Speaker: The silent minority
41 Responses
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Emma Hart, in reply to
Asian New Zealanders in several surveys are the most intensive internet users, but I’m not sure what their electoral turnout is like.
From memory, they're one of the lowest turn-out ethnic groups, along with Pasifika.
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David, have you looked at the youth-not-voting issue compared with other elections? I'd be interested to know if political engagement increases with age, or if it's more a generational thing.
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David Hood, in reply to
General reports are that it is a cohort thing, but I haven't looked at it myself. That will be a particularly interesting question when the 2014 results become available soon given what happened to Labour.
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Emma Hart, in reply to
It's a cohort thing, indeed. Those young people establish a pattern of not voting, and largely carry it through their lives - so far at least, which is into their thirties.
I've recently discovered that my own 18 year old daughter isn't enrolled to vote, and can't be arsed enrolling to vote, and isn't really bothered about voting. I'm torn between the shame of it, and having my own little n=1 lab specimen in the house.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
having my own little n=1 lab specimen in the house
Isn't that the reason to have children?
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BenWilson, in reply to
I’m torn between the shame of it
I'm torn on whether to be shamed on it at all. If the social atomization that Rob is referring to above is a real thing, and an ongoing trend, aren't we proselytizing against the tide? (sound nicer than "pissing into the wind").
What I mean is instead of fighting a systemic condition and slowly losing for our whole lives, perhaps we could think about what institutional change might give us the same effect as increasing voter participation?
My own feeling is that a big part of disengagement is the feeling of the irrelevance of voting to our particular atomic situation. Things like the huge left-right divide we're supposed to care about (but the jury is out about whether we really do when it comes down to actual choices) just turn people off - there's no sense of participation, and just getting our choices made for us by representatives isn't how we're living our lives in so many other ways that we have no faith in it as a way of deciding how the nation is governed. Well, either no faith, or no interest (not the same thing).
Essentially what I'm saying is that we've got an institution that's basically an old dog running the country, compared to what we're capable of making. Young people probably see this, and just can't be arse to engage with the old dog. You can't teach the old dog much. It's as likely to bite you as guard you, and it barks all the bloody time, and needs a lot of care. They'd rather just let those who want to tend the dog do that, and think about other ways they can get what the dog does done for them. If they're worried about people breaking into the house, they could get an alarm, to more directly address the problem of the old dog having slept through the last break in, but bitten one our friends who came around.
Maybe young people are just getting on with building a better system, and hoping the old dog will either get with the program or just die already.
Of course the problem with that idea is that the dog is immortal, in a Tolkien Elf kind of way. It won't die of old age, although it could maybe be killed. We are kind of stuck with teaching it new tricks, as bloody frustrating as that is. We're talking about a dog that, for instance, could spend 50 years deciding whether to follow scientific evidence AND public opinion on what to do about cannabis. It took a hundred years to teach it to stop biting homosexuals, and it still growls at them.
Another thing that strikes me about young people and this sort of thing is that we live in a time where voting with one's feet can at least have a major effect on how much the old dog affects us. We can always choose NOT to live in NZ. As we get older, this kind of choice is less and less viable. I pretty much can't leave, even though at times I really want to. But I've got a family, and our ACC system means that we get a level of care for my son that would not happen anywhere else. My wife likes it here. But a young single person without kids can go anywhere that will take them. Perhaps that freedom colors their view on how much participation is even appropriate for them.
These are random thinks. I dallied with deleting this entire post, as I do with most of my posts recently, on account of thinking my reckons are less valuable than I used to. But hey...treat them as in the spirit of igniting thought, rather than things I firmly hold to.
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By the spirit of igniting thought, I didn't mean killing it stone dead. Now I really wish I'd deleted that post.
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There is a lot happening this week. (false) flag choices, refugees, etc
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Though here is one media people can read to much into (there is only 5% in difference for most media sources for most people). This isn't trying to work out peoples total electoral news consumption, just plotting the individual sources.
Still, National Radio should be pleased- being at the top on the left end with a linear line of decrease is about the ideal state for a quality broadcaster. Beats being a media source where people become less likely to vote when they go from sometimes getting their electoral news to often.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Though here is one media people can read to much into
Yes, it looks like an almost classic case of being careful to distinguish causation and correlation. Lots of alternate reasons why these could be correlated besides the hypothesis that these particular news sources improve a person's likelihood to vote.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
By the spirit of igniting thought, I didn't mean killing it stone dead. Now I really wish I'd deleted that post.
