Continuing on from Part 1 (which you’ll really need to read before chewing on this), today we’ll look at an interesting demographic play with young families and the ALP vote at the last election.
The standard narrative has it that Labor did well with young families – those Howard battlers out in the urban boonies with their rumpus room full of rugrats, flocked to that nice man Kevin Rudd etc etc – we’ve all heard the spiel.
But the evidence supporting this isn’t as compelling as the standard story would have us to believe.
If we look at our new data and use the 0-4 year old age cohort over the period of 2006-2007 as our substitute for young families and analyse the way it plays out by electorate, we get a rather strange picture.
To start with, if we sort our 150 electorates on the basis of the proportion of 0-4 yr olds in 2007 from highest proportion to lowest proportion - in the 20 seats with the highest proportion of this cohort (from Lingiari at 8.7% through to Flynn with 7.4%), before the election Labor held 11 of these seats, after the election they held 16.
Tick one to the narrative. 15.3% of all seats changed hands to Labor at the last election, but 25% of these 20 seats did (Solomon, Leichhardt, Lindsay, Longman and Flynn) – Labor appeared to do well with young families.
Further, if we compare a stock with a stock – the proportion of 0-4yr olds in a by electorate against the ALP two party preferred vote and run a linear regression line through it (because it is barely different from our preferred LOESS here and is easier to get a handle on) we get:
As it was with the Coalition TPP relationship with the proportion of the 65+ cohort per electorate, so it is with the ALP TPP and the proportion of the population aged 0-4 yrs. The higher the proportion of rugrats in an electorate, on average, the higher the ALP TPP vote is at a statistically significant level - give another tick to the narrative.
But if we move on to a flow vs flow comparison, where we compare the change in the 0-4 year old population by electorate against the ALP two party preferred swing – we get something quite different ( and again, we’ll run a linear regression line through this for the same reason as before):
This tells us that the higher level of growth in that 0-4yr population over the 12 months preceding the election, the lower the average size the ALP TPP swing became.
This too is statistically significant.
It also throws a huge spanner in the works regarding the accuracy of the narrative – not necessarily because young families didn’t vote for Labor (there is probably some ecological fallacy at play here), but the impact of this demographic on the spatial distribution of the ALP swing – the only real thing that matters when it comes to targeting demographics to win seats - does pose a problem for the orthodox story.
If we break this down even further and measure this relationship using metro and non-metro seats, something even freakier comes out:
In the non-metro regions, the relationship was completely and utterly non existent, yet in the metropolitan seats is was powerful and tight and highly statistically significant.
In the cities, the higher the level of rugrat growth , the lower on average was the ALP swing, the complete opposite to the ALP relationship with the 65+ cohort.
We can bring these two demographics together – the growth in the 65+ age cohort and the growth in the 0-4 yr age cohort – via a regression or two to see how they play out in terms of explaining the variation in the ALP swing. But to do that we need to be sure these two variables don’t correlate (or it might stuff our regression results up) – and thankfully they don’t. We can see that by a simple scatter plot and linear regression line where I’ve given the correlation of the two variables.
There’s no relationship between the two (which is an interesting little aside in itself) so our regressions are safe from the evils of multicolinearity.
First up, we’ll run a regression measuring the way that changes in the 65+ and 0-4 yr age cohorts over the 2006-7 period explain the variation in the ALP swing by electorate.
This suggest that for every 1% increase in the size of the 65+ age cohort over 2006/07 in an electorate, the average swing the ALP received in that electorate increased by about 0.5%.
It also suggests that for every 1% increase in the size of the 0-4yr age cohort during the same period in an electorate, the average swing the ALP received in that electorate declined by 0.37%. These two relationships are highly statistically significant and together explain about 13% of the variation in the ALP swing by electorate.
“13% “ I hear you say, “that aint very big!” Yet, for this sort of cross-sectional data analysis it actually is pretty big.
