When Chris Hipkins took over as Prime Minister from Jacinda Ardern, he held a policy bonfire: all the government’s most unpopular schemes were scrapped, with the exception of the already-heavily amended Three Waters, which was rebranded (it’s now the Water Services reform). And this led to a temporary surge in his party’s popularity.
Labour’s key tax policy for the October 14 election is the GST exemption on fruit and vegetables. Shortly after the policy was launched, Stuff political editor Luke Malpass wrote that instead of arguing for the scheme’s principles, journalists were given polling “showing that it was popular with potential Labour swing voters”. Labour’s pollster, Talbot Mills, was reported as finding that 80% of swing voters supported it. (The plan was, however, savaged by economists and media commentators, and the party’s popularity has continued to decline.)
There are similarly grave doubts about the credibility of National’s tax plan. Lobbyist and political commentator Matthew Hooton, a longtime National supporter, laments, “They’re supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility and yet, during a time of high inflation and high debt, they’re running on tax cuts and Working for Families handouts they can’t afford”.
This election year, the policies and pledges of both our main parties reflect a marketing-oriented approach. This raises problems for voters, says Jennifer Lees-Marshment, associate professor of politics and international relations at the University of Auckland and an internationally recognised expert in political marketing.
There’s nothing novel about politicians using new media or marketing techniques to sell themselves, but an ongoing focus of Lees-Marshment’s research has been the way political parties have been transformed by modern marketing. Instead of movements built around policies and values, contemporary politics is dominated by “market-oriented parties”, which focus on consumer research and brand management, reconfiguring themselves to deliver what voters want or feel they need, rather than what their members believe in.
An important driver is the rise of big data and analytics-driven campaigning. Modern political parties curate gigantic databases filled with information about the voter base. In New Zealand, this is often based on the electoral roll, which contains your name, address and occupation. This is supplemented with information from commercial data companies, which track your spending habits if you use loyalty cards, buy information from online retailers, scrape the web.
Once they have enough data, they can profile you: take the findings from their focus groups, polls, electoral surveys and previous election results and predict how you’ve voted in the past, who you’re likely to support this election and what messages and issues might persuade you to change your mind.
“People need to understand that modern political parties know an awful lot about you,” Lees-Marshment says. “They know where you live and who you live with; they know about your online transactions and browsing habits, demographics: race and gender. Education. Employment. So, when you receive a communication from a political party – it might be via social media, or email, or texted to your phone – that communication can be highly personalised. And because this is not a public message it isn’t subject to the same level of scrutiny and debate. And that can be a problem.
“It means that when a campaign advertises to you online, or their volunteers knock on your door, they can tell you something different to what they’d tell your friend or neighbour, based on the analytics.”
The technique is known as microtargeting. “It really came in with the Obama [US presidential] campaign, partly during his first [2008] campaign and then very strongly in 2012,” she says. “There’s a reaction against this style of campaigning when it gets used for Brexit or by Trump, but it started with the US Democratic Party.
“It can be a good thing or a bad thing, like all marketing techniques. But the risk is that the claims parties make when they communicate in this way are hard to monitor – they’re hard to contest if the claims are not true.”
Principles Diluted
Lees-Marshment moved to New Zealand from the UK in 2005 and her model for understanding the transition to a market-oriented party was the UK Labour Party, rebranded “New Labour” in the mid-90s by Tony Blair. For most of its existence, Labour was a traditional socialist party, believing the economy should be centrally planned and government should exercise “common ownership of the means of production” – generally seen as state control of most business and industry.
When Blair won the leadership in 1994, Labour had been in opposition for 15 years. The collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s abandonment of its economic model had discredited socialism and Western democracies had taken a neoliberal turn.
So Blair changed the party’s name and diluted its core values to make it more palatable to voters. Instead of telling the public what he stood for, he hired pollsters and consumer research companies to find out what voters wanted – the messages they liked, the policies they’d support – and then campaigned on those messages and policies. And New Labour won the 1997 election in a landslide. The market-oriented approach was such a successful strategy it forced all major political parties to accommodate it – if they didn’t, they’d simply lose to rivals that did.
Hooton thinks this approach to politics began in New Zealand under Helen Clark, got worse under the Key government and reached a nadir under Jacinda Ardern, when Labour “campaigned on policies they could never conceivably deliver or which were just aspirational slogans in the first place”.