Well, I'm glad you didn't anyway.
What you're saying broadly chimes with some vague thoughts I've been having. Firstly, and without wishing to minimise the considerable problems that still exist and need to be dealt with, there has been a lot of progress in the last few decades, but it's all been on a level of 'benefit to the individual'. So we have civil unions, workplace equality legistation, anti-discimination leigislation, and steps towards drug legalisation (mostly in the US, but still). And on the other hand, in terms of 'benefit to the collective', there has been considerable roll-back of hard-won rights: widespread privatisation, zero-hours contacts, sell-of of social housing, etc.
Perhaps it's easier for people (young people) to get behind single-issue campaigns that directly affect them, and which have easier-to-grasp consequences, and where there is tangible measurable progress.
The other thing which your 'old dog' analogy reminded me of was Russell Brand's political capering last year. Whatever you think of him (and the kindest thing I can find to say about him is that he is at best a court jester), he managed to land a few telling blows. He flat-footed Paxman merely by not playing the interview game by the established rules (given that Paxo is supposed to be the people's champion of 'holding truth to power', that was quite telling in itself). He also had a bit (I think in the same interview) where he was talking about the Commons/Lords in the UK - if you've been raised in the certain way as a member of a certain demographic, then when you walk into a place like that, you are 'home'. For anyone outside that demographic, it's either overwhelmingly foreign and intimidating (you don't belong here), or just...weird. Show the opening of the UK Parliament to a young Brit, and I expect the reaction would, 9 times out of 10, be bemusement. Who's that idiot in the stockings? Black Rod? Why's he knocking on the door with a golden club? These people govern us? I'm supposed to be engaged and invested in this? Yeah, nah. Then try explaining to them that while 'yo mama' jokes are unacceptable in the playground, Prime Minister's question time is a bastion of democracy.
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this is actually interesting
If you take the how interested in politics are you question, and focus the people who declared "Not at all interested" and then look at how many in person politics discussions were they in, the voting rates are
Frequent discussions 100% (tiny, tiny group)
Occasional discussions 81% (in the same zone as rare)
Rare discussions 83% (in the same zone as occasional)
No discussions 55%Which, I would opine, is consistent with the knowledge trumps duty etc argument I made initially that talking to people is a good thing individual people can do if they want to raise the vote, given the big difference between no conversations and any conversations.
As personal contact is playing such a powerful role, i would also opine also suggests that coopting epidemiological models for disease outbreak might give so useful thinking.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
No discussions 55%
The 'Maurice' Minority?
Bringing in epidemiological models for disease outbreak is on the money - something is spreading fast through the whole National stable - perhaps they should be quarantined, lest they infect the public ...- oh, too late....
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there has been a lot of progress in the last few decades, but it’s all been on a level of ‘benefit to the individual’
It's also things that are zero-cost to the 1%. The only downside for them is antagonising the proles.
And a lot of the "left" are happy to take the win of symbolic zero-cost victories while ignoring whole herds of elephants that seem to be in the room.
A good example is the University of California at Berkeley. It's been a hot-bed of radicalism since the 1960s. Use the wrong name for a minority group, and one would be in serious trouble. However, ever since the Manhattan Project, UCB has been involved in managing Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories whose primary focus is to develop nukes which might well be used to blow up People of Color (as well as conventional weapons which definitely are used for that).
But while there is no doubt opposition to that, it's pretty muted - the left get their zero-cost victories and the right get their depleted uranium.
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Making people aware of the "damage" being done to the country by National would increase the number of people voting, whether the damage was real or imagined would not make any difference to this. Telling people how much "damage" would be done by Labour and the Greens would not make much difference to voting numbers.
Reasoning for this is that doing nothing, in the latter case, allows people to think doing nothing means no change, whereas the former instils a desire for change therefore a desire to vote.
I would submit that most elections are lost rather than won... if you see my point.
I am sure any of you could come up with numbers for this, I just use inspired guesswork and an unfailing knowledge in all things, in my mind's eye, thus I am rarely wrong, apart from that time I thought I had made a mistake, I was wrong then. -
Rich Lock, in reply to
the left get their zero-cost victories and the right get their depleted uranium.
Yeah, it's a bit hard not to compare and contrast opposition to the Vietnam war with opposition to Gulf Wars I and II, the main difference being that there was a significant risk that nice white middle-class young men might get drafted and have to put their lives on the line.
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