Tag Archives: Scott Yorke

Pagani and polls

I’ve been very busy, and had no time to thrash over John Pagani’s rather remarkable outbursts in defence of his tenure as the Labour party’s chief strategist, which ended a few weeks ago. Lots of commentary, but the best is by Danyl once, and again; Scott, and Eddie. Read the comments too.

I’ll not go into great detail, except to reiterate that the problem with Labour’s narrative — which John was presumably involved in constructing — has been that it lacks cohesion and a distinct, authentic character of its own. The song of the Labour party has failed to ring out these past two and a half years, it turns out, because John Pagani has been counselling his choir to mumble along to the prevailing tune, on the assumption that that’s the song the electorate wants to hear.

But how would he know? When Scott Yorke suggested that dismissing Danyl and Eddie as ‘trolls’ was an attempt to silence his critics rather than engage with the substance of their critique, Pagani tweeted “If only I could silence them.” That, right there in less than half a tweet, is in my view the root cause of the Labour party’s malaise. The predominant attack narrative which saw Clark Labour ejected from office in 2008 was ‘out of touch’, and I wrote in September 2009 that the way forward was for the party to start listening to the electorate again. John disagrees. I’ll let his record, currently illustrated by the 3 News Reid poll which puts Labour on 27.1% of the party vote, with 78% of the electorate believing the party cannot win the forthcoming election, speak for itself.*

John appears not to believe that a successful political movement needs to lead public opinion, rather than simply following it, and needs to be willing to alienate some people to that end. But most crucially it must listen to them. This was exactly the course of action advocated by Labour insider Jordan Carter back in January 2010:

Our task this year, to be blunt, is to listen to what people have been saying, and to go beyond listening, and into reflecting back the things we are hearing and seeing what people think. Instead of listening and saying “that’s nice”, we have to say, “we’ve heard you and this is what we think.”

Jordan was recently named on the Labour list at #40, which on current polling is sadly outside the running for a seat. But the party could do a very great deal worse than Jordan as a strategist; though who would want that job right now I can’t quite imagine.

Someone else who has been making sense on this topic is Matthew Hooton, who endorsed Eddie’s take in comments on The Standard post linked above. There’s a discussion about opinion polling in the comments to that thread as well, in which ak raises the fact that widespread reporting of poll results can influence turnout and voter choices. People like to back a winner, the reasoning goes.

Well, yes — but a couple of things: first, the ‘poll effect’ favours leaders, not one side in particular. The left has benefited from this in the past, it’s a bit churlish to complain about it now. Secondly, regarding the argument that landline-only polls favour conservative parties. There’s a good point here. Yesterday in the NatRad politics slot Hooton was pooh-poohing the landline bias, arguing various sorts of anecdata to say he didn’t think it made a difference. I’m aware of no rigorous research on this topic in NZ, and since (I believe) all the major polls are landline-only, it’s largely moot (polls are mostly useful as sources of continuous, compatible data — a known set of methodological distortions — and screwing with polling methodology breaks that). But Pew Research did study this in the US context late last year, and found a 6-point bias in favour of the Republican party in landline-only polls, compared to those which included cellphones. So it rather seems to me that the onus is on those who reckon there’s no bias to explain why and how the NZ context differs from the US context. I’m sure it could be done, but it’d take a good deal more than Matthew Hooton’s anecdotal waffling about how if pollsters want to reach him, they’ll have to call him on his cellphone.

* There’s every likelihood this is a rogue; but let’s not pretend that the trend is much more rosy.

Things that scare me

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Today I was waiting in my doctor’s waiting room and, as my older daughter played with the water machine, I espied in the hands of a kindly, grandmotherly looking woman, a copy of the July edition of Investigate magazine — the one about how Obama is going to eat everyone’s babies. But also the one with the article about whether North & South got their recent report on vaccination right.

