The pitfalls of Better Party To Manage
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What started out as an exercise in looking at whether we can see any structural effects of incumbency on the results of “better party/leader to manage” polls over time – whether the act of being in government itself has an impact on these metrics – quickly became something else entirely as the data spoke in what were slightly unexpected ways.
If a party or political leader increases their standing on any particular issue – say on “better party/leader to manage the economy” – what also generally happens is that they increase their standings on *all* issues. Not only do the results of “best party/leader to manage” questions all move together through time, but they’re also tied up in massive correlation with generic approval ratings and Better Prime Minister ratings, at least to the point where any given poll result on these better party to manage questions doesn’t have anything particularly useful to say.
To show how it all works, we’ll use the Newspoll results through time for four issues – two issues that are usually considered Labor strengths (Health & Medicare and Education) and two issues that are usually considered Coalition strengths (National Security and the Economy).
On the actual question front, until recently Newspoll used to ask two separate questions here. The first question – and the question they still run –asks:
Which one of the following (ALP, Liberal and National Party Coalition, or someone else) do you think would best handle the issue of: (insert issue)
The other question, and one they haven’t asked since September 2008, goes:
Which of (Leader) do you think is more capable of handling (insert issue)
Historically, these different questions were asked about a month apart at various times over the last 5 years. That allows us to compare the results of each question on each issue for reasons that will become apparent a little later on.
First up, the raw results of both the best leader and the best party to handle each of the four issues.
The two things that stand out are firstly, the way that the leader and party results for each party on a given issue move together, with the better leader results being a little more volatile. That’s not particularly surprising.
The second thing that stands out is how each pair of issues that a party is considered strong on (Health & Medicare and Education for Labor, National Security and Economy for the Coalition) not only move together, but produce almost identical results at both the party and leader level. It becomes more obvious when we chart them against each other – party results first, followed by leader results.
As a party or leader increases or decreases their position on Health and Medicare, there is an almost identical movement for them on Education. Similarly, as a party or leader increases or decreases their position on National Security, there is an almost identical movement for them on the Economy.
In fact, the results from all of these issues move together nearly all of the time.
If we take the first difference of these poll series, where we measure the change in value for each observation (for example, if Education was on 40 in one poll and came in on 50 the next, the value for this observation would be +10), we can track the way these changes all move together on all issues.
Remember, these results also contain polling noise which is likely to be washing out the correlation a little!
The other thing we can do is plot the change in each series for the Party question against the change in each series for the Leader question. Coalition results are in blue, Labor results are in red.
Not only are leadership effects tightly correlated with party effects, but all the issues behave in a way that suggests they too are tightly bound up with not only the leadership/party correlation, but with correlation between each other.
If the results of these polls all move in the same direction approximately all of the time – what actual, meaningful information can we extract out of them?
For instance, if Labor increases their lead in “better party to handle Education”, what does that actually mean when the issues are all moving together? What does it mean when the leadership of each party is entangled with the results?
At this stage, I was thinking that generic approval must be playing a major part in these results – something has to be, and that was the most obvious place to look. So, time for some regression work (stop groaning – I heard that!)
If we build two new series, firstly the change in satisfaction rating with each leader and secondly, the change in preferred Prime Minister for each leader – that gives us a couple of good proxies for generic approval. So, for instance, if the Preferred PM for the Labor leader increased by4 points between June/July 2005 and October/November 2005 (the first two observation periods), the value for this observation would be +4
If we regress the “Best Party/Leader to manage” results against these generic approval ratings for these four issues, this is what we get:
For the non stats types:
The dependent variable is the thing we are trying to explain.
The independent variable is the thing we are trying to explain “changes in the dependent variable” with.
The Coefficient Value tells us how much change we would expect to see in the value of the dependent variable if the independent variable changed by 1 point.
The R-sqr value tells us how much of the variation in the dependent variable is explained by changes in the value of the independent variable.
The Standard Error, T-stat and p value are for the nerdherd. Suffice to say that these are all strongly statistically significant relationships.
For instance, 60.8% of the change in “Best Party to handle” any of these four issues can be explained by changes in the preferred PM value of the leader of that party. For every 10 points that the party leader increases his preferred PM value, the better party to manage result increases, on average, by around 3 points.
