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Hitwise Intelligence - Alan Long - Asia Pacific

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The Politics of Leadership

December 10, 2009

The change of Opposition leader last week piqued my curiosity as to whether we could have used the same theories that our colleagues internationally apply when looking to pick the winners of American idol or the UK’s X Factor. (See Richard Seymour’s excellent analysis of the remaining contestants in the UK’s X Factor.)

The chart below shows the search volume around each of the main players in last week’s saga, Joe Hockey, the deposed Malcolm Turnbull and the new Liberal Opposition leader Tony Abbott. Kevin Rudd has been included to provide some context around the volume of interest around last week’s events.

Using search volume as a guide in the weeks leading to the Liberal Party leadership spill, it seemed that only Joe Hockey had a profile to match Malcolm Turnbull in the party room.

Tony Abbott was not on the public’s radar, but once the first spill (25 November) occurred he shot to prominence and was able to create enough support within the Liberals as well as gaining a larger share of search volume the week prior to him garnering the role of Liberal Opposition leader.

While Kevin Andrews could not mix it with Malcolm Turnbull, the newspapers seemed to be anointing Joe Hockey if he decided to challenge and the search volumes responded accordingly, but what was the hoopla around Tony Abbott?

That photo of course, in week ending 28 November the search volume of search terms containing ‘Tony Abbott’ focused 98.3% on his name (including email, and mp) and 1.7% focused on his profile (age, photo and biography).

However during the week when he took the top Opposition job by slenderest of margins (week ending 5 December 2009), the public interest in Tony Abbott increased wanting to know more about the new Liberal leader.

76% of searches about Tony Abbott focused on his name (including email, and mp) and searches relating to his biography increased to 7.4%. The biggest mover was the now infamous ‘speedos’ photo, or as some searchers described them ‘budgie smugglers’. The balance of ‘tony abbott’ searches included family (2.5%), social media (1.5%) religion (0.9%), his book (0.9%), Labour Party (0.8%), Liberal Party (0.6%) and miscellaneous searches including jokes, sex and sport (1.0%)

Interest in actual policy searches was just 1.6% of all search volume.

Based on the uplift in approvals reported in the newspapers relating to preferred Prime Minister, it seems the image of Tony Abbott in budgie smugglers has done him no harm.

Posted by Alan Long at 09:39 AM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Politics | Search