Oz Politics Blog

We are approaching a milestone. The Australian Politics Test has been taken almost 10,000 times. To commemorate this occasion, Ray Hentzschel sent me some fascinating graphs of his analysis of these statistics.

Ray has looked at the left-versus-right leanings of the people who have taken the test according to their self-reported party preference. He has plotted the results, and a polynomial regression line for each of the economic, social and political values dimension of the test. However, before looking at the graphs, I will quickly recap the three dimensions.

The economic policy dimension reports the extent to which respondents think the state should be regulating the economic aspects of our lives. A negative score means you believe the state should, on more issues than not, intervene in the economic lives of its citizens. A positive score means you believe the state should be less interventionist.

The social policy dimension reports the extent to which respondents think the state should be supporting its citizens as well as protecting its citizens from making decisions that could be harmful (in social policy areas other than those covered by the traditional values dimension below). A negative score means you believe the state should, on more issues than not, intervene in the social lives of its citizens as a force for good. A positive score means you believe we are responsible enough to live and run our own lives free from excessive government intervention.

The traditional values dimension reports the extent to which you think the state should act to maintain conservative moral standards (for example in respect of abortion, divorce and drug use). A negative score means you believe the state should not overly intervene in the moral lives of its citizens. A positive score indicates you believe the state should intervene on more of these issues than not. A strongly positive score is consistent with the position adopted by the ‘Christian Right’ in Australia.

A number of points of interest emerge from these graphs.

• Most surprisingly for me, the self-reported One Nation voters were not all that far to the right in their answers to the questions - especially on economic policy where they were typically left of centre
• Next most surprising, Liberal Party voters tend to be to the left of centre when it comes to traditional values
• Family First voters tend to be middle of the road on social and economic policy, and clearly to the left of the Liberal and National Parties on these issues
• Family First and National voters tend to have similar right of centre views on traditional values
• Liberal voters tend to be slightly more right wing on economic policy issues, whereas National voters tend to be slightly more right wing on social policy issues
• There is not a lot of difference in the profiles of Democrats and Labor voters
• Green voters are much more likely than Democrat or Labor voters to hold far-left views on economic and social policy, and traditional values

I am working on a second beta test which I will release shortly. These graphs will help me refine the test.

In case you are wondering, the 100 most recent test results can be seen here.