The North & South June edition, which contained the report on vaccination, was also on the magazine table. I’ve read it, and it’s sound investigative journalism about an important topic: how some diseases we thought were dead and buried are enjoying a resurgence because some otherwise sensible people decide not to vaccinate against them. I haven’t read the Investigate article in question, because my life is short enough as it is, and at any rate I refuse to fund Ian Wishart.* But the Investigate editorial position on vaccination — pretty well documented in previous articles which I have read — is just the sort of thing which raises the spectre of doubt in the minds of parents already nervous about having to hold their little treasures down so a nurse can stick a needle in them. Finding such a hysterically anti-science tract as Investigate in a doctor’s surgery bestows upon it a medical legitimacy it does not deserve. There’s a time and a place for this sort of material, but a medical context is not appropriate. It’s like the proverbial smoking doctors whose habits were supported by Big Tobacco in exchange for reassuring their patients that smoking didn’t do them any harm.

The other daughter? At the time, she was in the nurse’s office getting her jabs. I had a word to the nurse about it; she was almost as alarmed as I was and said she’d remove the offending rag. That’s something.

* I’m sure this entitles me to a free bout of Wishartian pig-wrestling and not-at-all-veiled implications about the standard of my professional work such as Scott received, but I’ll pass, thanks all the same.

Bleg: what do people want in an electoral system?

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I wrote most of this before DPF’s post on the threshold, including his link to Chris Bishop’s handy paper on representation and stability went up, so read that first. In fact, you’d also do very well to look over BK Drinkwater’s series comparing electoral systems: noise, wastage, proportionality, and a critique of some critiques of SM, although note that the SM numbers assume a 70-50 electorate-list split as per our MMP system at present. This is good from an apples-apples perspective, even if it’s not an option that’s actually on the table. I also wrote it before my more-recent post on the topic, for which some people have begun offering their preferred electoral modifications. Wonderful!

Much like the subtext to the s59 referendum question was ‘do you like the anti-smacking bill?’, the question above lurks behind the forthcoming debate on MMP, for which the troops are currently massing.

The likeliest contender, in my view, is the retention of MMP as we have it now, with a 5% threshold and a 70-50 split. Other less-likely contenders, again in my view, are as follows:

STV, as employed in some local body elections and for the Australian Senate.
SM, as apparently favoured by National and employed in the Republic of Korea.

Note that FPP isn’t in this list. I don’t think NZ would go back. Modified MMP also isn’t in the list; not that I think it isn’t a credible contender, just that the way the process is structured (referendum: MMP yes/no; if no, referendum on alternate systems) doesn’t seem likely to permit it. There are lots of other peripheral options, such as open list; run-off or instant run-off; or any number of other possibilities. Feel free to argue your corner.

But what sort of system do people actually want? As I see it, within a centralised democratic structure such as we have, relevant factors include the following:

Transparency. Results in transparent electoral systems are clear and obvious; how a particular candidate, party or government was elected is reasonably self-evident. FPP is very transparent. STV is very opaque.
Simplicity. Simple systems are easy for people whose political engagement stretches to ticking a box or two every three years to understand. Again; FPP is very simple, STV is not at all.
Proportionality. Proportional systems elect candidates from parties according to the party’s share of the vote. FPP is not proportional at all. STV is often claimed to be proportional, but it’s really fauxportional, often producing results which seem proportional but were arrived at by non-proportional means. Open list is (in principle) perfectly proportional. Thresholds in proportional systems and the number of electorates in mixed systems are also relevant to this question.
Representativeness. Similar but orthogonal to proportionality, a representative system contains mechanisms to guarantee certain segments of the electorate representation. This is a complex notion; geographical electorates are such a representative measure, ensuring that people from the geographical margins are represented, when a non-geographically-determined system (such as purely proportional open list) might marginalise them. Reserve seats for tangata whenua or other groups are another such form of representativeness.
Low wastage/regret. Conventional wisdom is that the prospect of a wasted vote depresses turnout (or changes behaviour) among voters who believe their vote might be wasted, which is a self-perpetuating cycle. This is most evident in FPP, but is also present in proportional systems to an extent, due to the effects of a threshold.
Decisiveness. Decisive systems produce strong, stable executive governments with few constraints on their power. FPP, except in the rare case of a hung parliament being elected, is decisive, while proportional systems which elect a number of parties and rely on coalitions are less decisive.
Small size. Self-explanatory. Any system can be made large or small, but this frequently has huge impacts on other factors.
Durability. Durable systems are not prone to future governments tinkering with, amending or replacing them. FPP was extremely durable. MMP has proven fairly durable. This is a meta-factor, in a sense; it seems like anyone valuing this factor highly should lobby for one of the less-extreme systems; a second-best choice, rather than a perfectly proportional system or a highly decisive system, since ‘pretty good’ is less likely to be overturned.

