took their advice. One wonders why anyone would want any other media outlets other than the Australian.
Possum, I think you might enjoy Sean Parnell’s “State of the Nation” piece in today’s Weekend Australian:
Sean Parnell is a balanced opinionist. He’s always on the money if you ask me. He attacks both Labor AND Liberal.
Bree, no one asked you. No one on this blog will. You are a troll.
What a lot of sophistry! Where did you get “where the oz thinks the public sees themselves” from? Is this based on anything other than your own imagination? On what basis do you add this totally plucked from thin air figure on a graph with serious research?
The oz calls on Labor to move closer to the the centre, not more than two points to the right of the Libs.
Maybe you should rename the the bar on the chart “where I want the public to see where the oz thinks the public see themselves on the basis that the oz is generally too right wing for my tastes, and this totally made up bar chart might help to marginalise them and prod them back to my way of thinking especially if I smudge it with some figures from a respected survey”.
Dear Bree and matthewr, please troll off.
I think Scott knows that nothing anybody says, let alone him, would change the The Australian’s editorial line.
Get yourself a sense of proportion, Matt.
So is the OO going to go you Poss.
Pollwars:the op-ed strikes back.
They have form you know.
Dr Mick and David Sunbury – I think Walter Lippman’s quotation is useful here: “Where all think alike, none thinks very much.”
It is good intellectual exercise to defend your conclusions from those with alternative points of view. Trolling is the making of completely outrageous statements simply in order to provoke a response, and I don’t see that here.
matthewr’s basic point, though laced with snark, seems valid enough to me (that there’s thin evidence provided about where the Oz believes the public to be on that scale).
In response to him I’d say that the (circumstantial) evidence that the Oz believes the “political centre” lies close to the Coalition (and therefore further to the right than the evidence indicates) is that the Oz doesn’t editorialise about the Coalition needing to also move closer to the political centre. Furthermore, putting the “Oz’s view of the public” out at 9 wasn’t intended to be read literally, rather it is intentional exaggeration for rhetorical effect.
Hi Caf,
I half-agree. I’m all for dissenting views – provided those view are backed by evidence and logic – or don’t pretend to contain either. I thought matthewr’s comment was fair enough.