Sunday, April 03, 2011

Who is the target audience of coalition scaremongering anyway?

Apart from the fact that coalitions are perfectly normal and constitutional in our form of government and scaremongering about the possibility of a coalition shows ignorance of how our system of government works and insults the electorate's intelligence, and apart from the fact that they're talking about coalitions instead of policy, leading me to wonder if there's a dearth of policy, the weird thing about all this coalition scaremongering on the part of the Conservative Party is that I can't imagine why it would lead to any additional Conservative votes.

Because the scaremongering focuses on the possibility of coalition of Liberal, NDP, and Bloc following a minority Conservative win, I'm going to focus on that model in this post.

If your politics align most closely with the Conservative Party's, you're going to vote Conservative anyway. No impact.

If your politics align most closely with the Liberal Party's, you might prefer for there not to be a coalition because you'd rather have a purely Liberal government. However, if the Liberal party wins the election and forms a government, they wouldn't need a formal coalition because they'd already be in government. However, if the Conservatives win, you'd rather have a coalition than not because then (assuming seat ratios follow historical patterns) you'd have a Liberal-led coalition government. So either way it would be best for you to work towards getting Liberal votes. Any Conservative votes would make it less possible for your party to get its policies implemented.

If your politics align most closely with either the NDP or the Bloc, and assuming based on current polls and historical outcomes that you're not going to form a government, a coalition would give your party more power, so it would be a good thing. Insofar as a potential coalition might affect your vote, you might choose to cast an Anything-But-Conservative strategic vote if you live in a tight riding so as to prevent a Conservative majority and thus make a coalition more possible. But nothing would be gained by voting Conservative.

So who's the target audience of all this? Who would be likely to vote Conservative because of the prospect of a coalition who isn't doing so already?

9 comments:

M@ said...

My suspicion is that they've calculated that with this fearmongering, they will not get a higher percentage of support, but more actual votes.

The emotions this sort of crap brings up in the conservative base tend to motivate people to go to the polls. The gamble is that more potential CPC voters will become actual CPC voters with this kind of rhetoric, than potential Lib or NDP voters will become actual voters.

This dynamic is also used in the US by putting "moral values" propositions on the ballot to motivate more (probably) republican voters to go to the polls. If they're angry enough to vote against gay marriage or something, they'll actually get up and go to the polls, and once they're there they'll probably vote GOP.

We'll see whether the fearmongering works. I'm hoping not.

impudent strumpet said...

I wonder if that means there are more non-voters/might-not-voters among conservative supporters than among other parties. That would be an interesting thing to study, if it's at all possible - which parties have the most non-voters?

M@ said...

It's a good question, and one that's typically only answered on election day. However, with only 60% of the eligible voters actually going to the polls, it's likely there are plenty of supporters of every stripe who are sitting at home.

Lorraine said...

Which is seen as a lesser evil, the possibility of a coalition government, or yet another minority government?

There's no government like no government.

jpg said...

my guess would be that it's targeted at people who swing from election to election bw the Liberals and Conservative party... that big chunk of people has a lot of impact on who has power from year to year, and if their politics are flexible or in-the-middle enough that they can be courted by either, they probably DEFINITELY want to minimize NDP influence, which would be way too left-wing for them. so in that context, if they're debating bw Lib/Con, this may pressure them to go Con because it won't result in the NDP/Bloc having a strong voice in Parliament.

i think this might be more salient than it seems. it's easy for me to forget bc i lived in quebec for a while, but the Bloc is fiercely hated by plenty of people in the rest of Canada. and of course there are lots of parts of the country where the NDP has had a hard time finding support as well.

just my guess!

impudent strumpet said...

Actually, given the many stories of people getting kicked out of Conservative campaign events not being perfectly aligned with their politics, it seems they specifically don't want to expand beyond their base.

jpg said...

ah, good point.

although maybe the fact that they were young people/students makes a difference... more likely to get flagged as troublemakers (even if they're no more likely to actually BE troublemakers) and less likely (historically) to vote? i always get the sense from conservatives that they don't think young people/students are among the "respectable members of society" that they understand themselves to be addressing...

also the "photos with ignatieff" part, maybe they assumed that the students were diehard liberals, ie unconvertible, which would make them not the lib-con swing-voters that would be the target of the coalition scare stuff.

obviously i'm speculating, and M@ probably has the best explanation overall. but i'm not sure we can say they don't want to expand beyond their base, or aren't trying.

laura k said...

Which is seen as a lesser evil, the possibility of a coalition government, or yet another minority government?

Minority governments are not seen as evils.

laura k said...

All parties want to expand beyond their base, they need to. But conservative parties everywhere (not just Canada) are always torn between the needs to play to the base and to expand beyond it.

Harper's version of playing to outside the base is claiming the govt prevented the economy from crashing, the election is useless, and scaremongering about the Bloc and the NDP.

I also agree with M@ in terms of this strange GOTV tactic.