But if you’re one of those R-squared fetishists (shame on you! – go sit in the corner!) we actually can go deeper. Remembering that these relationships individually were only significant in the metropolitan seats, if we now run the same regression but this time using just the metro seats, we get:
By isolating the analysis to just the metro seats, it not only boost the explanatory power of these two variables to nearly 25% (which is pretty extraordinary) , but also suggests that for every 1% increase in the 0-4yr age cohort in a metro electorate, the average swing to the ALP decreased by over one half of a percent (0.57). It also slightly reduces the size of the impact that the growth in 65+ age cohort had on the ALP swing from a 0.48% increase in the ALP swing for every 1% increase in the 65+ age cohort growth, down to a 0.47% increase in metro seats.
What does it all mean?
Well, for starters we might have to start rethinking our political demographics.
The vote premium the Coalition receives from the 65+ age cohort is in decline and that decline will probably accelerate as baby boomers move into that age group replacing the pre-war generation that has always voted solidly conservative. We already knew that from polling results, with the Coalition demographic train wreck being an old favourite around these parts. Because we have independent data (the polling) confirming this data here – we can be pretty confident that ecological fallacy isn’t largely responsible for the 65+ age cohort relationship with the ALP swing at the last election when aggregated by electorate – it’s merely confirming what we already knew to some extent.
The 0-4yr data here though is a little different, not only because 0-4 yr olds cant vote (although anyone that has spent time at a polling booth would surely wonder if that’s actually true, considering the behaviour of some people), not only because this age cohort is acting as a substitute in our analysis for the behaviour of young families – but because the broader demographic context that places young families in certain electorates could itself be responsible for what we can observe here with the data.
Even though the relationship between this age cohort growth and the ALP swing is stronger than with the 65+ age cohort, there could be any number of reasons for it.
There are a few worth thinking about that could explain a lot, firstly the power of the baby bonus. Did Howard perform better than expected with young families because of the cheques that rolled in once a new 0-4yr old was added to the population? Were large numbers of these families virgin mortgage holders and were swayed by the Coalition advertising on economic responsibility and influenced by the power of incumbency?
Or was something else, or some group of other things that correlated strongly with 0-4yr population growth responsible – if so, does anyone have suggestions on what they could be?
What could be problematic for the Coalition at the next election though is if the Rudd government uses the power of incumbency to reverse what happened in seats with large rugrat growth. If the Rudd focus on young families gains traction in the electorate, then the pattern of the 2007 election with this demographic could be reversed where the higher the rugrat growth, the higher the ALP swing – which would not only partially ameliorate the consequences of Rudd losing a chunk of some other demographics (although so far, we haven’t seen any evidence of that at all), but would be likely to deliver half a dozen seats in and of itself.
The Labor tracking polls would be telling them in reasonably accurate detail how they’re travelling with various cohorts – with the Rudd focus on Childcare and early education, and now with the first home owners/builders grant boost and increased family welfare outlays, as long as unemployment doesn’t go through the roof, Rudd is in a good position to nail this demographic and by the looks of the Labor policy angle, they know it and are setting out to do it. Keep your eyes peeled.
The Libs on the other hand face a bit of a problem – especially without the power of incumbency to help. In Part 1 where we were looking at the 65+ cohort, Scorpio in comments nailed it perfectly:
“I would think that the Libs are well aware of what you have identified here possum and this is why they have been behind the demonstrations of allied senior groups trying to regain that demographic.
Notice that these demo’s have taken place in metropolitan areas and have specifically been structured to gain maximum media coverage, especially TV, and to give the Opposition plentiful material to work into specifically directed questions in QT.
Also designed to get maximum coverage in evening news bulletins and current affairs type coverage. They are well aware of the potential long term loss to their voting base. I don’t know what they can do about the youth vote though. My lad, 17 & politically aware & active, tells me that amongst his fellow students that even the strong Liberal supporters can’t cop Turnbull.”
