Thanks to everyone who voted! It’s really cool to see how people are feeling.
The Status Report
Tabular Format
| Position | Officeholder | Responses | Average | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Administration | N/A | 25 | 3.84 | 1 | 1 | 7 | 8 | 8 |
| Prime Minister | lordnwahs | 26 | 3.92 | 1 | 1 | 7 | 7 | 10 |
| Deputy Prime Minister | ProfessorHenn | 23 | 3.70 | 0 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 7 |
| Minister of Foreign Affairs | ConcreteSlab | 24 | 3.50 | 2 | 2 | 8 | 6 | 6 |
| Minister of Culture | xshotss | 25 | 3.80 | 2 | 1 | 5 | 9 | 8 |
| Minister of Defense | Coltranius | 25 | 4.12 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 8 | 11 |
| Minister of Integration | maluhia | 25 | 3.88 | 0 | 2 | 6 | 10 | 7 |
| OWL Director | lordnwahs | 25 | 4.64 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 5 | 18 |
Approval ratings across the board are… good. I’ll do my best to give my usual spiel about them, but the big picture is that approval ratings are solid and that citizens are happy.
Usually, when that’s the case, I tend to speculate about the reasons behind it by pointing to the Cabinet’s accomplishments. The Ministry of Culture is running a culinary contest. The Ministry of Integration has run a survey via mass telegram, among other projects in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Ministry of Defense has introduced trading card rewards and tidal force ranks (just don’t ask me about the rank names…). The Office of World Assembly Legislation has continued providing voting threads and producing recommendations. If you want to argue that the approval ratings have been driven up by the Cabinet’s accomplishments, there’s plenty to go by. That argument is left as an exercise for the reader 
.
It’s also easy to highlight the relative highs and lows. It seems like LordNwahs has produced another star performance as OWL Director, with an approval rating of 4.64 and with no responses rating their performance below a 3. Sure, it’s a bit lower than the record-high 4.81 they earned in June, but it’s still undeniably high approval.
Meanwhile, Concrete Slab earns the lowest approval rating in this round of polls for their performance as Minister of Foreign Affairs. A rating of 3.50 isn’t bad, but compared to how our government officials have typically polled, it’s more accurate to describe it as slightly on the low side of the average than it is to view it as being 0.5 points above a neutral rating.
Life’s Good Without Controversy
Here’s my hot take: the administration hasn’t a lot to increase public approval. That’s not to say the Cabinet is doing poorly; clearly, the approval ratings don’t reflect that, and there are plenty of accomplishments to point to. But if you subscribe to the mental model that candidates list promises in the campaign, that voters elect candidates to fulfill those promises, and that voters judge candidates by how well they can fulfill those promises, I think it’s natural to ask at this point how the Cabinet is actually doing at ticking off that list of promises.
In their campaign, LordNwahs laid out specific projects for each ministry, most of which remain somewhere between “not started” and “in progress” or even just outright scrapped. The last we heard about an ambassador program was over three weeks ago. The last we heard about a mentorship program was ten days ago. The last we heard about a new “Local Council” or a TSP awards ceremony was the campaign itself. The last we heard about a “news bulletin” was that the Prime Minister had thought better of routing communications through a specific minister. The Minister of Engagement resigned a week ago and there’s been no indication that the Prime Minister feels that a replacement is needed.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m personally not even a fan of many of these projects. In a sense, I don’t mind if they stay stay incomplete. There is, however, a gulf between the state of the projects enumerated in LordNwahs’ campaign and the approval ratings across the Cabinet. Rather than having completed campaign promises to tout, I think the approval rating comes from the administration having avoided the challenges that could threaten to lower public approval.
Many of our recent administrations — honestly, I think all of them since we started this series of polls — have faced periods of intense questioning from citizens. I wouldn’t say this administration has faced scrutiny with that level of vigor. While the appointments topic ran up a total of 73 posts (including a debate about voting procedure), questioning since then has been far more sporadic and, frankly, I think it has pulled far more punches than with previous administrations. By and large, the questions regarding the Cabinet appointments were largely about substantive agendas for the term and not about the individual qualifications of ministers. The Assembly, however, hasn’t returned to those questions. Public discourse thus far this term would suggest that those confirmation hearings were more of a rite of passage — a finish-and-forget kind of ordeal — than a springboard for more consistently applied legislative oversight of the executive. My point isn’t that the Cabinet deserves the same kind of grilling that previous administrations has received, but rather that it wouldn’t be immune to it. Any Cabinet can appear to falter when faced with tough questions, at least to some citizens, and that can easily have an effect in the polls, and I think that there are tough questions which could be asked of this administration but which have not. There are accomplishments that one can argue have raised public approval levels, but there are also factors which have lowered approval ratings in the past that this administration has avoided.
