Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to andin,
Some people EH! wont get behind a good idea unless it benefits them directly.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that even if Fairness is the number one question dividing Left and Right, it's not a sufficiently strong reason for most people to vote the way they do. Because there's the number 2 question, which could be almost as important, and so on down the list. At each step down, the people in the groups subtly change, so that by the time you get to question 10, even it if divides the population neatly into 2 groups (and there is always a way to do that), they won't be the same 2 groups as question 1.
In fact, I'd say this also goes for question 2. If fairness were question 1 and divided everyone into Left and Right wing, question 2 would divide both groups into 2, and the opposition between those divided on q2 could be not much less fierce than that dividing those on q1.
In other words, if you divide our political spectrum into broadly:
1. National and ACT on the Right. Labour, Greens, NZF on the Left .then the next division is really what separates Greens from NZF. Find a nice way to divide them cleanly with a single question and I think you'll find they don't much like each other. The Right can also be divided this way, but I don't think the two groups that would result are quite so far apart in this question.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Yes, together that's a big plan. Will it inspire? We shall see.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to linger,
Even if you make your question highly specific about the kind of fairness you mean, and asked people the extent to which they agree with it in some kind of Likert scale, and you get half on one side and half on the other, perfect even division, I still think it would not tell you a lot about how people will vote. It could even be the one question that maximally divides the population, the ideal question, the perfectly formed question. It’s still not going to be a good explanation of how they vote. Because the criteria people use are all different. For some people it would be all you have to ask. But for most people you’d need a lot more.
ETA: I guess what I’m saying is that you might very well find that this question is a less powerful predictor of how they will vote than “How old are you?” or “Are you female”?
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I want to point out that I’m not disparaging you (Emma) for raising this call, btw. By all means lets have another go at finding the big common ground of Leftists, at least among this very small self selected group of people who probably represent a disparate group epicentering on the Green Party. But to be honest I found what chimed with me most in your post was the sense of helplessness, the sense of losing this battle, of the warm bath beckoning as a sensible choice over getting out there and raging against the machine. For me, the taking stock of life has been a period of self-collection and self-reflection. We are Gen X, you and I. Soon, we’ll be the establishment. Do we really understand ourselves? I don’t think we do.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Emma Hart,
The stuff that happens – like the housing crisis – just happens, it’s nothing to do with government, and this is all complicated and boring and all the parties are the same and nothing ever changes so why bother, right?
That's one excuse people give. Well, technically it's a bundle of excuses, but let's say it's representative of the most commonly given ones. I've also heard:
-I don't want to support the system
-I'm too busy, have better things to do with my time
-No party represents me
-I don't know and I don't care
-It's not my country, I'm not staying
-I hate all the candidates
-We just have to wait until all the Baby Boomers die
-The world is going to hell anyway
-I don't want a record of which way I voted
-I don't even want to come to the attention of politiciansClearly it's an international phenomenon. Can it be put down to one thing or is it again a function of many, many things? Is some of it almost an inevitable function of human progress? It's hard to believe it would be happening everywhere if political differences were important.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to linger,
I would think that the Left, as I defined it above, are more likely to see fairness in the terms you lay out for them. But how much more likely? I think you'd probably be disappointed when you got down to numbers. There's a good chance that your definition makes your chances of picking a Leftist from a Rightist based on that alone only barely above chance. With that in mind it's hard to see it as the big unifying idea. You have to define the Left in terms of your big idea to get a major separation. But then it's 100% separation and it's not practically useful for anything except having an argument about.
You can, of course, ask people to say if they are Left or Right. But that seems mostly to be a proxy for how they voted. When questioned more widely on their actual values, the distinctions between the groups breaks down a great deal. Those who claim to be Left are not actually homogeneous in opinion at all (and the same goes for the Right), except in so far as self-labeling as being on the Left. You can use this method to find out what people on the "Left", as the term is understood by the population, are most strongly associated with in viewpoint. But absent any statement about where on that spectrum they are, you will almost certainly find it difficult to actually work out from their other opinions. Just because some idea is more strongly associated with Leftism than other ideas does not make it a good indicator. Even a large series of questions about their opinions is not going to help that much. And even if you work out they're of the Left, it's still not going to tell you how they will vote.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Sacha,
“Yes We Can”
“Make Amerka Great Again”
“Brighter Future”
“Lotto is our best hope”
Yes, herein lies the futility of the call for the big idea, and why this thread turned into guys making dildo jokes. If slogans are the best we can do in the big idea stakes then it's no wonder that electoral turnout is crashing.
I do not think that the "Left" has a big idea at its core. By "Left", I mean the half of people in this country whose political positioning is further from National than they are from Labour. This group has huge numbers of people in it who vote National. Likewise there are many on the "Right" (same definition, but backwards) who vote Labour. The positioning of Labour and National I define as the center of the position of people who vote for them, not where the parties claim to be, or based on some political theory. There are people who sit exactly on these centroids and vote for the other party. In other words their political positioning is right on the Labour centroid, they represent the exact perfect mean Labour voter, and they vote National. And vice versa. People far to the right of National vote Labour. People far to the Left of Labour vote National.
Like the housing crisis, voter choice is a very complex mix of a great many factors. There are no silver bullets for either one. There are piecemeal bits and pieces that will take a few percent here and there. A sustained effort with a dozen of them might make a real difference, if applied for a very long time, but our political system does not have the kind of memory required to do that. In fact, large change is the one thing that it is most resistant to.
Of course large change happens anyway, but it comes from outside the system. We have had a very large change in the fundamentals of our housing situation in NZ. But almost nothing has changed in the institutions dealing with it. It keeps weakly swimming against a huge outgoing tide. Small moves are made here and there, most of which have only made things worse. The same goes for poverty, which I think in NZ is now almost entirely driven by the housing crisis. When a basic fundamental of survival starts slipping out of reach, that is the very definition of poverty creeping in.
Large demographic change is happening. From the passage of time, generations die and new ones are born. From the passage of immigration, the ethnic makeup of the country alters. But the taps that are turned by government are never decisive in any way. Even if they screw one setting down, causing 10,000 less of a particular kind of person to be able to enter the country per annum, that affects the overall demography by 0.25% per annum. It would barely be noticed for 20 years in official statistics. It's certainly not going to have an appreciable effect during an election cycle, except on the people it denies entry to NZ for.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Rob Stowell,
People vote for big ideas, not policy papers.
Not sure about that either. Could you give an example of a big idea that people vote for? My understanding is that voting is mostly kinda tribal and demographically driven. Couple of years ago I set some data mining software ripping on the way people vote based on their opinions. Guess what the number one difference between Labour and NZF voters was? NZF voters were less likely to trust internet banking. I took that to be a proxy for demographics (which I had not fed into the covariates being explored). Opinion wise it was pretty difficult to tell them apart from Labour voters.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Why is this so hard for ‘third way’ advocates to see?
That's some British thing, right? I guess the main problem is that policy and positioning only seem to have quite a small influence on the way people vote.
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