Posts by BenWilson
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So far as I understand, the first principal component is putting similar weight on lab and grn, and also nat and act, but in the opposite direction. It places very little weight on nzf. This is quite like the left-right axis. The second component, in the up-down direction places positive weight on self, and negative on everything else, most strongly for the smaller parties. It hardly puts any weigh on nat.
I think this suggests that how people rated themselves has little bearing on their choice between Labour and National, more so for the smaller parties, particularly NZF.
But I'm inexperienced at interpreting these at the moment so don't take my word for it.
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Polity: Meet the middle, in reply to BenWilson,
Can you plot the variable coefficient positions too? All 9 of them?
Worked out how to do this. Still learning how to interpret the outcome though. Note that I had to scale up the arrows and placement of the texts, because otherwise they'd have been lost in a tight cluster in the middle of the graph. The arrows are 5 times longer than they should be, which is where the texts should be found. They'd be unreadable.
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But having said that, those who don't care about the term at all aren't the only people. Perhaps the majority have some kind of definition in mind. I just don't think it's going to be the same definition across the board. It would, however, be interesting to try to model it to find what the features of that definition are.
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Which can go some way to explaining why Labour and National are not equidistant from the center. I suggest that they mentally evaluate where they think the population center is, and then place the parties relative to that. I think they get that part wrong, that the center voter could very well think that the center is to the left of them because they feel more affinity to National, which they "know" to be right.
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Polity: Meet the middle, in reply to David Hood,
I mean a reference as to what direction is left and what is right. Not how far - that's what they judge for themselves.
What I'm saying is when they judge how left the Greens are, they evaluate how much like Labour the Greens are compared to how much like National. This is a theory on how people who don't even really care about the terms might judge this question.
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Polity: Meet the middle, in reply to David Hood,
Rob did limit his definition of where the center was to that region. But just going off how people self-rated doesn't do that. Well, we don't really know what it does, since their criteria are not transparent. Perhaps in general they use the two main parties as a reference anyway.
ETA: Off the self-rating, the center does land between the parties. But not exactly in the center. Or does it? Depends on what measure of central tendency you use. If you use median, definitely not. If you use mean, it's pretty close. National is 0.2 closer.
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You're using the words "party of the center" there to mean "party perceived to be at the center by the voters". I'm not sure if that's what's required. If the center is not where the voters think it is, then the actual position of the actual middle voter could be closer to the right. They might personally think the center is to the left of them, but they still prefer the right for their vote. They're not statisticians, after all. The population's positioning is something they probably know less about than the party positions, since one is a matter of dry statistics and the other is bombarded on them by political salespeople.
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Note: I'm not a big fan of this theory or anything. Just trying to be a bit careful about how I reject it. I'm not even sure I worry too much about rejecting it as a predictor of voting outcomes. I'm more concerned about supporting it as the most important part of an strategy aiming to win elections. Exactly how does one move to the center? How does a party change the perception of where it sits on the spectrum? What effect might attempting to alter position have on where the actual center is - it could also be a moving target. In all of these questions, we can't get far with data if we don't clarify how position is ascertained.
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Polity: Meet the middle, in reply to David Hood,
So your answer is that the center was understood to be 5 when they answered the question? Seems fair enough. I'm still trying to think critically about your claim:
Just to make the conclusion quite clear here people moving from Labour to National were doing so while thinking National was a greater distance from the centre As a non-political science person, I would suggest that this behaviour is incompatible with the idea median voter theory was actually important in New Zealand.
I'm not sure that the median voter theory suggests that the median voter has to want what they perceive to be the middle value. It says that the outcome will be chosen by what they themselves want. If the median voter actually positions to the right, then a party further from the center could win them, under the theory.
Which is why I'm agonizing over where the actual middle is. You're suggesting that because people who switched their vote from Labour "knew" that National was further to the right that the left-right-ness can't really be that important in their decision? But what if they themselves had also moved to the right, and saw themselves as to the right of center now, and National as closer to them?
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Numbers for don't-know vs gave-answer, followed by proportion don't-know out of total
Self-position 2370 588 19.9%
Lab-position 660 2251 22.7%
Nat-position 650 2252 22.5%
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