Crisis, What Crisis?
Daniel Finkelstein had an thoughtful piece in The Times the other day in which he argued that Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, is doing himself no favours by banging on about a 'cost of living crisis' endlessly because this simply plays to the strengths of his opponents, as the country claws its way out of recession.
Now, broadly speaking, I think Daniel Finkelstein is right but I would also point out that you can't have serious and sensible discussion about the cost of living (crisis or not) if you don't take people's housing costs into account.
Because as every knows housing costs represent the single biggest cost to the average person's or family's budget and in many cases the artificially low interests rates that the UK has been experiencing since 2008 means that many mortgage payers have been doing very well out of the recession.
So the tactic of banging on about a 'cost of living crisis' when so many people are not experiencing any kind of crisis seems completely mad to me and is yet another sign that UK politics is completely out of control.
Robbie and Mozart have a lesson for Labour
By Daniel Finkelstein - The Times
Plant the right issue at the front of voters’ minds and victory is yours. History suggests Ed Miliband has got it wrong
In 1999, a poll was conducted to discover the most influential musicians of the millennium. I have been laughing at the result for more than a decade. Just recently, however, I have come to believe that the survey provided some useful advice about how to win the next general election.
More than 600,000 people took part, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart will have been disappointed when he opened his copy of The Guardian and discovered that he came only seventh. I don’t think it is going too far to suggest that he will have been gutted when he absorbed the news that he finished just behind Robbie Williams. And no one would wish to have been having breakfast at Beethoven’s place that morning. He finished nowhere.
Trying to understand this ridiculous outcome, I developed two linked theories, and together I think they might assist Ed Miliband.
The first is that because Robbie Williams was all over the media at the time, his name was simply nearer the top of people’s minds than Mozart’s. The second, more tentative, thought is that by using the word millennium in the question, respondents were reminded of Williams’ hit single of that name.
I will come to Mr Miliband in a moment, but for now just note that such survey effects are familiar to pollsters. Change the wording of a question slightly and you get a different outcome. The same is true if you change the order of the questions. Take, for instance, a question asked by the American pollsters Pew Research at the end of 2008. Far more people (88 per cent rather than 78 per cent) said that they were dissatisfied with the way things were going in America when the question was posed immediately after respondents were asked whether or not they approved of the president, George W Bush.
It is common to dismiss this as just an annoying quirk of polling. However, in his classic book The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, John Zaller explains that this survey effect (or what I think of as the Robbie Williams effect) is much more important than it seems. It reveals something about voters.
Professor Zaller argues that the most common mistake in political analysis is to assume that people have straightforward, consistent and strong views about the subjects on which they are being polled. In fact, people are ambivalent, uncertain and likely to give a different answer to the same question on different occasions.
So responses vary wildly depending on the order of the questions, not because of an error in the survey but because people’s opinions actually change depending upon what happens to be at the top of their mind.
And it is for this reason that I question Labour’s “cost of living” election strategy. I am not, here, interested in whether Mr Miliband’s policies are correct or whether they would persuade me to vote for him (I am a Conservative and a peer, so I can’t vote and if I could it wouldn’t be for him). I am instead interested in whether the strategy makes political sense.
By talking incessantly about the cost of living, Labour is raising the salience (the prominence in people’s minds) of economic issues. It is, if you like, reordering the survey so that just before they are asked to vote, the public is first prompted to think of the economy. Why would they want to do that? The economy is now growing strongly and Conservatives are much more highly rated on economic competence.
If Mr Miliband is not persuaded by my Robbie Williams analogy, he might try reading The Message Matters, Lynn Vavreck’sstudy of American presidential elections.
Ms Vavreck’s starting point is that the results of presidential elections are very strongly related to the performance of the economy and opinions about the economy in the year before an election. It is possible for a campaign to be victorious when the economic fundamentals are not helpful, but it is hard.
If there is strong growth in election year, the standard bearer of the governing party can run as what Ms Vavreck calls “a clarifying candidate”. She uses this term to meancandidates who campaign on the economy when the economic fundamentals are in their favour. This sort of campaign was successful for Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, one Bush in 1988 and the other in 2004. You can also be a clarifying candidate when the economy is weak and you are running against the incumbent party. That, for instance, is how Obama won in 2008.
Ms Vavreck notes that there have also been some victories for what she terms “insurgent candidates”, those attempting to win even though the economic fundamentals are not in their favour. John F Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and George W Bush in 2000 all won by successfully changing the subject of the election away from the economy. In 1968, Nixon, just for example, ran as the law-and-order candidate.
What never works is to run as a clarifying candidate when you are, in fact, the insurgent (George McGovern in 1972, Bob Dole in 1996, John McCain in 2008). In other words, there is no point in putting the emphasis on economic policy when the economic fundamentals are against you. This does not, of course, mean that Mr Miliband cannot win doing this. It just means that such a victory would be unprecedented.
The weight of the research of political scientists strongly advises him to develop an alternative to banging on about the cost of living. The NHS being a possible topic. Or perhaps linking his fairness message to public services rather than the economy. He is running out of time, and identifying a different message will be hard, although not impossible.
At the same time, the implication of all this for the Conservatives is obvious. David Cameron should run as the clarifying candidate. He should run on the economy because the economic fundamentals tell him to.
Lynton Crosby, the head of the Tory campaign, understands this very well. He talks often of the importance of salience, of identifying what is on the top of people’s minds. The Australian’s favourite tool for creating campaign strategy is a simple chart that employs a statistical technique known as regression analysis. He plots on it those issues that are most salient and those where his party has an advantage. Then he insists on the discipline of talking only about those issues.
