The South Australian Election of 18 March 2006

The South Australian election on 18 March 2006 saw the Labor Party; led by Mike Rann, storm out from the shadows of minority government to record a decisive victory which has the potential to set a platform from which the party could govern for at least the next eight years. Labor won 28 of the 47 seats in the House of Assembly gaining 45.2% of first preference votes. However, the decisiveness of its victory in the Lower House was not matched by the result in the Legislative Council. Voters turned away from both major parties giving 4 of the 11 seats contested to minor parties and independents. This continued a trend that has been evident in South Australian elections for the last two decades, although on this occasion its dramatic acceleration was explained by the extraordinary result of the ‘No Pokies’ independent Nick Xenophon who won 23.5% of the vote and easily secured two quotas. The election campaign itself marked new heights in the trend towards presidential style campaigning on the part of the Labor Party which used extensive television advertising to make the most of its popular leader. The Liberals, on the other hand, lacked both a leader to counter Rann and the funds to match Labor's advertising budget. The election also saw the confirmation of Family First as a significant player in South Australian politics, and may mark the beginning of the end of the Australian Democrats. The Democrats failed to make any impact and were effectively replaced by the Greens, who in winning a seat in the Legislative Council enjoyed their first South Australian electoral success.     

Electoral inequalities in the 1990 federal elections

Due to the concentration of Australian Labor Party voters, that party has to poll more votes than the Liberal and National Parties to win an election. That is not a gerrymander, for no matter how fairly the boundaries were drawn, Labor would still need to poll more votes than its opponents under the preferential, single‐member constituency voting system. Nevertheless, even under perfectly fair electoral redistributions, Labor is bound to come off worst because Labor voters are more highly concentrated than non‐Labor voters.     

A Right-of-Centre Triumph: The 2004 Australian Half-Senate Election

The Australian Senate is a significant part of the Australian parliamentary system and the electoral contest for the Senate results in representational outcomes that will influence the way the Senate will perform. This paper argues that the 2004 half-Senate election result was significant because it resulted in the Liberal–National Coalition obtaining a majority in the upper house. It accounts for this outcome by examining the contest by way of inter- and intra-party bloc contests. It finds that a particularly strong Right-of-Centre performance in Queensland, to which voters voting for Ms Pauline Hanson made a major contribution, delivered the Senate majority to the Howard government. The significance of the result also lies in the way it confounded previously held views that the combination of proportional representation used for the Senate with the need to elect six senators from each State would make it unlikely for either Labor or the Liberal and National Parties to ever win an upper house majority in the future.     

The Electoral College and the election of 2000

The United States is one of few contemporary democracies that does not choose its chief executive officer through direct popular vote. Rather, the President of the United States is formally chosen by the Electoral College, and a majority of votes in the Electoral College is required to secure election to the Presidency. In 2000, Republican George W. Bush won a 271–266 majority in the Electoral College despite the fact that his opponent, Al Gore, won about half a million more popular votes.The Electoral College system can be conceptualized as a mechanism by which the results of separate elections in each state and, since 1964, the District of Columbia, can be aggregated to produce a nationwide outcome. It has not experienced major reform since 1804, despite the fact that many critics have regarded the system as archaic, outmoded, and essentially undemocratic. Since the early nineteenth century, more than 600 proposed constitutional amendments concerning the Electoral College system have been proposed and debated in Congress. Some would eliminate the Electoral College system altogether and replace it with direct popular vote. Others would retain the Electoral College system but change the way electors are selected or affect the relationships between popular and electoral votes in each state.Because the popular vote in Florida was very close, and because the remaining states were so closely divided, Florida proved to be the pivotal state in the 2000 presidential election. The closeness and controversy surrounding the Florida outcome has renewed efforts on the part of critics to eliminate or reform the system. However, analysis of the 2000 campaign underscores the fact that both sides based decisions concerning their campaign strategies and allocations of human financial resources in an effort to win an electoral college majority, within the constraints of the present system. It is unlikely that there will be sufficient support to overturn or reform the system through constitutional agreement in the foreseeable future.     

