liberation

The Act Party – two factions fight for control

The Act Party’s divisions and future prospects are examined in Radio New Zealand National’s latest Focus on Politics programme by Catherine Hutton (which you can listen to or download here). I was interviewed for the programme, speaking about Act’s schisms and the recent damage to Act’s electoral brand. In the blog post below, I elaborate on what I spoke about on Focus on Politics. I argue that with the Act Party having now been in government for well over a year – a tumultuous year for the party – its annual conference is a chance for both party members and the leadership to draw up a balance sheet about Act’s successes and failures, to sort out the internal schisms that nearly split the party in 2009. Furthermore, the conference would allow the politicians to try and plot a way forward whereby the party might reverse its current popularity and credibility slump, but ultimately the future depends on who will triumph out of the two different factions in the Act – the pragmatists and the radicals. The history of another minor ‘flank’ party – the Alliance – also in coalition with a more conservative major party, is instructive in this regard. [Read more below]

Key to Victory – Opinion polls and prediction markets

During an election campaign, when we want to know the likely outcomes, we normally look to the five main voter opinion polls that are published by the mainstream media. But as Shaun McGirr and Rob Salmond argue in their chapter in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts) there are some problems with these established opinion polls, and in the 2008 election there were ‘two emerging challengers: “polls-of-polls” and election prediction markets’. Their chapter asks ‘which sources of political information New Zealanders should trust in election campaigns’?, finding that ‘some of the options are substantially superior to others’. [Read more below]

Key to Victory – Therese Arseneau on National’s winning strategy

Was Labour’s election loss in 2008 a ‘benign dismissal’? Therese Arseneau is not so sure that it was. Certainly National’s 2008 win was the result of a much cleverer and pragmatic electoral strategy than in 2005. Furthermore, although not unexciting, the campaign was rather lackluster, without any significantly defining issues, polarisation or passion. This is what Arseneau writes about in her chapter in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. [Read more below]

Key to Victory – The YouTube campaign in 2008

The National and Green parties won the battle of YouTube in the New Zealand general election of 2008 according to a chapter entitled ‘2008: The YouTube campaign’ by Rob Salmond in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. The chapter looks ‘at the different ways in which political parties used YouTube to communicate with New Zealanders’, and argues that successful strategies involved putting positive-themed political advertisements on television and using YouTube for the negative, attack-advertising. Unsurprisingly, twice as many YouTube clips were negative, and on average these were watched by 2.5 times more than positive videos. [Read more below]

Key to Victory – The campaign in cyberspace

Helen Clark never really took to Facebooking with much enthusiasm, and in the 2008 general election her most commented on status update on Facebook was: “Helen Clark is stuck at the airport”. John Key, in comparison, gathered up twice as many Facebook registered friends and fans as Clark. These are some of the facts presented in the chapter entitled ‘2008: The campaign in cyberspace’ by Nicola Kean in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. This blog post discusses the chapter, mentioning some of the more salient facts and observations made in terms of 2008’s campaign on the party websites, social networking and blogs. [Read more below]

Key to victory – Levine and Roberts' new book

New Zealand’s preeminent psephologists – that is, political scientists that study and explain elections - Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts have just published their latest book, entitled Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008. This edited collection is their ‘eighth in a series of New Zealand post-election books that have followed on from conferences held shortly after each general election’. The book attempts, they say, to provide ‘an overall perspective of what occurred and why’. As well as editing the book, Levine and Roberts wrote two chapters and a preface, which are discussed in this blog post. This work explains some of the factors shaping voting behaviour, making use of a pre-election voter survey that they commissioned – which they’ve done in every election since 1984. The results show, for instance that the Greens were the least liked party in the 2008 election, and that Helen Clark was no match for John Key in what was a two-horse leadership race [Read more below]

Identity politics vs class politics - 10: Introduction to Slavoj Žižek

The rock-star status currently attached to philosopher Slavoj Žižek indicates a shift in thinking away from post-ideological, post-political frameworks and is symptomatic of a flourishing of critical questioning of the politics of liberal multiculturalism. Everywhere that intelligent debate supposedly occurs – from universities, to the Guardian newspaper, to the blogosphere – Žižek is increasingly all the rage. Žižek’s popularity and notoriety might seem strange given his recent pronouncements of support for communism, Leninism, and his attacks on political correctness. However, the popularity of his ideas can be seen as stemming from the failure of liberal orthodox ideas and theories (postmodernism, identity politics, muticulturalism) to ask the right questions regarding the pressing crises humanity faces in the 21st century. Thus the philosopher’s critiques of social liberalism are essential to the debates around identity politics vs class politics, and guest blogger John Bernstein will examine what we can learn from Žižek over the a number of blog posts on this topic. This will include an examination of Žižek’s call for a reengagement with the concepts of class and an anti-capitalist universalism. [Read more below]