As you can tell by blog, I have a full-on political junkie (what's a guy to do without the NHL) and as I have mentioned before in my non-blogging life I am in Sales & Marketing (I'd rather not get more specific than that). From this you can see why this report from COMPAS is like candy to me.
In Canadian politics, the Conservative party is the political "product" with the more appealing features in the eyes of today's
consumer-voter, much closer to where the public stands on issues. The Liberal party appears to outsell or outpoll the CPC because it appears to outperform the CPC in marketing. In consumer product language, the Liberal brand appears to trump the Conservative brand while the Conservative brand while the Conservative product appears to outperform the Liberal product.
I had never considered the following, but it is fascinating.
...the left-right spectrum is above a measure of the degree to which voters feel a party is "like me". Canadian voters are different from American voters. American voters use ideological labels meaningfully, correctly positioning themselves on liberal-conservative or left-right scales. Canadian voters, by contrast, are non-ideological in their language. The terms left and right mean almost nothing to them of an ideological or policy nature.
COMPAS looked at 10 policy choices to compare voters preferences on and found that the Conservative policy is closer to the public on 7 of them, tied on 1 and the Liberals are closer on 2. What may surprise you is that on some issues the Conservatives are preferred on some issues because they are less to the left to the public on them. For instance:
- the CPC can move to right on tougher sentencing to gain public support
- the CPC can move to right on a public/private mix on health care and gain support
- the CPC can beat the corruption drum even louder and gain support
- the CPC can promote smaller government more than they have been doing so
- the CPC can move to right on promoting tax cuts
- the CPC is very close to correct position on BMD
Tough on crime, smaller government, lower taxes, free-markets; these are core conservative values. No wonder COMPAS concludes that the Conservative Party of Canada has a better product that the Liberal Party of Canada.
So the CPC has the product to sell, now they have to create a buyers market. See bullet point three above as the way to do so (any news for us today Justice Gomery?)