A revisionist interpretation of the impact of Queensland's electoral scheme

In December 1989 Queensland voters changed their government from National Party to Labor Party. Labor had been out of office since August 1957, a record period of opposition for a major party. How is that very lengthy Labor period in the wilderness to be explained? The orthodox interpretation is that there has been a gerrymander in Queensland. This article argues, however, that Queensland's electoral system is the same as that of other mainland states. While it is true that electorates are malapportioned in Queensland (and in Western Australia), nevertheless the method of single member electorates with preferential voting is in use for all mainland states. Such a system does not translate a party's percentage of votes into a similar percentage of seats in the Legislative Assembly. The elections of 1956 and 1989 each saw Labor getting a first preference vote in excess of 50 per cent— with which Labor won in excess of 60 per cent of the seats. At no election between these dates did Labor secure a majority of votes, either first preference or two party preferred.     

Split parties finish last: Preferences,pluralities and the 1957 Queensland election

The 1957 election is a watershed in Queensland politics. Coming after the Labor split, the election saw the end of over 40 years of almost uninterrupted Labor rule in Queensland. Often overlooked in discussions of this key period is that the 1957 election was conducted under plurality rule, or as it is more commonly known, ‘first‐past‐the‐post’. Had the 1957 election been held under preferential voting, preferences would have been distributed in 46 of the 71 contested seats. Through simulations of distributions of hypothetical second preferences I assess the effects of the Labor split on the fates of the respective parties. Contrary to some interpretations of the 1957 election I find that plurality rule saved Labor from even greater electoral losses than those they would have sustained under preferential voting. Single‐member constituency electoral systems deal harsh punishment to small parties, or, as in 1957, split parties: a point well known by astute political leaders. Preferential voting may have given Labor leaders even more powerful incentives to heal the split of 1957, and perhaps even avoid it in the first place.     

Electoral Disproportionality and Bias Under the Alternative Vote: Elections to Australia's House of Representatives

Studies of electoral disproportionality and bias under Australia's alternative electoral system have mainly relied on the two-party preferred (2PP) vote totals for all electorates, irrespective of whether these are needed to determine the election outcome there. We argue that separate analyses should be undertaken for two groups of electorates – where the determination is made using the first-preference (FP) votes and where the 2PP redistributed votes are needed because no candidate wins a majority of FP votes, illustrating this with an analysis of the 2007 House of Representatives election results.     

The Electoral Politics of Economic Reform in Australia: The 1998 Election

Like many other advanced industrial democracies, Australia has experienced major and ongoing economic reform over the last two decades, the pace of which has, if anything, increased since the election of the Liberal‐National government in 1996. These developments have led to a growing sense of economic insecurity among many voters. Many of these concerns were focused on the 1998 election, when the Liberal‐National Coalition advocated the introduction of a goods and services tax. This paper uses the 1998 Australian Election Study (AES) survey to examine the impact of economic evaluations, economic insecurity and economic issues on voting in the election. The results demonstrate the existence of widespread economic concerns across the electorate, but that the Coalition gained a marginal electoral advantage on the tax reform issue. Economic issues were also a cause of defection to the new One Nation Party, although further analysis reveals that its support was motivated more by race and ethnic concerns than by economic discontent.     

Tasmanian Forests,the Environment and Voting in the 2004 Australian Federal Election

The 2004 Australian federal election appeared to depart from the historical tendency for the Australian Labor Party to benefit electorally from adopting policies more sympathetic to environmental movement demands than those of the Liberal–National Coalition, when environmental issues have been prominent in election campaigns. This article assesses contending claims about the actual impact of environmental issues on the outcome of the 2004 election, and possible explanations for Labor's failure to gain a significant net electoral advantage from its environmental policies, in particular its commitment to preserve 240,000 hectares of native forest in Tasmania.     