After the European election, the Conservatives’ big task will not be to beat Ukip, or to do a deal with it, or to make Nigel Farage look foolish. It will be to shut up, shut up, shut up about Ukip and talk about the economy. They must be a clarifying economic party running a clarifying economic campaign. Nothing else will work.
Plant the right issue at the front of voters’ minds and victory is yours. History suggests Ed Miliband has got it wrong
In 1999, a poll was conducted to discover the most influential musicians of the millennium. I have been laughing at the result for more than a decade. Just recently, however, I have come to believe that the survey provided some useful advice about how to win the next general election.
More than 600,000 people took part, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart will have been disappointed when he opened his copy of The Guardian and discovered that he came only seventh. I don’t think it is going too far to suggest that he will have been gutted when he absorbed the news that he finished just behind Robbie Williams. And no one would wish to have been having breakfast at Beethoven’s place that morning. He finished nowhere.
Trying to understand this ridiculous outcome, I developed two linked theories, and together I think they might assist Ed Miliband.
The first is that because Robbie Williams was all over the media at the time, his name was simply nearer the top of people’s minds than Mozart’s. The second, more tentative, thought is that by using the word millennium in the question, respondents were reminded of Williams’ hit single of that name.
I will come to Mr Miliband in a moment, but for now just note that such survey effects are familiar to pollsters. Change the wording of a question slightly and you get a different outcome. The same is true if you change the order of the questions. Take, for instance, a question asked by the American pollsters Pew Research at the end of 2008. Far more people (88 per cent rather than 78 per cent) said that they were dissatisfied with the way things were going in America when the question was posed immediately after respondents were asked whether or not they approved of the president, George W Bush.
It is common to dismiss this as just an annoying quirk of polling. However, in his classic book The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, John Zaller explains that this survey effect (or what I think of as the Robbie Williams effect) is much more important than it seems. It reveals something about voters.
Professor Zaller argues that the most common mistake in political analysis is to assume that people have straightforward, consistent and strong views about the subjects on which they are being polled. In fact, people are ambivalent, uncertain and likely to give a different answer to the same question on different occasions.
So responses vary wildly depending on the order of the questions, not because of an error in the survey but because people’s opinions actually change depending upon what happens to be at the top of their mind.
And it is for this reason that I question Labour’s “cost of living” election strategy. I am not, here, interested in whether Mr Miliband’s policies are correct or whether they would persuade me to vote for him (I am a Conservative and a peer, so I can’t vote and if I could it wouldn’t be for him). I am instead interested in whether the strategy makes political sense.
By talking incessantly about the cost of living, Labour is raising the salience (the prominence in people’s minds) of economic issues. It is, if you like, reordering the survey so that just before they are asked to vote, the public is first prompted to think of the economy. Why would they want to do that? The economy is now growing strongly and Conservatives are much more highly rated on economic competence.
If Mr Miliband is not persuaded by my Robbie Williams analogy, he might try reading The Message Matters, Lynn Vavreck’sstudy of American presidential elections.
Ms Vavreck’s starting point is that the results of presidential elections are very strongly related to the performance of the economy and opinions about the economy in the year before an election. It is possible for a campaign to be victorious when the economic fundamentals are not helpful, but it is hard.
If there is strong growth in election year, the standard bearer of the governing party can run as what Ms Vavreck calls “a clarifying candidate”. She uses this term to meancandidates who campaign on the economy when the economic fundamentals are in their favour. This sort of campaign was successful for Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, one Bush in 1988 and the other in 2004. You can also be a clarifying candidate when the economy is weak and you are running against the incumbent party. That, for instance, is how Obama won in 2008.
Ms Vavreck notes that there have also been some victories for what she terms “insurgent candidates”, those attempting to win even though the economic fundamentals are not in their favour. John F Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and George W Bush in 2000 all won by successfully changing the subject of the election away from the economy. In 1968, Nixon, just for example, ran as the law-and-order candidate.
What never works is to run as a clarifying candidate when you are, in fact, the insurgent (George McGovern in 1972, Bob Dole in 1996, John McCain in 2008). In other words, there is no point in putting the emphasis on economic policy when the economic fundamentals are against you. This does not, of course, mean that Mr Miliband cannot win doing this. It just means that such a victory would be unprecedented.
The weight of the research of political scientists strongly advises him to develop an alternative to banging on about the cost of living. The NHS being a possible topic. Or perhaps linking his fairness message to public services rather than the economy. He is running out of time, and identifying a different message will be hard, although not impossible.
At the same time, the implication of all this for the Conservatives is obvious. David Cameron should run as the clarifying candidate. He should run on the economy because the economic fundamentals tell him to.
Lynton Crosby, the head of the Tory campaign, understands this very well. He talks often of the importance of salience, of identifying what is on the top of people’s minds. The Australian’s favourite tool for creating campaign strategy is a simple chart that employs a statistical technique known as regression analysis. He plots on it those issues that are most salient and those where his party has an advantage. Then he insists on the discipline of talking only about those issues.
After the European election, the Conservatives’ big task will not be to beat Ukip, or to do a deal with it, or to make Nigel Farage look foolish. It will be to shut up, shut up, shut up about Ukip and talk about the economy. They must be a clarifying economic party running a clarifying economic campaign. Nothing else will work.