Changes in satisfaction ratings or preferred PM ratings separately explain between 20% and 78% of the variation we see in the better party/leader poll results. Combined, they would explain more of the variation, but there is so much correlation between satisfaction and preferred PM it’s virtually impossible to pull their joint effect on these issue polls out of the data.
So, if:
- all the issues move together approximately all of the time
- between 20% and 78% *at least* of the variation in issue polls are a function of generic approval levels of the party and its leader
- changes in those issues that are considered strong by a party are almost identical to other issues considered strong by that party
…what meaningful value can we actually extract from them? We know what we cannot extract meaningfully and that’s guff like this.
But what can we extract?
Perhaps long term relative changes in which party is best perceived to manage a given issue, perhaps we can identify if issues cease to become a strong issue for a party over a long period of time. Any sharp jump in value for a given issue that is above and beyond that achieved by other issues in that poll is also something that would be meaningful and worth taking a second look at.
But for ordinary poll to poll movement, we can’t actually pull much pointy end value out at all because large parts of the variation are simply a function of generic approval of the party leaders.
These questions could be analysed using respondent level data and there would be value to be had there (which is what the internal party polling does) – but these raw aggregations are a little blasé in the broader scheme of things and should be treated with the utmost caution.
On another related issue, Newspoll asks the following question on issue importance:
Thinking about federal politics, would you say each of the following issues is very important, fairly important or not important on how you personally would vote in a federal election?
It’s a real shame that they only publish results for the “very important” response. The “fairly important” or “not important” results would be a great addition to understanding how the intensity of political issues is changing over time.
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I wonder if the results of such questions would be at all skewed by the order in which they are asked? For example, if the questions on National Security and the Economy were all asked together first would they give a better lead-in for the Liberals to the more socially-based areas such as the Environment, and vice-versa?
Probably not to any great extent Dario. A lot of the polling questions actually get rotated in the ask order for each respondent. I’m not sure if Newspoll does that here for this question set, but I wouldn’t be surprised
Am I right in saying the Party statistics for Labor are generally trending upwards on all 4 issues?
If so, how does this compute against the Primary and 2PP statistics which seem to be trending down?
What I am getting at is with Labor’s issues trending up how can they possibly lose the election, despite what the poll-to-poll 2PP figures say?
BB, here is the chart for ALP Better Party to Handle for those 4 issues as of yesterday’s data:
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/files/2010/02/forBB.PNG
The data in the charts in the article only goes to September 2008 because I needed both sets of of questions from Newspoll, and September was the last time they released them.
What we saw was a rise in the Coalition across the board yesterday – which is what we’d expect to see considering the rise in Coalition satisfaction and PPM
When they whine about national security though they are only talking about beating up refugees. Why don’t the pollsters say that instead of this perpetual girning about national security?
Where on earth is our national security under any frigging threat that we have to be polled about it incessantly.
When did the government have total control over the economy is another question. They only control the taxes raised and spend them.
The rest is private.
I do wish the frigging pollsters would state the bleeding obvious about these absurd polls.
ALP Health/Education = 45 + ALP TPP – LIB TPP
Lib Health/Education = 35 – ALP TPP + LIB TPP
ALP Economy/Security = 30 + 2 X (ALP TPP – LIB TPP)
Lib Health/Education = 50 – 2 X (ALP TPP + LIB TPP)
or something like that!
Marilyn, when people think of “National Security” they actually think of defence and terrorism, not only refugees.
It’s a broad question.
So does this all mean that people’s perception of the “issues” is actually just a reflection of their notion of the popularity of the parties’ leaders?
At the absurd level it’s budgie smugglers over boardies?
Who’d of thunk that so many voters could be so simplistic?
All these questions are bunk. Most people don’t think about “issues” – they have an overall impression that the government is doing well, or not doing well. When a party and its leader are popular, they do better on the “issues” questions. When a party and its leader slide, so do their “issues” ratings. Labor always does better on girly issues (health, education, environment), the Libs on boy issues (defence, security).
You nailed it Christopher. Leadership and general perceptions matter.
