recent talks and presentations

Backfire

Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia Workshop on the 2025 Federal election

Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra

2025-06-13

Simon Jackman

Using a unique, four wave survey, I analyse the drivers of Labor's surge in support in the months leading up to its historic winning margin in the 2025 Federal election. Albanese's net likeability over Dutton grew steadily over the six months leading up to the election, and is a key driver of transitions in voter support to Labor. Separately, Labor did extremely well in converting 21% of Green supporters and 23% Undecideds, comparing Jan/Feb voting intentions and the post-election wave of the survey. Respondents reporting having voted Yes on the Voice were more likely to convert to Labor; this is especially the case among respondents intending to vote for the Coalition in early 2025. 23% of Jan/Feb Coalition supporters who reported having voted "Yes" on the Voice switched to Labor; just 9% of Coalition "No" voters switched. Conversely, "move" vs "stay" rates for Labor supporters are unrelated to the Voice vote.

Estimating mass sentiment from noisy, biased signals: recent Australian elections and the Voice referendum

Seminar, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics, Monash Business School, Monash University

Monash University Business School, Caulfield, Victoria

2023-10-30 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM

Simon Jackman

I deploy a class of hidden Markov models to recover the trajectory of latent public opinion from a series of noisy and possibly biased signals: public opinion polls. Example applications include recent Australian federal elections and the current Voice referendum campaign. In addition to recovering both level and trend in mass sentiment, incorporating known election results ex post identifies pollster biases. Pollster biases are a durable characteristic of Australian election polling; calibrating model outputs to adjust for these biases produced accurate forecasts of the 2022 Australian Federal election result. Recent Australian federal elections also reveal a persistent pattern of voter sentiment trending towards the Coalition over the campaign. We also discuss extensions of the model, including switching between volatility regimes and step discontinuities in response to shocks such as leadership switches, scandals and gaffes.

Owning the agenda: using machine learning to track issue salience

Annual Conference, Australian Society for Quantitative Political Science

Australian Catholic University, East Melbourne

2022-12-13 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM

Simon Jackman and Andrea Carson

We analyse 325,000 social media posts from parties, candidates, interest groups and media organisations generated ahead of the 2022 Australian federal election. Learning the topics of these posts provides insight into the issues and campaign narratives of the election. Observed changes in topic prevalence over the campaign – and between different publishers – lets us chart the competition among rival campaign frames and for issue ownership. Measures of user interactions with posts (aggregated to topics) further reveal the dynamics of this competition. We use these data to assess the extent to which parties, candidates and media organisation engineer issue salience, or respond to the public’s appetite for issues and frames revealed in social media interactions. Our analysis of the social media posts goes well beyond the bag-of-words/LDA toolkit firmly established in the analysis of political texts; we represent the posts by embedding their sentences in high-dimensional vector spaces using models trained on massive English language corpora; sentence embeddings preserve word context and hence the semantic distinctiveness of the recovered topics. Further, hierarchical clustering methods help us assess the rich topic space spanned by our corpus in an unsupervised approach, the structure of the topic hierarchy guiding the construction of higher-order topics, which we interpret as “frames” or “issue bundles” in the context of an election campaign.

The 2022 Australian Federal Election: Results from the Australian Election Study

Launch of the 2022 Australian Election Study

Parliament House, Canberra

2022-12-05 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Sarah Cameron, Ian McAllister, Simon Jackman and Jill Sheppard

The Australian Election Study (AES) is a national survey of Australian voters conducted after each federal election. This talk will present the results from the 2022 AES, focusing on the key findings and implications for Australian politics.