Speaker: The silent minority
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Here's a great example initiative along these lines during the lead up to the last election;
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Lovely graphs. Pity the Soviet Corbynites are now shelling your bunker.
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the response rate (weighted to take account of the oversampling) was 31.2 per cent
There’s your problem, right there. You’re assuming that sample is representative of the total population, but the respondents are self-selecting for being interested in filling out a 24 page questionnaire. That would, I think, give you people who were more engaged and analytical about their political attitudes than the general population.
Before any analysis, I’d be interested to see some ground truthing, to start with: E1B: “Made a select committee submission" – how many answered positively, versus the number of submitters to select committees.
Unless you address that, you’re just taking numbers and drawing pretty pictures.
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Great work. The question of engagement is fascinating. Interaction between the variables you found would be good to know about.
From a biased perspective, it would also be very interesting to know whether the decision trees come out different, conditioned on what party they .... hmmmmm....felt closest to? (Can't be what they voted for, obviously :-)...had to think about that). I know the opinion on closeness is in the survey.
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David Hood, in reply to
You’re assuming that sample is representative of the total population
Er, I did say "As a technical note, this is just playing with the survey results themselves, without working through the weightings to make them representative of the general population."
This is a Sunday Evenings stroll through the data. I haven't fully digested the effect the weightings have, but rough results of applying them (I just haven't yet convinced myself I have applied them correctly) suggest raising information is a pretty good strategy for what individuals can try to do to raise the vote.
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BenWilson, in reply to
jknow is not a questionaire value, but one of those calculated after the fact. Does it take weighting into account already?
ETA: I'm not expecting you to know the answer, just bringing this to your attention, although I'm pretty sure you already knew.
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Hmmmm. "Now, there are other groups where things *effect* voting – for example English language fluency"
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BenWilson, in reply to
LOL. Now, now.
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David Hood, in reply to
*effect*
A fair cop :) Though it was what language was spoken at home, rather than a pure measure of fluency.
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chris, in reply to
*comprehension.
There’s some fascinating stuff here David. I was interested by this;
Basically, the 18-26 year olds (as I divide it up in this graph) are not-voting at about twice the rate of the next cohort.
Though not a new trend it’s good to have data. It popped back into mind on reading Russell’s post:
It probably goes to the limit of what can politically be said
Perhaps the politicians just aren’t speaking their language.
Also this:
A quick easy thing you can do, if you want to increase election turnout is talk politics- at the hairdresser, in the supermarket, on the bus or train.
Does remind me a little of the JW’s who came to the door yesterday, I couldn’t do so personally, I don’t really have the skill set for it. The religiosity graph is what interested me most, as it looks to read that those who might believe in God or karma or something are more likely to abstain, perhaps I'm reading it wrong.
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chris, in reply to
Sorry I missed the largish number of non-religious abstainers - nihilists? Anyway...
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These results seem right, and fit with both common sense and much of the existing literature on turnout. (The Pacific MPs thing is the obvious, very NZ-specific, exception.)
Bob Putnam's Bowling Alone makes similar claims about why voter turnout is declining in the US. He says turnout decline just one indicator of a broader movement of social atomisation, which leads people to disengage from civic affairs more generally.
For Putnam, technological change (eg. TV, internet) is a large, long-term driver of that atomisation, and therefore of the decline in turnout. I agree with him.
A difficult challenge for all political parties is how to entice people to vote again without touching the (IMHO) primary driver of the initial turnout decline. From earlier threads ,"being bold" and "being relevant" are two ideas currently floating around the NZ left on that question. I think it's worth noting that, regardless of which strategy gets chosen, all political parties are swimming against a strong cultural and technological tide.
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David Hood, in reply to
For Putnam, technological change (eg. TV, internet) is a large, long-term driver of that atomisation
While I have not looked at TV, but can understand the case for it doing that, I don't think Internet is having that effect (possibly because we are now in the age of community building and networks rather than publication and distribution of a decade ago that is more similar to broadcast TV one way flow). I can justify that with:
2011 voting rate for those with access to the internet 87.45%
2011 voting rate for those with no access to the internet 87.50%And that difference is just margin of error.
Similarly, as a proxy for amount of use, the question "how often use the Internet for banking or to buy/sell something"
2011 voting rate for those who never bank or buy/sell 87.53%
2011 voting rate for those who less than once a month bank or buy/sell 88.35%
2011 voting rate for those who 1-3 times a month bank or buy/sell 88.20%
2011 voting rate for those who once a week or more bank or buy/sell 86.99%
2011 voting rate for those who left question blank 85.92%Or do they have access to mobile internet
2011 voting rate for those who have mobile internet 85.99%
2011 voting rate for those who do not have mobile internet 87.87%Basically, there is no real difference in there. My suspicion is that as the most recent "age of the internet" has become embedded with day to day lives, any atomisation from the early days has gone away.