Border protection,the 2001 Australian election and the coalition victory

While the issue of refugees and asylum-seekers has preoccupied many European countries, until the November 2001 federal election Australia had largely been immune from the problem. In the election, border protection—combining the Tampa crisis with the ‘war against terrorism’—were central electoral issues. Analysis of the 2001 Australian Election Study shows that border protection cost Labor the election. Labor suffered defections to the Democrats and Greens over its position on refugees and asylum-seekers, and defections to the Coalition on terrorism. Negative public attitudes towards asylum-seekers rested on oppo sition to immigration, but also on a particular dislike of arrivals from the Middle East. By contrast, support for the ‘war on terrorism’ was based mainly on notions of fairness and democracy. Of the two border protection issues— asylum-seekers and terrorism—terrorism was the more important of the two in shaping the election outcome. If 11 September had occurred but the Tampa crisis had not, the Coalition would in all probability still have won the election.     

The problem with counting preferences: the example of one nation party preferences at the 2001 Western Australian legislative assembly election

A growing number of lower‐house seats at Australian State and federal elections rely on a distribution of preferences from Independent and small‐party candidates before seats can be awarded. Actors have attempted to gain political capital from this situation by claiming that the preferences of particular small parties have affected election outcomes. This paper uses the events of the Western Australian State election held in 2001 to explore the validity of such claims. More specifically, it investigates the widely propagated contention that the One Nation Party's anti‐sitting‐member preference strategy was a key determinant of the Coalition's electoral defeat. It concludes that the increased number of candidates contesting elections makes it difficult to assess whether the second and subsequent preferences of any particular small party were critical to the outcome.     

Forecasting Australian elections: 1993, and all that

The link between economic conditions and election outcomes is a pillar of social science. Voters prefer ‘better times’ to worse and reward or punish incumbents accordingly. We investigate the extent to which this truism holds in the Australian context, with particular emphasis on the 1993 result. While Australian election outcomes are generally not well predicted by prevailing economic conditions, we are impressed by the extent to which the 1993 election outcome is at odds with the state of the economy. In particular, we find Labor performed up to five percentage points better than expected in 1993, making this result one of the most exceptional election results ever observed in Australia. The sizeable electoral penalty typically accompanying large increases in unemployment was effectively nullified in 1993. We accurately predict the 1993 result (ex post) only if unemployment is considered electorally irrelevant. We conclude by suggesting a research agenda for better understanding the link between economic context and election outcomes in the Australian setting.     

民主的悖论——英国议会选举制度改革

英国1832年前的议会选举制度是贵族控制的,具体体现在选区、选举权、选举活动和议员结构等方面。1832—1918年的英国选举制度改革客观上促进了英国的民主发展,但这不是英国决策者的意图。对于英国统治精英来说,改革的宗旨是为了保持贵族的统治和避免真正的民主。英国的议会选举制度改革在民主问题上形成了一个悖论:反民主的举措却促进了民主的发展。     

The dual endorsement in the federal electorate of Riverina, 1966

The dual endorsement in Riverina was the result of several circumstances: the Labor Party was unlikely to win the seat; Newman, though he agreed to contest the election, had no strong parliamentary ambition and no antipathy to a second candidate; the electorate was large enough to justify dividing the effort and expense of the campaign. In the face of these circumstances the State Executive, when pressed by the Electorate Council and the endorsed candidate, agreed to Solly's endorsement. However, political conditions proved to be unfavourable to Labor in the elections and the experiment of endorsing two candidates failed, or rather, was not properly put to the test, since it was not necessary to distribute preferences. Underlying this failure is the absence of any evidence to support the belief that the presence of two candidates will increase a party's vote. Since 1949, Labor's real problem in Riverina has been a lack of enough Labor voters—dual endorsement or not. It is probably unlikely that the A.L.P. will repeat the experiment of endorsing two candidates in the near future; perhaps even less likely that the curious circumstances in Riverina will occur in other electorates.     

