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The Rise of New Politics and Market Liberalism in Australia and New Zealand

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Ian McAllister  and
Jack Vowles
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Extract

The rise of ‘New Politics’ concerns since the 1970s parallels the rise in popularity of market liberalism. Although often considered to be opposites, both goals have been pursued vigorously and simultaneously by social democratic governments in Australia and New Zealand. This article examines the circumstances of this unlikely marriage and, by applying multivariate analysis to election survey data collected in each country in 1990, examines the implications of these apparently contradictory policies for public opinion and party support. We conclude that value orientations associated with New Politics have mixed associations with party support. Postmaterialist and materialist value orientations are linked to attitudes towards the specifically Australasian old left strategy of ‘domestic defence’. The findings suggest that the effects of value change are more far-reaching in New Zealand, where social liberalism may have overtaken collectivism as the dominant value cleavage in the party system.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , July 1994 , pp. 381 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

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21 The Liberal and National (formerly Country) parties have been in permanent coalition since 1923, except for two short periods, and for that reason are treated as one category. Similarly, in the 1990 election there was an informal arrangement between many Democrat and Green candidates to exchange vote preferences, and for that reason they are also treated as one category here. This latter arrangement also means that the 1990 survey significantly under-estimated votes for Green candidates.

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29 The factor analysis reported in the Appendix indicates that while collectivist attitudes form the dominant factor in Australia, social liberalism is the dominant factor in New Zealand.

30 The environmental questions used in the two countries are not fully comparable, making the means compared across countries misleading (see Appendix).

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39 We can only speculate as to how Australians would have behaved in the 1990 federal election in the absence of preferential voting and under conditions of simple plurality as in New Zealand. It is possible that more postmaterialists would have voted strategically for Labor, as the lesser of two evils. Similarly, under conditions of preferential voting it is possible that more New Zealand voters, postmaterialists as well as others, would have given their first preferences to minor parties, secure in the knowledge that their second preferences would count for the major party they ranked above the other. Many of the differences in the political alignments of Australia and New Zealand voters may therefore be explained by a combination of different electoral systems and the different policies of the two governments during the late 1980s. See McAllister, Ian and Bean, Clive, ‘Explaining Labor's Victory’Google Scholar, in Bean, , McAllister, and Warhurst, , The Greening of Australian Politics, pp. 155–80.Google Scholar

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43 The study of political ideology and voting in New Zealand is severely limited by the relative absence of trend data, making it difficult empirically to infer change over time. Nevertheless, it is obvious from the historical record of political discourse in New Zealand before the 1970s, and particularly from debates between the two parties and what is known of the political values of their representatives, that social liberalism could not then have formed the basis of an ideological cleavage between the two major parties in the way that it can be shown to do in 1990.

44 This is best illustrated by an example. In the case of the 11.3 percent change in the value of L2 when collectivism is regressed on the Labor vote for postmaterialists, this is estimated as follows. The L2 value for the constant alone is 299.3, with 223 degrees of freedom. Once collectivism is entered into the equation, along with the control variables (age, gender and education) the L2 becomes 265.5, with 218 degrees of freedom. The resulting change to the L2 of 33.76 is 11.3 percent ((33.76/299.27)* 100); together with the change in the degrees of freedom of 5, this represents a change that is statistically significant at p < 0.01. The other figures are calculated in Table 4 in the same way.

45 While higher for postmaterialists, the figure is not statistically significant.

46 This is in line with other research which has concluded that any realignment of the party system would tend towards a Labor—Democrat—Green versus Liberal—National conflict. See McAllister, Ian, Political Behaviour: Citizens, Parties and Elites in Australia (Melbourne: Longman-Cheshire, 1992), p. 250ff.Google Scholar

47 The postmaterialist vote is more effective in Australia because of second preference voting, a factor which we cannot assess here.

48 In fact, all the signs for the attitude variables that are statistically significant in Table 4 are the same across the value groups and as reported in Table 3. While intervention augmented by controls has the expected effect on coalition voting in Australia, the variable itself is not statistically significant in the equation.

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