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David Hood, in reply to
nihilists?
I haven't gone through the data, but the story I assume in lack of evidence is a mix of principled atheists who are voting at the same rate as everyone else, through to the extremely lazy.
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Rob Salmond, in reply to
I can justify that with:
2011 voting rate for those with access to the internet 87.45%
2011 voting rate for those with no access to the internet 87.50%And that difference is just margin of error.
I think looking at this in a bivariate way isn't likely to give you good information, both because (1) there are so many other known correlates of voting also correlated with internet use, and also because (2) the theorised effect is time-series / cultural, rather than cross-sectional.
Foe example, income / education / SES is positively correlated with both voting and internet use, while age is negatively correlated with internet use, but positively correlated with voting. But, even if you do a big giant regression accounting fort those, it's still missing the temporal component.
I don't want to just be a naysayer, I'm sure there are a ton of studies testing and retesting Putnam's claims on this. But a bivariate correlation won;t cut it this time.
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chris, in reply to
The percentage of abstainers in the “voting can make a big difference” group seems quite high. Does the ‘abstain’ category also apply to those who were unable to vote?
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If, through talking to them, you increase their knowledge of politics from 0 to 0.5 (nothing to half informed) you increase their chance of voting from 67% to 89%
This doesn't really seem to follow, does it? Someone who's fundamentally uninterested isn't going either to know much or to vote, and causing them to know more won't (necessarily) increase their interest so much as increase their desire to avoid you. You'd need longitudinal data to start drawing that kind of conclusion, and even then it's a bit iffy.
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David Hood, in reply to
I'm sure there are a ton of studies testing and retesting Putnam's claims on this,
From a very quick reading, Putman made no particular claims about the internet, and
notes:
There is, of course, one space where civic engagement is alive and well, which Cortright glosses over: the Internet. A 2010 Pew study on "The Social Side of the Internet" found that Internet users are far more likely to actively engage in voluntary groups or organizations than others non-Web users. According to the data, 80 percent of Internet users (including 82 percent of social networkers and 85 percent of Twitter users) participate in group civic organizations, compared with 56 percent of non-Internet users.
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David Hood, in reply to
The percentage of abstainers in the “voting can make a big difference”
It looks to me that, once you believe voting can make a difference, believing it more strongly doesn't make much of a difference. The larger abstainers in the bar chart is just that it is a big raw number of a bigger raw column, but the percentage is about the same as the reasonable difference.
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David Hood, in reply to
This doesn’t really seem to follow, does it?
I absolutely agree causality is not established. To do that you would really need to be measuring an intervention. However, in terms of what the data suggests in terms of the space in which an individual might most constructively put their efforts, my opinion would be this is not unsupported.
It might be you need enthusiasm to get knowledge, it might be knowledge by itself makes the area feel more important so creates enthusiasm. I don't know. But in my opinion talking to people is a pretty good path forwards into that space either way.
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chris, in reply to
a big raw number of a bigger raw column, but the percentage is about the same as the reasonable difference.
Yes, a little difficult to fully apprehend without the tables, perhaps it’s the #f89828. but I’m liking your angle David. I guess the real outliers in that group are those who think ‘voting won’t make any difference’ but are still having a punt. I’d like to know more about them.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Basically, there is no real difference in there. My suspicion is that as the most recent "age of the internet" has become embedded with day to day lives, any atomisation from the early days has gone away.
Yup. Although you would find the greatest differences in internet use within older New Zealanders, who are overall less likely to be active internet users – but quite likely to vote?
Asian New Zealanders in several surveys are the most intensive internet users, but I'm not sure what their electoral turnout is like. It would be complicated.
You could have a look at the World Internet Project surveys for New Zealand, which are conducted by AUT.
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I did a cross tab table to make the distinction between interest and knowledge. The take-home is that for a given level of interest there are a range of knowledges, so their knowledge is not fully dependent on their enthusiasm. So raising peoples knowledge to get them to vote is not ruled out.
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David Hood, in reply to
I’d like to know more about them.
Looking at it in detail, I think the results for that question are heavily influenced by, in the wake of the election as people fill out the forms, who won.
Voting won't make any difference is made up of: Labour 37%, National 14%, Greens 8%, New Zealand First 11%, ACT 3%, United Future 0%, Maori Party 16%
Voting can make a big difference is made up of: Labour 27%, National 44%, Greens 12%, New Zealand First 7%, ACT 0.8%, United Future 0.4%, Maori Party 4%
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chris, in reply to
16%
Thanks for that David, much appreciated.
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