In late October 1990, immediately after the election that felled the Lange–Palmer–Moore Labour government, approximately 3000 questionnaire booklets arrived at addresses randomly selected from the electoral rolls. Twenty-five pages long, the questionnaire was a daunting task to complete. Yet after a little prompting by post card and follow-up questionnaires, nearly 2000 completed booklets were returned to be coded into what at that time was the most extensive dataset yet assembled on the characteristics, attitudes and electoral behaviours of the people who make up the NZ electorate. Subsequently, Auckland University Press published Voters’ Vengeance; the 1990 Election in New Zealand and the fate of the Fourth Labour Government.
After a tentative beginning in 1987, the 1990 survey of electors and publication of Voters’ Vengeance marked a major scaling up of the New Zealand Election Study (NZES) programme, with funding from the now-defunct Social Science Research Fund Committee. Now, eight elections on from 1990, the oddly titled A Bark but No Bite is the seventh book-length election study to have emerged from the NZES stable. Three experienced researchers and authors have shared the writing: Jack Vowles, a professor of political science at Victoria University, who has been with the NZES from the start, is joined by his colleague in Sociology, Hilde Coffé and Jennifer Curtin from Political Studies at the University of Auckland.
Bark maintains the NZES brand of authoritative analysis of data generated by the triennial mailout of jaunty-covered, post-election questionnaire booklets, now even larger than the 1990 prototype. Discussion of the data is typically extended to include comparisons with other countries and drawn from a flourishing field of international literature of a similar genre. (The reference list in Bark is 50 pages long.) The overall sample, randomly selected from names on the main electoral rolls, is large and omits only those who have (illegally) failed to enrol. Being a post-election survey it includes those who, though enrolled, did not cast a vote – the silent participants in New Zealand elections, who now comprise the third largest block of electors after those who chose either Labour or National. Respondents who were coy about admitting they had not voted are barred from fibbing their way into the dataset as voters. For the NZES consults the publicly available marked rolls held at electoral offices to check that those who said they voted had indeed done so, while strictly maintaining their anonymity.
As in all survey research there are biases in the dataset due to such factors as variable response rates among subsets of the population, or sampling error. Oversampling and the weighting of data can compensate for these and restore the data to a closer statistical representation of the actual population. A Bark but No Bite is therefore on solid empirical ground, its data being as reliable as can be. This can pose a challenge to those who wish to blame the data if the messages out of it are sometimes unclear, or seem at odds with conventional wisdom. But that is the nature of the electoral beast, not an artifact of the way the data have been assembled. Consequently, the analyses, inferences and conclusions that unfold chapter by chapter are not always easy to comprehend and may not always accord with prior assumptions. Expect to be challenged. The style of the book is necessarily analytical, not narrative. Mercifully, though, in a major concession to the quantitative innocence of most readers, the authors have made it easier for us by corralling the tabulated results of the most difficult statistical procedures into a 30-plus page appendix. You do not have to read them. They are source material for the book’s chapter by chapter array of simpler tables and visually explicit line and bar graphs (over 100 of them). It would pay, however, to understand the importance of confidence intervals when interpreting the effect of comparable variables.
So who or what was the apparently toothless dog in the 2014 election that barked without bite? For those who recall the election, it could have been Labour’s leader David Cunliffe; or Kim Dotcom’s foray into the election via the Internet party? Or was it Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics with its leaked and potentially damaging insights into the activities of elements of the National party, including the Prime Minister?
There was plenty of bark from Labour’s energetic leader, David Cunliffe, and intellectual bite too, though that did not go down well among some of his colleagues, or grass-roots members, and media personnel and made little positive impression on people in the street. In the end, Cunliffe left no evident teethmarks on the hide of a popular Prime Minister. Meanwhile, amidst widespread resentment and scepticism directed at himself, Dotcom’s mission to discredit Prime Minister Key spluttered to an end with an unconvincing ‘Moment of Truth’ staged only days from the election. Perceptions of Key as ‘competent’ and ‘likable’ remained high and, despite both Dotcom and Dirty Politics, 58% of NZES respondents after the election still rated Key ‘fairly or very trustworthy’.
