Kevin Bonham

THE existence or otherwise of factions on Hobart City Council has long been a matter of debate. At many times the existence of “sides” has been suggested, one usually thought to consist of “pro-business” aldermen some of whom are members of the Liberal Party, and the other comprising of the rest (typically Greens and aldermen with a progress association or resident’s group type background). Claims of factionalism are frequently (and technically correctly) rebuffed by suggestions that people go and check the voting record … and yesterday, I decided to do just that. What a boon to psephology broadband and a set of online minutes can be.

I downloaded the minutes of every meeting of the current Council up to the end of this August, with the exceptions of 10 July 2006 (for which the minutes were not correctly linked on the HCC website) and 18 December 2006 (for which they were present, but in a format that was excruciatingly slow to wade through). I checked through all of these in search of contested motions (dismissing one case where Briscoe’s name appeared on both sides of a motion; it seems it was merely a typo.)

By a contested motion I mean anything where the council wasn’t unanimous, according to the records of voting. In some cases, a single issue would generate two motions and the voting on these would be the same or (more often) the exact reverse. For instance, a few aldermen might vote to amend a motion, and then when their amendment failed might vote against the same motion in exactly an identical lineup. I counted such cases as just one motion, except where the voting on the main motion was different in some way. I did not include motions or amendments that lapsed for want of a seconder, since a motion not being seconded might not have proved that everyone opposed it – only that no-one but the mover wanted it put to the vote.

In each case I recorded which aldermen were on the losing side of the vote (which in the case of a tied vote meant the side opposing the status quo) and recorded their names, as well as the names of any aldermen who did not vote on that motion (for instance because they were away, or declared a conflict of interest and abstained.) My aim was to look at how aldermen behaved, proportionally, when they were free to vote on an issue, especially compared to other aldermen who were likewise free.

My sample size turned out to be 145 contested votes. Only Aldermen Ruzicka and Christie voted in all 145 cases, Briscoe in 141, Cocker 136, Hayes 134, Valentine 133, Burnet 132, Sexton 121, Freeman 110, Zucco 108, Haigh 106 and Archer 83. (The last two named have had significant absences caused by serious illness.) In 52 cases one alderman dissented, in 35 cases two, in 25 cases three, in eighteen cases four, and in fifteen cases five. Although it is possible six aldermen could have been recorded as dissenting, eg if a motion to change the status quo was tied 6-6, this did not happen in the minutes I examined.

Lone dissent cases obviously don’t tell you much about the existence or otherwise of factions or sides on council. Some aldermen are probably more inclined to vote “no” and have their dissent recorded when they are the only one with reservations, while others may decide it simply isn’t worth the bother. Some aldermen may also be more inclined to have formal reservations about specific motions that do not reflect overall political leanings. So I decided I’d remove all lone dissent cases from my sample before looking at the question of who lines up with who, but for the record, the proportions of those contested motions which each alderman voted on, on which they were noted as the lone dissenter were: Ruzicka 11%, Burnet 7.3%, Archer 7.2%, Haigh 3.7%, Cocker 2.9%, Zucco 2.7%, Briscoe and Christie each 2.1%, Freeman 1.8%, Sexton 0.8%, Hayes 0.7% and Valentine zero.

With those removed, I could see how often each alderman was on the losing side of a motion contested by multiple aldermen. Burnet 37%, Cocker 35%, Valentine 34% and Ruzicka 30% are most accustomed to being voted down, while in between are Haigh 19%, Christie 17%, Archer, Briscoe and Zucco 12%, and least likely to side with the minority are Freeman and Sexton 9% and Hayes 7%.

With the lone dissent cases removed, I went to work with some secret Excel herbs and spices on the remaining ninety-three contested motions to determine how often each alderman agreed with each other alderman, on votes on which they were both present, and eventually came up with the table that appears below, in an order from left to right that I shall discuss further (above, and below):

image

For each pair of aldermen, looking across the row with one’s name until it intersects with the column for the other (names shortened across the top for space reasons) gives you the percentage rate at which those two aldermen (if both voting) have voted together on a vote contested by more than one alderman. So, for instance, it can be seen that Aldermen Haigh and Briscoe have agreed 48% of the time.

Looking at this table closely, some things can be seen about the makeup of Council. Firstly there is a massive cluster of 70s and 80s in the bottom right hand corner, including aldermen Sexton, Hayes, Freeman, Briscoe, Zucco, Archer and Christie. All these aldermen agreed with each other more than 70% of the time in this Council period, but none of them agreed with any other alderman more than 60% of the time. Secondly, there is a far less recognisable cluster, but a cluster nonetheless, in the top left hand corner, including aldermen Burnet, Cocker, Ruzicka, Haigh and Valentine. There are five figures over 65 plus three high fifties, a 53 and a 47 out of ten aldermanic pairings in this cluster, but no figures over 60 and only eight over 50 in the 35 pairings that can be formed between these five aldermen and the other seven.

