Posts by Lew Stoddart
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
One of the dirty little secrets is that Waitakere Man doesn't really even live in Waitakere, it's just a nice handle on which to hang a set of stereotypes. Chris' Waitakere Man lives in Wanuiomata and New Plymouth and Balclutha and Wanganui (not Whanganui, clearly).
(None of which places I'm dissing, by the way -- I grew up in one of 'em, after all.)
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
What you don’t seem to grasp is that complaining of media bias and operating with the media that we have aren’t mutually exclusive.
This bit I agree with.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, has said the media is biased, let’s sit on our hands.
In fact, this is more or less exactly the view expressed by many disenchanted lefties (and righties, for that matter): since the Em Ess Em is so shite, fuck’em, we’ll DIY.
Least of all Labour’s strategists and comms people.
I don’t know the internal workings of Labour’s strategic comms unit, but I am excruciatingly familiar with the results of their work. If they aren’t appallingly ignorant of how the media works in the real world rather than in some idealised fantasyland where the broadsheets love policy and serious hard-news political issues; and if they aren’t just tonedeaf, with poor timing and emphasis and coordination, lacking senses of synergy and symbolism and narrative congruence – then they are doing an incredibly good job of imitating exactly that.
You seem to think that media analysis leads to inaction. Somehow.
The action they’re conducting as a result of their media analysis: it’s not really working in the real world. It’s not translating into results. Something needs to change, in my view as a media analyst.
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Scott A,
Might be right, Scott, I'm not sure.
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Rich,
Interestingly, he has backed Megan Woods, the Labour candidate for the Wigram seat. I'm not sure where this leaves the other members of the Jim Anderton Progressive Party (both of them).
Well, Josie Pagani is standing in Rangitikei (unless parachuted into Darren Hughes' electorate to the south). Not sure about the other one.
Carol,
They do in Australia plus a further 11 countries.
And it has bad outcomes -- especially in Australia, where they have a complicated voting system. Lots of people vote informally (on purpose or by accident), or randomly. Sub-optimal.
L
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Paul, I understand -- and you don't owe me answers. But all too often what I get by way of counter-argument is 'but what about X Isolated Incident!'. Can't be arsed.
You're right -- a list of policies won't answer the allegation. because while Labour's policy record isn't outstanding, that's not the real problem -- it's that nobody even knows any of their policies. That's the problem, and that's why they're failing.
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Marcus Turner,
Marcus, an absurdly long comment follows, which is partially a response to your musings, and partially a general explanation of my critique on the thread so far.
I notice that many people in this discussion seem to know a heck of a lot more about the inner workings of the two main parties – and politics in general – than I do.* In the predawn glimmer of an upcoming election, I’d like to ask about the effect of swinging votes.
Just to be clear, I have no knowledge of the insides of any party, Labour or otherwise. (Some will probably say ‘it shows’ :) All of what I’m on about here is derived from observations on the outside. So take it for what it’s worth.
That having been said, while not discounting the views of insiders, I do think, at times, they lose perspective and become compromised by their entanglements. I believe, for instance, that one of the major reasons for Labour’s sluggish response to the 2008 election loss was that, while the leadership went, many of the mid-level functionaries and organisers responsible for the abysmal strategy which resulted in that loss remained. Although Labour still doesn’t seem to admit it, in its latter years Clark Labour actually was out of touch, and it was out of touch largely because insiders weren’t efficiently fulfilling their role of feeding back to the leadership what the public cared about. I wrote about this here.
So the two topics of your question – regarding insider knowledge, and swing voters – are pretty closely linked. Now on to the second.
You are right in saying that there’s a lot that’s difficult to ascertain about all this, but enough is known to say the following with some certainty: swing voters (those not ideologically committed) are almost never rational actors, unless a very explicit appeal is made to their sense of utility maximisation. An example of this was ‘north of $50’; another example was interest-free student loans. By and large, these are handy as a clincher, but are no substitute for building a baseline narrative which communicates to voters at the gut level. Questions like who are these guys, what do they stand for, can I trust them to act in my best interests even when I don’t really understand what it is that they do – all need to be answered reasonably well before explicit policy appeals, or even appeals to the back-pocket can work. (Though, often, such questions can be answered by a policy proposal).