Nevertheless, Hager’s bite left palpable marks on National’s rump. National tried to dismiss Dirty Politics as the work of a left-wing malcontent, but Hager was a seasoned author whose research was widely respected if not applauded. Only 6% of NZES respondents thought there was ‘no truth’ to the claims in Dirty Politics, while 58% thought there was truth in the book (including 16% who considered it to contain ‘a lot’ of truth). Even among National voters slightly more than half thought there was ‘a little’ or ‘some’ truth in the book. When these judgements were merged with assessments of Key’s likability (a value that was strongly related to voting National), the effect was to slightly reduce the inclination to vote National among those who rated Key, but also believed there was some truth in Dirty Politics. It was not a dramatic effect, but when election results are close, small effects at the margin assume importance. The authors conclude: ‘By reducing the potency of John Key’s personal popularity, Dirty Politics may have affected enough voters to rob National of a single-party majority’.
In their different ways, Cunliffe, Dotcom and Dirty Politics contribute to the ‘account of the 2014 general election’ that the authors give as one of their book’s ‘dual’ purposes. They are also what most people are likely to remember about the election. The authors’ second purpose, however, is ‘to inquire into the implications of social and economic inequality as a matter of political party contest’. Internationally and within New Zealand, the issue of inequality has risen in prominence, driven especially by the dominance of free-market practices. The salience or at least pervasive presence of inequality constitutes the ‘bark’ associated with the 2014 election. The absence of ‘bite’ acknowledges the failure of the left and specifically Labour to benefit electorally from an issue that politically ‘belongs’ to the left. Instead, Labour’s vote dropped to 25%, its lowest since 1922. In effect, inequality in its various guises was a toothless dog – all bark and no bite. Why was this?
That a growing concern for inequality failed to achieve electoral bite in 2014 owed simply to the plethora of countervailing factors that stacked up against it, as summarised in Bark’s admirably lucid final chapter: the economy, a popular prime minister, a Labour party divided within itself and reluctant to make strategic concessions to its Green party block partner, the comparatively muted impact of the global financial crisis, the distraction of the Christchurch earthquake and National’s focus on the strategically important median voter. In the end, the pervasiveness of inequality in its various guises reinforced the decisions of those who ‘were already more likely to vote for parties of the left’, rather than shifting voters from the right to the left. The authors conclude: ‘National won the 2014 election because this was the default option. There were insufficient reasons to change’. That may seem self-evident after the event, but without the assembled data we would not have known with certainty.
Launching Bark at the same time as the parties are moving into campaign mode for the 2017 election tempts a reader to extrapolate from 2014 data to the present – when the focus inevitably falls on the Greens. In a revealing chapter on ‘Greening the Inequality Debate’, the Greens clearly emerge on the left of the political spectrum, always closer to Labour than National. The Greens’ urban-dwelling voters were young, highly educated, of European ethnicity and, though low in income and assets, disinclined to identify in class terms. Ideologically, Green voters tend to combine a set of values opposed to inequality and poverty with their views on environmental issues. Self-placement on the political left was a strong predictor of Green voting in 2014. The authors are firm in their conclusion: were the Greens to reduce their accent on social justice and inequality or to narrow their agenda in order to concentrate on environmental issues they would risk shedding as much support as they gained.
Obviously the problem in this for the parties of the left is that within their wider contest with the centre-right they are also competing with each other. The pathway for voters between the two parties is a veritable highway. The electoral logic of the current Labour/Green MOU thus becomes evident.
Equally evident from the NZES respondents is a potential lack of cohesion among parties in the centre-right block. Here NZ First was the misfit, occupying a space further to the left than National, ACT and the Conservatives on economic issues. In addition, respondents who were warm to NZ First were also more inclined towards the parties of the left – Labour, the Greens and even Mana – than to the parties of the right. In these data, we can detect a rationale for a Labour-led administration inclusive of NZ First.
The issue of inequality may not have worked for the Labour/Green parties of the left in 2014, but it has worked well as a steering theme for Bark but No Bite, providing a point of reference for the varied social structural and attitudinal factors at play in any election. It establishes a consistent interpretive thread that runs through separate chapters on the ‘social foundations of voting and party funding’; on the traditional major parties; the Greens; and then the smaller parties of the centre and right, before turning to gender and ethnicity-based inequalities, and the matter of declining turnout.
Moreover, it is a theme that the NZES team may want to hold on to as they refine their questionnaire for the 2017 election. Social and economic inequality is still with us. The fortuitous launching of Bark but No Bite late in the electoral cycle opens the possibility for a closer coupling by the NZES of its trademark election analyses. Many of the manifestations of inequality present in 2014 apply to the imminent 2017 election, though one inequality that the authors allude to, National’s electoral dominance, has already diminished. Another, however, has grown and that is the asymmetric carving up of the left by a reviving Labour and the wilting Greens. In 2017 there may be more political bite in the issue of inequality than in 2014. One awaits the NZES’s eighth election study with anticipation.