The administration has also been savvy in steering clear of the kinds of pitfalls that — whether you call them obvious or not — past administrations have not always avoided. The Minister of Defense planned for their absence by appointing a deputy over three weeks in advance. When real-life circumstances over took their duties, the Minister of Engagement resigned. Our last two Prime Ministers both faced questions around the midpoint of their terms about their responsiveness to answering questions from the public. It seems like this Cabinet, while not free from being busy in real life (after all, who is), has sought to take a more proactive approach.
At the end of the day, I felt that LordNwahs’ campaign was one of the lengthiest and most substantive we’ve seen in a long time, and that — combined with the number of questions in the appointment process — buys a certain level of credibility. I do think that if you treat the campaign as a to-do list, as objectively as you can treat a political agenda, this administration still has a lot left on its plate. But it remains to be seen how this dynamic will play out in the rest of the term. Will the Cabinet move more projects from being “in progress” to presenting them to the public? Will the current level of public approval turn out to be a ‘honeymoon’ period? Or will citizens decide that, forget the campaign, the Cabinet’s other accomplishments speak for themselves?
The Big Three Priorities
The top three priorities this time are — in a three-way tie — integration, foreign affairs, and culture and events. At first glance, that seems not terribly surprising, but also not terribly insightful. If you squint at the historical patterns, though, you might see what I see.
Hmm… still pretty hard to tell. Let’s focus in on the top three.
See it now? In almost every poll, these three priorities — integration, foreign affairs, and culture and events — have been the top three priorities, if you include ties. (If you’re wondering what beat them out that one time, it was engagement, which is pretty synonymous with integration, or at least it was prior to this term ) The pattern could still easily change, but it’s getting interesting enough that I think it’s worth calling out here.
Does it say something that engagement, foreign affairs, and culture were three of the four fixed ministries in the Charter before we adopted a flexible ministry system? Just food for thought.
Dude you have no idea what you’re talking about. I disagree with everything you said. You are just super duper wrong.
This analysis came out with more subjective punditry and less “objective” analysis than usual. Honestly, I think I just needed a break from the usual “this number is bigger than that number” schtick. Maybe next time! But if you missed it, you’re more than welcome to produce your own. And if you disagree with my opinions, I would love to hear from you, even and especially if you disagree with me. There’s no single right way to read into these polls; the more the merrier!
As always, all data from this series of polls is archived here.
R Snippets
This is pretty random but I’ve been playing around with R recently. These snippets didn’t make it into this post (though I shared a couple of plots on Discord) but if anybody else wants to analyze the data this way, hopefully this can help get you started. A brief disclaimer, though: I am pretty new to this, so apologies if the code quality isn’t great.
library(tidyverse)
library(googlesheets4)
library(janitor)
polling_data <-
read_sheet("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c_EmuSaRx67MS9uTJsHFSRBclOW0sG97p6tZMfw96YU/edit?usp=sharing", sheet = "Approval") |>
clean_names()
sep_2024_approvals <- polling_data |>
filter(date > "2024-09-14" & date < "2024-09-16") |>
select(
position,
officeholder,
"1" = x1,
"2" = x2,
"3" = x3,
"4" = x4,
"5" = x5
) |>
pivot_longer(
cols = "1":"5",
names_to = "rating",
values_to = "count",
names_transform = as.integer
)
sep_2024_approvals |>
ggplot(aes(x = rating, y = count)) +
facet_wrap(~position) +
geom_col() +
labs(
title = "September 2024 Approval Ratings",
x = "Rating",
y = "Count",
fill = "Position"
)
polling_data |>
filter(position %in% c("Administration", "Prime Minister")) |>
ggplot(aes(x = date, y = average, color = position)) + geom_line() + geom_point(aes(shape = position)) + ylim(0,5)