Opinion & Commentary
Growth in Labor support: it’s academic
It used to be the case that, if you knew what somebody did for a living, you could predict with reasonable accuracy how they were likely to vote. A majority of manual workers voted Labor; very few middle class people did.
Today the pattern has become much murkier. John Howard's appeal to “the battlers” is revealed in the fact that a majority of skilled manual workers voted for the Coalition on a two party preferred basis at the 2004 federal election (55% against 45% for Labor). And although managers and administrators confirmed traditional middle class political allegiances (70/30 for the Coalition), the professional middle classes deserted in droves (49% supported the Coalition, 51% voted Labor). Nowadays, if you want to predict how someone votes, you might just as well toss a coin as consult a sociologist.
In March, Labor's Shadow Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, commissioned research showing that, while Labor's overall support fell at the 2004 election, its vote rose in many constituencies containing a high proportion of university graduates. He concluded from this that the rapidly-expanding graduate population might represent Labor's future.
At first sight, Tanner's hypothesis appears to be supported by evidence from the 2004 election survey. It found 54% of people with postgraduate qualifications had gone for Labor (two-party preferred), as had 52% of those with Bachelors degrees, yet at every lower level of qualification, the Coalition had won a majority of the votes.
However, if a university education really did predispose people to support Labor, as Tanner suggests, then we should see this effect among all graduates. But we don't. Graduates employed in the private sector do not support Labor in any greater numbers than the rest of the population (56% of them went for the Coalition in 2004). It is only in the public sector that a university education seems to influence the way people vote (62% of public sector graduates supported Labor).
This suggests that what matters is not someone's level of education, but the sector in which they work. But on closer inspection, this hypothesis doesn't stand up very well either. While it is true that Labor polls more strongly among public sector employees than those in the private sector, this holds only for those in higher level jobs. Among manual workers, working for the government doesn't seem to make much difference.
The key to identifying who Labor's new supporters really are is to look at the precise jobs that they do, for the middle class, public sector, university-trained professionals who support Labor are drawn from a very specific band of occupations. I call them the ‘opinionators,’ because they are in a unique position to shape, transmit and influence political thinking. Hayek called them the “second-hand dealers in ideas.”
Labors graduate support is concentrated among that section of the educated middle class that could be called the opinionators. These are the people whose job it is to develop, process, transmit and interpret ideas, values and opinions in our society.
They include academics (who drive research agendas and provide expertise); journalists (who report current affairs and set developments in a context we can understand); artists and TV programme makers (who help define and shape our values through written texts and visual images); political advisers and community activists (who develop, analyse and influence public policies); and teachers (whose job it is to transmit our culture to the next generation). Taken together, these people constitute no more than 10% of the employed population, but they occupy pivotal ideological positions in our society.
In 2004, when Labor won only 45% of the two-party preferred vote, 64% of opinionators voted Labor. No other occupational grouping came close to this.
It is because opinionators tend to be university-educated that Lindsay Tanner found higher-than-average levels of Labor support in highly-educated constituencies. Similarly, it is because they tend to be concentrated in public sector jobs that we find a tendency for public sector employees to vote Labor. But the real influence on Labor voting is not a university education or a public sector job. It is working as an opinionator.
Opinionators do not only vote very differently from every other group. They also express strong political attitudes which are at variance with mainstream public opinion. They are much more likely to favour higher taxes to fund public services. They are more pro-trade union. They are much more disapproving of the Iraq war, and much more sympathetic to asylum seekers and Aboriginal land rights. They are also much agitated about the environment (many of them voted Green as their first choice, and almost half belong to or have considered joining an environmental campaign).
At a time when there seem to be few clear political or ideological divisions left between different occupational and social class groups, the opinionators stand out sharply as a distinct section of the Australian electorate. With the rest of the country inclining somewhat to the right, they stand prominently as the major bulwark of the left. This is not without significance for the so-called culture wars, for the people whose job it is to develop and interpret our culture is more divorced from how the majority of Australians are thinking than any other single group in the population. Is any of this of anything more than academic interest? It might be, for two reasons.
First, there are serious implications for the future of the Labor Party when their most influential and passionate supporters appear increasingly out of step with mainstream voters.
In terms of sheer voting strength, opinionators will never form a large enough group in the electorate to give Labor power. Indeed, given their relatively radical views, they may represent more of a hindrance than a help for the Party’s political ambitions, for given the chance they are likely to drag it further away from mainstream opinion and values. In terms of their wider ideological importance, however, the opinionators occupy many of the key positions within our core educational and cultural institutions. Their political significance should not be measured in votes.
If the opinionators succeed in remoulding the Party in their image, Labor could well become unelectable.
Second, there are implications for understanding the “culture wars.” Less than 10 per cent of the population shapes the agenda for the other 90 per cent, yet most people disagree with them.
More than sixty years ago, Joseph Schumpeter warned that capitalism was creating a new intellectual class which would seek to undermine it. The intellectuals, he said, had no material stake in capitalism and would embrace notoriety by attacking all conventional wisdoms and moralities. They, and not the industrial proletariat of Marx's imagination, were the true revolutionaries of the future.
Sixty years on, we can see that Schumpeter was right.
Professor Peter Saunders is social research director at The Centre for Independent Studies This is an edited extract of a paper in the winter edition of Policy, published by the CIS.
