'; ?> The heat is back | What The People Want
The heat is back
Wednesday, 21 October 2009 23:24 | Written by Graham Young

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"Change" is the word that represents climate change, and it has gone to the top of the list. There appears to be a rough 2:1 equivalence between the way that this new version of Leximancer counts mentions compared to the previous one, so "Warming" has also gone up in the rankings dramatically.

ETS makes it's debut as an issue. Not all of these concepts represent the same thing. So Labor and Greens voters are much more likely to talk about "warming" while Liberal, National and Liberal National voters are more likely to talk about "ETS".

There is also some substitution going on. "Education" and "health" have declined slightly in importance, but they are issues that are mentioned by the same people most concerned about global warming. While the Copenhagen Summit and the press accompanying it is presumably driving some of the rise of global warming as an issue, it is again closely associated with water. The return of drought conditions on the east coast, and perhaps even the recent dust storms, have also probably played a part.

The map below shows how the issues relate to voters and each other. While the Global Financial Crisis appears to be almost entirely missing, there is an echo of it in the theme labelled "people". This word denotes concern for the welfare of others. It is most closely associated with what I have in the past labelled the "Values Voter". This is a group who supported John Howard on cultural grounds, rather than economic interest, and felt sufficiently comfortable at the last election to desert him for Rudd because they felt that they had missed out . One of their concerns was that they hadn't seen the benefits of the economic boom. It looks from this graph as though this group is getting restless again. They tend to be less affluent than average, and older, so they may have missed the benefits of the stimulus package.

Analysis of the qual should turn-up some more clues. In the meantime, here is the Leximancer Map of the concepts and where they lie in relationship to voting patterns. (Click to enlarge.)

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