I did some similar, though less statistically skilled, analysis a couple of years ago and found basically the same result, with some qualifications. I divided the issues according to basic ‘issue ownership’ (ie one party pretty consistently gets more favourable reaction than the other). I concluded that there was pretty much a single ‘general Liberal performance’ judgment which affected all issues, though very high profile stories on one issue could temporarily break the pattern (eg Tampa and Salon/Rau on immigration). For Labor there seemed to be a ‘general Labor performance’ judgment which strongly affected Labor ratings on Liberal issues, but it was less strong on their own issues (eg health, education etc). Possibly ALP support leaks to the left on these issues.
In general, however, I think these results are much as we would expect. The average person knows very little about politics or policy, and so when answering these questions they use stereotypes of party strengths and general impressions of how the party is going. Very high profile issues can temporarily affect voters’ views, but as the media cycle moves on the effect diminishes.
The most important issue questions are more important in seeing which way the political wind is blowing – whether Liberal or Labor issues are trending up over time.
So, to continue with that thought a bit: are we headed to a presidential style of government? It sure appears that the pollies are treating it as if we already have, and of course the meedja would much rather talk about personalities than the details of policy or the problems of implementing them.
Christopher Dunne
‘headed to’? Does that imply that sometime in the past we weren’t?
I certainly remember my parents (aaarrrggghh, over thirty years ago, I’m getting old…) voting on the basis of ‘I like Gough” “Mal Fraser will take better care of us now we’re in a small business” ‘Hawkey’s a good bloke”…and Barry Humphries refers to his mother voting for Menzies (who I don’t think was her local member) on the basis of his nice speaking voice.
In the days before mass mass media, I think the leader was probably even MORE important than now. Certainly, pre WWII, a lot of the more remote electorates had local members who lived in the capital cities and rarely even visited, which suggests their personal importance was even less than it is now.
Possum wrote:
I’m not worried about the Coalition for the moment. Labor’s graphs seem to be rising on National Security and The Economy, steady on Education and a slight fall on Health. When you compare Labor’s Economy and National security figures to the Coalitions it’s been a steady narrowing of the gap between the two. From looking at the charts it doesn’t look like it’s going to be too long before Labor takes over the lead from the Coalition on at least these issues.
Isn’t this good for Labor? Seems all good to me. As Shanahan said about the latest Newspoll, maybe it’s just a “protest poll”?
Andrew – that’s an interesting approach, you’ve inspired me to go and have a look!
BB,
Over the longer term it should be- but does it really, actually mean anything?
I suppose in one respect it might reflect people being more comfortable with Labor over a growing number of issues.
This does bring to mind the 2007-era ‘analysis’ of Newspoll in The Australia which maintained that the Liberals’ lead on the economic management questions meant that the ALP couldn’t win the election, despite it being well ahead on the primaries, the TPP and almost all of the other issues…
I guess, as far as issues are concerned, where we have seen people engaged (although perhaps not always as well informed as us in the political sphere) has been on very specific examples, e.g. interest rates or Workchoices. Although that’s probably crossing over from issues to slogans and messages to a certain extent.
Also Poss, doesn’t Essential do similar polling but with more specific “issues”? I seem to recall something along the lines of “better party to get you a better wage” or something, i guess an attempt to ask a more direct question in the wake of Workchoices. If so, i’d be interested to see if their questions give pretty similar results to the Newspoll questions.
Poss,
We do appreciate your work. It give me a greater degree of confidence to say that it shows that you are normal & that the rest of us are skewed.
However, this comment is probably at variance with what the others are saying.
So Poss does this mean that pollsters who ask 20 questions are actually wasting time and money?
Your analysis seems to suggest that there is limited extra information garnered by asking about specific issues and either the leader/party is perceived as doing well on everything or nothing.
NickD – Your point is relevant to the one I was making above about which issues are most important. While the Coalition was ahead on the economy, this had significantly declined as an important issue. This can be hard to see in Newspoll because they have asked about it much less than other issues and let people class every issue as important. However in the Morgan poll and the Australian Election Survey the decline of the economy can be seen clearly. With ‘Labor’ issues rising, this helps explain why the political cycle was moving in their favour.
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