No alderman agrees with another on more than 90% of multiply contested votes (the least disputatious pairing is Hayes-Freeman at 89% agreement) and no alderman agrees with another on less than 20% (most at each others’ throats are Zucco and Burnet on 21%). Nonetheless, although actual 7-5 votes are uncommon (perhaps because they are so often not all present!) the 7-5 right-left split in Council alluded to by poster “Turnoff Thetelly” at http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/index.php?/weblog/comments/3228/ can be clearly seen from the table. Generally I am no great fan of the left-right dichotomy, preferring more complicated ways to describe a person’s viewpoint, but in this case and for this context it sticks out like a sore thumb. Whether a person’s leanings as a Councillor reflect their political orientation generally, I would not try to say.

Having split the aldermen into the two groups that are jumping out from the table, it is possible to see how often, on average, each alderman agrees with the others on their side (the Left Av and Right Av figures in my table) and then to use the ratio of these figures to get some idea of how left or right-leaning (on Council issues) each alderman is. I’ve given these ratios in the “Ratio” column, and placed the ratio in bold if it is left over right as opposed to right over left.

The “Ratio” column figure needs to be handled with a little bit of care, as it is not totally reliable. For instance, both Valentine and Burnet’s “left” figures are dragged down by the fact that Burnet and Valentine only agree on 47% of contested motions, despite being on the same general side. While this is one of a number of pieces of evidence suggesting that Valentine is centrist with just a little dash of left (and hence the muting effect on his Ratio figure is appropriate), the most likely reason Burnet disagrees with Valentine so often is that she is far to the left of him, so Burnet is probably further left than her left/right Ratio indicates, and the same applies to a slightly lesser degree to Cocker. Nonetheless, on the whole, the ratio should work pretty well.

However, the stats in the table suggest a number of things:

• There are no formal factions on council, but there are some very strong tendencies for certain aldermen to vote with or against certain others. These tendencies are stronger on the Right than on the Left.

• Although the presence of two Greens Aldermen on council has been discussed as an intrusion of party factionalism, in this sample they agreed with each other slightly less often (80%) than several pairings of aldermen from the dominant “side”, even though some of those aldermen are not members of any political party, and some are. The difference is not strong enough to be statistically significant, but it does show that the Greens’ presence does not create a sudden new level of faction-like solidarity – it was already there and probably has been for decades.

• Some previous outlines of the Council (including mine) have portrayed Valentine, Ruzicka, and the Greens as one “side” with Haigh somewhere in the middle. In this period of Council, Haigh is actually very marginally closer to Ruzicka, Cocker and Burnet than Valentine is, and Haigh and Valentine are clearly the two most moderate Aldermen on council.

• Some previous outlines of the Council (again including mine) have portrayed Sexton as also relatively neutral. Whether or not this would have stood up to analysis in previous election periods, it certainly doesn’t now. Sexton is only marginally more neutral than Hayes, Freeman and Briscoe and votes with Christie (the most right-wing alderman in this period) 81% of the time.

• While Briscoe’s supporters may like to portray him as touching all the political bases, his voting record provides no evidence that he does this any more than some other aldermen widely viewed as stock-standard conservatives.

• While Zucco is also keen to emphasise his independence (and every councillor is independent to some degree so he is right to that extent) there is really no huge difference between his voting record and those of Freeman and Briscoe, even on a candidate by candidate basis.

• Alderman Hayes’ position on the spectrum is unusual because he is the most likely alderman to agree with the other right-wing aldermen, but he is also more likely to agree with the left-wing aldermen than any of the other right-wing aldermen are. Consistent with him also being the least likely alderman to dissent at all, this suggests Hayes tends (not necessarily intentionally!) to avoid controversy.

Of course, any analysis like this is open to objections and suggestions. To quickly demolish a couple:

• Not having watched a meeting for some time, I am unsure of how the Council currently deals with recording of motions (eg whether a formal division is always taken at the sign of a likely dissent, or whether some aldermen will simply let things go when they are clearly going to be beaten.) Nonetheless if an alderman allows their vote to be placed on the record as in favour of something, they are, quite formally, in favour. If it’s in the approved minutes and on the record then that’s the way you voted, period, and if you didn’t care enough to get your dissent recorded, then it can’t have been all that important to you.

• My methods give no weighting of issues by their significance. To some degree, significance is a subjective thing anyway, but to the extent that this criticism is true, the onus is on anyone who makes it to demonstrate how it is relevant, by showing how the pattern differs from that I would describe across the more “significant” issues in the sample.

However, I do have one little regret about this work, and that is this: while it is possible to scrutinise the voting records of incumbent Aldermen in advance and see where they lined up, it is impossible to do the same for any Alderman who has yet to be elected. I expect that this year, just as in years previous, there will be several candidates running whose true political orientations are mysterious, and whose votes (should they become elected) will be difficult to predict at the time of their election, except on those candidates’ known pet issues. What a pity that we cannot run these mysterious wannabes (some of whom will have the cheek to criticise the voting records of incumbents) through some device that could tell us where they would have fitted into the above table. I suppose that if new candidates do not make their full orientations clearer, then they can hardly blame the voters should the voters stick with the names they think they know …

Kevin Bonham has lately worked primarily as a beetle-sorter, on the side as a chess tournament director, and sporadically in his main scientific field of land snails. He has been involved in the scrutiny and analysis of Hobart Council elections since 1988. For all the tedious disclaimers he can’t be bothered giving after nine hours working on this puppy, see other HCC-related threads in the Psephologist section.