Peter Gallagher

Small changes in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of votes in each coun­try would have seen very dif­fer­ent out­comes. bq. In the United States, the Pres­i­dent won 51% of the pop­u­lar vote but the out­come was deter­mined by a major­ity of Elec­toral Col­lege that was due, finally, to the results in Ohio. There, the Bush­mar­gin was 130,000 votes; in other words, had 65,000 of the vot­ers who made up their mind on the day of the poll voted for Kerry, he would now be Pres­i­dent. What does this tell us about the sen­ti­ments of the U.S. elec­torate? Noth­ing. bq. In Aus­tralia, the gap between the pri­mary votes of the Liberal-National Coali­tion and the Labor party was much larger than in the Bush/Kerry race. But the “outcome”:http://www.abc.net.au/elections/federal/2004/results/ was still less an endorse­ment of the Howard gov­ern­ment than the U.S. result had been for Bush. The vote for the gov­ern­ment was smaller than the vote against the gov­ern­ment by a mar­gin of 3.2 per­cent of the elec­torate: the con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment secured 46.8 per­cent of the pop­u­lar vote, Labor 37.7 per­cent and the rest went to Greens, the Democ­rats and inde­pen­dents. Due to the dis­tri­b­u­tion of votes, how­ever, this minor­ity of the pop­u­lar vote won the incum­bents 87 lower-house seats while the major­ity non-government vote won only 63 lower-house seats. In nei­ther case can these close and ambigu­ous results be extrap­o­lated to any polit­i­cal or social con­clu­sion. As the math­e­mati­cian John Allen Pau­los “argues”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5065109–110865,00.html, the idea that sig­nif­i­cant events such as the return of Bush to the White House must have sig­nif­i­cant causes is only a “charm­ing super­si­ti­tion.” Far from sug­gest­ing a pro­found swing in elec­toral moods or val­ues, sta­tis­ti­cally defen­si­ble mod­els sug­gest a high degree of latency in the electorate’s pref­er­ences that may also hold in Aus­tralia. Pau­los points to Yale econ­o­mist Ray Fair’s six explana­tory fac­tors: bq. The first is incum­bency, which has been a dis­tinct advan­tage his­tor­i­cally. The sec­ond is party (Repub­li­cans have a slight his­tor­i­cal edge), and the third is “party fatigue” (two or more terms out of power offers some ben­e­fit). The remain­ing three fac­tors con­cern the econ­omy: GDP’s per capita growth rate (higher is bet­ter for the incum­bent), the num­ber of quar­ters dur­ing the pre­ced­ing four years in which the growth rate exceeded 3.2% (the more, the bet­ter), and the infla­tion rate (lower is bet­ter). On the basis of these six fac­tors, Fair’s model has gen­er­ated quite accu­rate vote per­cent­ages in pres­i­den­tial elec­tions dat­ing back to 1916.