How Would Jesus Vote? The Churches and the Election of the Rudd Government

The Coalition's clear victory over Labor at the 2004 federal election after prominent campaigning by conservative church-based groups – along with the election to the Senate of a member of the Family First party – seemed to many commentators to confirm the growing power of a ‘Religious Right’ in Australia. This paper argues that two features of the 2007 federal election campaign are impossible to square with the rise of the Religious Right thesis. First, Labor won in 2007 without shifting its leadership, policies or electoral strategy to suit the Christian Right. Second, the contributions of church groups to the 2007 election campaign were not dominated by a single perspective but covered a wide range of issues and expressed competing views on key policy issues. This pluralism allowed Kevin Rudd, the Labor Party and even the Greens room to present themselves favourably to significant groups of Christian voters. The 2007 election suggests that, rather than being dominated by a hegemonic Christian Right, church involvement in Australian electoral politics is pluralistic in character.     

The Occurrence and Consequences of Electoral Mandates in Historical Context

This study revisits the debate over electoral mandates by assessing the occurrence and consequences of landslide electoral victories since the 1860s. The study builds on Keeler's (1993) formulation of mandates in terms of the opportunities afforded by an election. Viewing elections as creating policy opportunities allows a more straightforward assessment of the relation between election outcomes and the legislative activity that follows. The idea of policy windows also avoids some of the criticisms directed at electoral mandates. Using public laws enacted from 1860 to 1998,1 find that landslide electoral victories precede less active Congresses almost as often as they precede surges of legislative activity. Using qualitative historical information, I further find that the legislative opportunities afforded by a landslide victory are conditional upon unity of the president's party.     

Electoral instability and the modern campaign: New Zealand labour in 1987

This essay explores the theme of the rise of the ‘modern campaign'—the electoral focus on polling, targeted appeals, and the professional, managed use of the media—as the strategic response by parties to the exigencies of electioneering in an era of increasingly fluid, weakly partisan electorates. Given New Zealand Labour's unparalleled policy‐reversals since 1984, which rocked a political system noted for its stable, loyal partisan politics, it is argued the 1987 campaign constitutes a threshold election in which Labour's executive consciously embraced the modern campaign to deflect reactions to its unorthodox policies, and to allow appeals to newly heterogeneous bases of electoral support. Interviews with key figures in New Zealand's Labour and National parlies afford the chance to examine this strategic tactic as a considered response to electoral uncertainty.     

One Party,Two Traditions: Radicalism and Pragmatism in the Australian Greens

The 2004 Australian federal election established the Australian Greens (Greens) as the third largest political force in the country behind the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Liberal Party in electoral terms. Despite the Greens’ electoral achievements, the party has been largely dismissed as a radical single-issue political party. This paper will argue that while radicalism is an institutionally entrenched feature of the Greens in both organisational and programmatic terms, there are also strongly pragmatic aspects to the party's modus operandi. It suggests that the Greens are astute political operators who use radicalism in a highly pragmatic way to achieve their political objectives.     

Changing the scale and changing the result: Evaluating the impact of an electoral reform on the 2000 and 2004 US Presidential elections

The ‘perverse’ outcome of the 2000 US Presidential election, whereby the candidate with most ‘popular votes’ was defeated in the Electoral College, has stimulated renewed interest in electoral reform in the United States. One option discussed is the Maine/Nebraska system (sometimes termed the Mundt–Coudert scheme) which changes the geography of the contest somewhat. One-fifth of the Electoral College votes are retained for the winner of the popular vote contest in each of the States, with the remainder being allocated to candidates who win in each of the separate Congressional District contests. This paper evaluates the likely outcome of the 2000 and 2004 Electoral College contests if this scheme had been in place. It shows that the 2000 result would not have been changed, but the 2004 outcome would have been even more favourable to the Republican candidate, because his vote total was much more efficiently distributed than his opponent's.     

Interest rates and the 2004 Australian Election

During the October 2004 Australian federal election campaign the expected or possible effect of the election outcome on interest rates was a key point of differentiation between the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal–National Party coalition. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we examine whether this effect was a significant factor in the election outcome, as measured by the percentage swing towards the coalition in each electorate. Second, we use standard methodology from financial economics to examine whether the election outcome had an effect on interest rates. Contrary to media coverage of the campaign, we find that the election result did have an effect on interest rates but that the possibility of interest rate changes was not a dominant factor in the election result.