With the Victorian election almost upon us there are many guides to individual seats available. To add to these I have developed a simple regression model to predict the 2010 Labor primary and two-party preferred votes and the 2010 Green vote in each electorate from the social composition of the electorate as revealed by the […]
A French left without workers?
The rise of the French National Front evokes alarm on the left. Actually I think Marie Le Pen is unelectable whoever she runs against. The Presidential system in France was introduced to marginalize the Communist Party which could never secure a majority in a Presidential contest. Now the system works against the National Front. Whoever […]
Listening to Labor’s true believers
The current malaise of the ALP has seen a recent upsurge of interest in primaries as a way to draw Labor supporters into participation within the ALP. But would this work? What do Labor supporters want? None of the recent discussion about primaries considers the example of Tasmanian state politics. The Hare-Clark proportional representation system […]
Canadian thoughts
Preoccupied by teaching but some hasty thoughts on the Canadian elections. Some attention from right-wing commentator James Allan who can’t work out why NDP did well, apparently voters think do highly of the Liberals that if they had criticised the NDP the NDP vote would have collapsed, if they respected Liberals so much than why […]
Further NSW thoughts
In the end the NSW election went as the polls predicted. Any very large swing tends to be somewhat irregular perhaps because traditional patterns of voting are disrupted. Labor sympathisers made much of the Greens disappointing performance. There would have been a time when for a political force to the left of the ALP to […]
Labor’s problem is not the Greens
With British Labour performing better than most would have expected this early into the term of the Conservative government partisans of Tony Blair’s legacy, excluded from the current leadership group, resemble voices in the wilderness calling Labour’s long-term prospects into question. Still some of their arguments have relevance for Australian Labor.
What do Labor and Green voters think of each other?
Further to last post I continue examination of the beliefs of Australians as revealed in the Australian Election Survey from 1998 to 2010. Asking voters were they position themselves on a left-right spectrum where 0 is furthest to the left and 10 furthest to the right might seem abstract but analysis suggests that these classification […]
Facts on the 2010 election
The 2010 election and Labor’s near defeat have been endlessly discussed by the media but until now we little clear evidence as to exactly what happened. After each federal election a comprehensive survey is undertaken by the Australian National University. The dataset for the 2010 survey was made available in late December. However it was […]
Following in the footsteps of the CPRS?
Labor is showing the signs of becoming obsessed about the Greens the same way they became obsessed by John Howard. Labor ministers have a point when they criticise the Greens for voting against the Rudd government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme but they sound rather like Greens complaining correctly that voters wildly overestimate the significance of […]
Labor wasn’t saved by the goldfields after all
This was a very good result for the Coalition. Obviously Labor had weakness but the Coalition had to be in a position to take advantage of them and to survive the scrutiny of an election campaign. Whereas in NSW and Queensland the opposition wilted under the pressure of an election campaign the Coalition flourished. The […]