Oz Politics Blog

Thank you everyone for testing the Australian Politics Test. I have progressively shaped the questions in response to the suggestions and issues you raised.

One issue particularly intrigued me. Matthew Hill made the following observation.

My reading of your [individual] results seems to show a lot of people with very high scores for the Greens. Assuming that your readership is not completely skewed, doesn’t that indicate that the test is slightly inaccurate?

It was a good question. So I added to the Australian Politics Test a page to analyse the results to date. I was expecting a left wing bias. The ANU 2004 Federal Election Online Poll exhibited a left wing bias among Internet users in the order of 5.6 per cent. But the extent of bias in the cumulative results surprised me. Of the first 2146 completed tests, 75% percent of the respondents prefer the Greens, Democrats or Labor. 66% describe their politics as far-left, left or centre-left.

Preferred party of respondents (self perception)

Political inclination of respondents (self perception)

Compared to the self-perceptions, only the economic dimension exhibits a similar distribution. The other test results are skewed to the left. The more difficult question is to determine whether the test or the self-perceptions are to blame for this left-wing bias. I will need to think about this some more.

Preferred party of respondents (test results)

Political inclination of respondents (test results)

Economic policy inclination of respondents (test results)

Social policy inclination of respondents (test results)

Traditional values inclination of respondents (test results)

A problem with classifying party preferences is handling the broad-church parties (Labor and Liberal). In order to win government, the Labor and Liberal parties seek to accommodate voters with a wide diversity of opinion. Some of their voters have views that are highly aligned with the space occupied by the Greens, the Australian Democrats or Family First. It is difficult finding questions that tell whether people prefer the minor parties or the majors. I will think about this one some more.

The graphical analysis also reveals some interesting facts. First, the next three graphs show a strong correlation between the social policy and economic economic dimensions.

Self identified Greens voters - Social by Economic

Self identified Labor Party voters - Social by Economic

Self identified Liberal Party voters - Social by Economic

Update: Opps. I ran of memory producing the graphs, so they have been dropped.

The second interesting fact is that the same correlation does not hold with traditional values. For Green voters, opposition to traditional values is strong. However, traditional values are (surprisingly) irrelevant to Liberal voters. Rather than the graphical analysis I will use a couple of tables (the graphs are available on the cumulative results page).

Traditional values inclination of 566 self reported Greens voters

Traditional values inclination of 415 self reported Liberal Party voters