Consider the typical demographic breakdown of late-capitalist democracies: a fair proportion of the extremely poor, a large proportion of fairly-poor-to-moderately-well-off, a small proportion of the comfortably-off and a tiny proportion of the extremely well-off. Under a purely rational model of political behaviour, a political movement which looks after the rich at the expense of the poor will lose every time. That they don’t comes down to the fact that these parties have made a study of the science of political behaviour over at least the past half-century, and they know how to pitch their messages and their values and their policies to voters who will, in all likelihood, be disadvantaged by them. Whereas the left sees ‘the game’ as something sort of dirty and beneath them, and – despite broadly rejecting rational-actor models of behaviour in economics – they tend to insist on making cerebral appeals of policy-wonk detail front-and-centre of every campaign. This is a damned shame, because in saying “the game is beneath us”, the left too-often says “winning elections is beneath us”.
Almost everything we know about political behaviour tells us that voters vote on their guts, not on their brains. (And we know a fair bit about it; read Drew Westen and George Lakoff for starters). So to be useful, reaching out to swing voters must be done by appealing to people’s guts first, and a lot of that is the sort of stuff we’ve been discussing with regard to Darren Hughes and Phil Goff. Swing voters, by definition looking to be convinced as to why they should follow a given leader, want to follow people they perceive as actually leading; who are decisive and transparent in their actions, and so on. They also want MPs who don’t take advantage of young, vulnerable men in their care; for example. These characteristics, and others like them, lend credence to a party’s policy statements and so on, make them believable and ‘truthy’. Because of this, a good leader can sell bad policy – and they often do – but a poor leader will have a hard time selling the best policy in the world.
Sorry to have been going on at such length, but the fundamental point is this: good policy, well-articulated, costed, evidence-based and so on, is necessary but not sufficient to a successful political movement (for the left, at least, who will be held to a higher policy standard – on the right you can usually get away with worse policy). But policy is what governments do while governing. Before you get to that stage, you have to win elections. And you don’t do that with policy. So while the policy has to be there, and it has to stand up to scrutiny, it should stay beneath the surface. To win over swing voters, you need to focus on leadership, narrative, values, and appeal, and use policy to clinch the deal.
In this regard, Labour at present has it arse-backwards. Giovanni’s protestations notwithstanding, people don’t know (or don’t believe) what they stand for, and consequently don’t trust them to be a good government. So, even though it’s overwhelmingly not in their best interests, they vote for the party which they feel like they know, or can trust to represent their values.
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
Russell, true, it is crucial in politics to bear in mind how things might be, but in order to win, you fight today’s battle according to the conditions of today. Too much wishing the ‘MSM’ was better, or the people were smarter, or whatever – all gets in the way of crafting politics which appeal to them. A not-especially-contentious statement which has probably gotten lost in the noise.
As far as ‘look it up’ went; Giovanni had already indicated that he couldn’t be arsed reading further on the topic, so I decided against belabouring the detail.
Paul, no real disrespect intended; just that what you proferred by way of a counterargument wasn’t one worth the name. While I may be a pretty recent commenter, but I’ve been lurking here long enough to know that’s not generally how things roll. *shrug*
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Yes and no. Brash at Orewa was a strategic loss. It was a tactical win, however.
Appalling policy platform and a bad direction for the country, but that’s independent of its quality as a political move.
Re the media -- my only point is that a political movement which wants to be successful responds to how things are rather than how things might be.
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Blaming the media and voting public is not a useful counterargument. The media is what it is; you live with it and work with it, or you fail. In a democracy, the voters are the people you have to persuade to support you; either you do what needs to be done to achieve that, or you fail.
The surest sign of failure: blaming them for doing what they do and being what they are.
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Ah, blaming the media. And the voting public. Check and check on the great list of apologists' excuses.
I've gone into great detail about what Labour can do, and indeed, none of it is simple. In a nutshell it's about moving away from a policy-led rational-actor model and towards a model which more adequately explains and predicts political behaviour. I won't rehash the last couple years of my writing on the topic here, but I'm sure you can work out where to find it.
L