Hooton was a Beehive staffer for National in the 1990s and has since been an adviser to National, Act and Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown. Much of his political commentary this year has criticised National and Labour for the cynical nature of their campaigns, which are focused on marketing – promising tax cuts and handouts to key voter demographics rather than addressing any systemic problems.
He is encouraged that it has not entirely swayed voters, according to the polls. The two main parties have struggled for most of the campaign; their leaders are not particularly popular and the Greens and Act appear more popular. “Say what you like about their ideas but at least they believe in something,” Hooton says.
He’s cautiously optimistic that after decades of empty campaign promises, voters are more sceptical. “John Key promised us a brighter future and that we’d catch up with Australia and solve the problems of the underclass, while Jacinda Ardern promised kindness and transformation. So, I think voters are tired of this nonsense. They’re figuring out that these parties don’t stand for anything.”
But he is wary of theories that politics is deteriorating. “It puts us at risk of nostalgia, of lazily convincing ourselves that everything was better back in the day.” He also argues that if the marketing-oriented approach is successful, we can’t fault politicians for employing it. “Everything the leaders of the major parties are saying and doing is completely rational from their point of view. We need to look to ourselves as voters.”
Agency-led
Hooton does concede the focus on marketing has degraded the quality of government. His example is also drawn from British politics. “I’ve been researching inflation in the 1970s. In 1975, when Margaret Thatcher became Conservative leader, UK inflation was 24%. And in the years before the 1979 election, her closest political advisers spent time working with Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who had won Nobel prizes for economics.
“These were the innovative thinkers of their time and Thatcher and her team worked with them on developing a coherent plan about what they’d do if they were in government.
“You wouldn’t do that today. Instead, you’d be meeting your advertising agency. Because now it doesn’t matter what you’re going to do about inflation. Instead, the major parties just promise to lower it but nothing they’ve promised [will work] and there’s every chance they’ll make it worse. It wouldn’t occur to them to bother thinking about the economics of it.
“Whatever people might think about Thatcher and her beliefs, the policies were thought through and they worked. She reduced spending, paid down debt and that lowered inflation. At one point, she even raised taxes.
“Today, when we get a new government, they convene a bunch of working groups. They have won an election but they don’t really know what they want to do or how they’re going to do it.”
Lees-Marshment is an academic – she is careful not to make any of the moral judgments that Hooton dispenses. But she does feel that market research is often more of a guide on what not to do. It tells politicians what the public doesn’t like but since the public are not policy experts, they can’t generate solutions, she says.
This matches Hooton’s experience as a lobbyist. “In politics, if you want to prevent something from happening you can probably succeed if you know what you’re doing,” he says. “But if a client wants to make something positive happen, that’s very hard – even if it’s in the interests of the country.”
Russel Norman, co-leader of the Green Party from 2006-15, has mixed feelings about the role of market research in politics. “In a democracy, the fact that parties are responsive to the concerns and desires of voters is a good thing. So, if marketing and the surveying that sits behind it are mechanisms whereby political parties can ascertain the preferences of voters, then that’s not entirely a bad thing.”
But, says Norman, survey responses are often incoherent. “If you ask people if they want tax cuts, they say yes. Then you ask them if they want more public services and they say yes. So, the role of a political party is to show leadership and promote sets of packages that actually make sense and are in the best interests of society as a whole.
“If they can’t do that, then, of course, political marketing dumbs down the political discourse. You can really see this with National this election and the trouble over their tax-cuts policy. They want to give tax cuts but they don’t want to be seen to cut spending so they’ve come up with this magical thinking idea around taxing foreign buyers. And they’ve run into trouble because the media has exposed the emptiness behind the marketing.”
Tunnel visions
In early August, the government announced a $35 billion-plus plan for two new road tunnels and a light rail tunnel beneath Auckland’s Waitematā Harbour. A month later, BusinessDesk reported that Treasury and the Infrastructure Commission had warned against the announcement, pointing out that the project was not funded and the government lacked the capacity to deliver it. Is that another example of marketing-based politics?
“Of course,” says Hooton. “But you have to be careful. If a political party wants to promise a harbour tunnel and the public believes them and votes for it, then that’s democracy. It’s up to public-sector bureaucrats to give free and frank advice but not to make final decisions and tell the politicians and voters what we’re allowed to have.
“The only thing worse than rule by elected representatives is rule by experts. Politicians have always told us what we want to hear and it has always been up to voters to make judgments about which of them we believe. And in the end, we wind up with the governments that we deserve.”