In principle, the relative importance a person assigns to of each of these factors should point to that person’s ideal electoral system. Could be programmed into a handy poll in the leadup to the referendum; in fact, I bet it already has been, I just haven’t found it.

There are other relevant electoral changes, as well. Here are a few; please add your own:

Size of parliament and division of seats. Yeah, I listed it above – what I’m referring to here is the electorate-list split in mixed systems; the North/South island and rural/urban splits, that sort of thing. Also the vexed question: how many MPs overall?
Allocation of seats. Historically, the One True Way in NZ was for seats to be allocated along population-geographic lines. Nowadays it’s a mix of population-geographic and party allegiance. But what other means of allocating seats are there? What would happen if seats were allocated according to social class? Income? Level of education? Ethnicity? Religion? The history of democracy contains precedent for all these things in one way or another.
Decentralisation. Federation of micro-states? Balance of central and local government power? How does one dismantle centralised democracy using democratic mechanisms?
Electoral term and other constitutional institutions. Our three-year term is quite short, and there are few checks on the executive ability of governments – as long as they have a parliamentary majority, there’s little they can’t (and won’t) do. Do we need a second chamber? A longer term? Should one go along with the other?
Referenda and non-electoral plebiscites. What should their status be? Other representative mechanisms, such as citizens’ juries?
The big one. What difference would becoming a republic make anyhow? A better question: if people knew that NZ would become a republic in the near future, how might their electoral preferences change?

Please, answer the question. What do you actually want in an electoral system, and why? And more than that — what do you want, and what do you think is (even remotely) plausible?

Update: Scott Yorke has a few choice words on the topic, as well.

Sovereign Democratic Realism

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2003849206 Via Scott Yorke’s excellent Imperator Fish, pics of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s Siberian vacation photo-op.

The wider photoset (you’ll have to google around for all the photos, since each website only contains part of the set) is a strong statement of Russia’s new national identity as a fit, keen, ruggedly independent nation which is the master of its own destiny, answerable to nobody. Vladimir Putin idealises Russia as it wants to see itself.

The wider campaign propagandises Putin’s adopted doctrine of Sovereign Democracy, essentially ‘we call our system democracy, so democracy it is’. It fetishises Putin’s personal capability and authority; his command over nature, his idolisation by ordinary Russians (even those thousands of miles from Moscow), his statesmanship. Closely resembling what I/S calls Heinlein’s psychopathic frontier barbarism, Putin rides horses, treks in the mountains, fishes in a wild river, pilots a fast boat, builds a fire, helps rescue a beached whale, comforts an Ingushetian politician injured in a suicide bombing, works in a metallurgists’ plant, gives orders as to a train crash, visits a political youth camp, meets Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s widow, and shares tea with the locals. All with the cameras in attendance (and in some cases, with the sound guy in-shot – no attempt at pretending it’s not a propaganda exercise).

There has been much speculation as to the import of this photoset, ranging from the suggestion that, by appearing bare-chested in the outdoors on a holiday with the Prince of Monaco, Putin is sending a signal of tolerance about homosexual rights, referencing Brokeback Mountain. The semi-official spin, naturally, is that it’s simply a demonstration that Putin knows how to relax – a signal that he will retire peaceably at the end of his second term as Prime Minister.

I am not so convinced. This lays the groundwork for a perpetuation of Putin’s role as Russia’s eminent statesman of the 21st Century, and in a much more subtle and compelling way than either Hugo ChÃ¡vez or Manuel Zelaya’s clumsy attempts at circumventing constitutional term-limits. The key to sovereign democracy is its illusory consent – the appeal to Russian independence, strength, unity and capability which Jonathan Brent and others have argued (audio) present the danger of sliding back to a new form of Stalinism, even with the support of those who would suffer under such a system. This is a strong warning to Dmitry Medvedev, who has criticised ‘sovereign democracy’ as a form of authoritarian doublespeak, and to the Russian people that if a ‘real’ leader is needed, one exists. Former KGB officer Putin, here, is presenting himself as another Man of Steel.