ACT voters sit right of centre, lean libertarian and oppose free school lunches
More than everyone else in this survey, they also oppose heavy taxes on the rich, and they disagree that we need to do more about climate change. Scroll down to see where they sit and why, one step at a time. Part 1 is what ACT voters think, and part 2 is how they choose a party.
This survey is not a poll. The people who took it are younger, more online and further left than New Zealand as a whole. An ACT voter here is a person who said they would vote for the ACT Party if there was an election today. Only 44 ACT voters have taken it so far, so this page has fewer steps and rounds their shares.
The live compass has changed since this page was built. The party dots show the latest positions, but the hexagons and the step text can lag behind them.
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Part 1 of 2: What ACT voters think
Step 1 of 11
Most people in this survey sit left of centre
Each hexagon is a small area of the compass. A brighter hexagon holds more people. An area with only a few people stays empty.
The crosshair is the political centre. It is the average of the party dots, weighted by each party's share of the 2023 vote. About four in five of the 854 people sit left of it, so this survey leans left.
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Step 2 of 11
ACT voters spread out, but nearly all sit right of centre
44 of these people would vote ACT today. They are too spread out for any hexagon to hold enough of them, so one hexagon marks their average position instead.
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Step 3 of 11
The ACT dot is the furthest right
The ACT dot starts from the average position of ACT voters. There are only 44 of them, so the dot is also pulled part of the way toward where ACT voters sat in an earlier, larger round of the survey.
About 70% of ACT voters sit nearest the ACT dot, and the rest sit nearer another party's dot.
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Step 4 of 11
What sets ACT voters apart
These are the statements where ACT voters take a clear side, few of them take the other side, and their average answer is furthest from everyone else's. ACT voters oppose free school lunches (about 80% disagree); oppose heavy taxes on the rich (over 90% disagree); disagree that we need to do more about climate change (about 80% disagree); call a capital gains tax an envy tax (about 80% agree); and oppose a larger role for the Treaty (over 90% disagree).
On all five, they also go further than National and NZ First voters, whose dots sit nearest.
Each arrow shows how far one of them moves the ACT voters' average away from everyone else's average.
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Step 5 of 11
No single statement puts ACT voters where they are
Start at the pale ring, where someone neutral on every statement sits, and add each statement's pull as one link, big ones first, with the ones that pull back fitted in along the way. The chain ends at the average of the ACT voters in this survey, not at the ACT dot (step 3 says why).
The longest link, on hate speech laws, makes less than a tenth of the chain. The thick links are the statements from step 4. Together they make only about a sixth of it, so many small pulls make the rest.
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Step 6 of 11
On the third axis, ACT voters sit close to the middle
This axis compares a person's economic views with their culture views. For ACT voters, the two match the way they do for most people. Their bar overlaps everyone else's a lot.
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Step 7 of 11
Half of ACT voters agree that New Zealand is on the right track
One question asks about the country today: is New Zealand on the right track? Each bar shows how a group answered, from strongly disagree on the left to strongly agree on the right.
About 50% of ACT voters agree. Everyone else mostly disagrees (84%).
Too few ACT voters strongly disagree or strongly agree to show each answer on its own, so each dashed part of their bar holds two answers.
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Part 2 of 2: How ACT voters choose
Step 8 of 11
More than half of ACT voters also voted ACT in 2023
Each ribbon is a group of people. The left side is how they voted in 2023, and the right side is how they would vote today. We draw only the ribbons into or out of ACT.
About 60% of today's ACT voters also voted ACT in 2023. The rest did not vote or gave another answer (about 20%), or voted National (about 20%).
Of the people who voted ACT in 2023, about 50% would vote ACT again. About 20% now pick OPP and about 10% pick NZ First.
Many fewer people here say they voted National in 2023 than the real result shows.
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Step 9 of 11
Four in five ACT voters also rank National in their top three
The survey asks people to rank their top three parties. 44 ACT voters did this, and about 90% of them put ACT first.
The pale bar is the share who put a party anywhere in their top three. The solid bar is the share for whom that party is the next choice after ACT.
About 80% put National in their top three, and for about 40% National is the next choice. NZ First is in the top three of about 70%, and the next choice for about 50%. The New Conservative Party is in the top three of about 10%.
Very few rank Labour, OPP or the Greens.
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Step 10 of 11
One in seven people rank ACT in their top three, about two and a half times as many as would vote for them
This step turns the last one around. It asks who puts ACT in their top three.
Each square is 1 in 100 people who ranked parties. 5 in 100 would vote for ACT today. 13 in 100 put ACT somewhere in their top three.
About 60% of National voters, about 50% of NZ First voters, 5% of OPP voters and 4% of Labour voters rank ACT in their top three. Very few Greens voters do.
This survey leans left, so 13% is far lower than New Zealand as a whole would give.
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Step 11 of 11
Where do you sit?
Answer the same 60 statements and see where your own dot lands among the party dots. It takes about ten minutes.
The numbers behind the diagram
The same information as the diagram, as tables. Positions come from the live compass. Everything else is an average or a share for a whole group.
Show the tables
The tables need JavaScript.
How we did this
Your answer to a statement, times that statement's weight on each axis, moves your dot. The party dots come from the live compass. The rest uses the answers as of the date at the top.
A statement counts in step 4 if ACT voters lean clearly one way on average, at most a quarter of them take the other side, and their average is clearly further their way than everyone else's (by at least 0.4 of a standard deviation). Those where they also go further than the voters of both nearest parties come first, then those where they go further than one. The step always shows five: where fewer clear that bar, it takes the next ones over a lower bar and says so. Each arrow is the gap between the two groups' average answers, times the weights. The chain in step 5 uses the ACT averages alone.
Steps 7 to 10 use the survey's other questions: the right-track question, the 2023 vote and the ranked top three.
We publish only group averages, shares and counts of whole groups, and we hide a share that rests on too few people. Where too few people gave an answer, we show it together with the answer next to it, or in "Other", and we leave out a group that is too small to compare. For the same reason, a group this small gets no steps on who its voters are, and no lists of the statements they agree or split on.
The methodology page has the rest.
KiwiValues is an independent survey and does not support or oppose any party. Where a party sits here describes how its voters answered, not how anyone should vote.