Managing midterm vacancies: institutional design and partisan strategy in the Australian parliament, 1901–2013

This article explores how replacement rules for midterm vacancies affect legislative turnover in the context of majoritarian and proportional electoral systems. The differing electoral rules and replacement procedures for the two chambers of the Australian parliament over more than a century permit an analysis of the complex interplay between institutional rules, party strategy, and patterns of representation between 1901 and 2013. Since 1901, the Australian House of Representatives has been committed to single member electoral systems and by-elections for filling midterm vacancies, but major changes to both the electoral system and midterm replacement rules for the Australian Senate have played a critical role in enhancing party control of Senate careers.     

Can the Australian Greens Replace the Australian Democrats as a ‘Third Party’ in the Senate?

In this article I discuss the likelihood of the Australian Greens being able to develop into a party that plays an equivalent ‘third party’ role in the Senate similar to that played by the Australian Democrats for most of their existence. My conclusion, based on attitudes underlying voting behaviour, is that they cannot afford to behave contrary to their position as part of a left-wing bloc without jeopardising a substantial part of their voter base.     

Trade politics in the American Congress:: a study of the interaction of political geography and interest group behavior

Political geography plays an important role in influencing how industries build coalitions to secure desired trade benefits in American politics. The political geography of an industry is defined as the intersection of its economic geography, i.e. the location of its means of production, and the institutional structure of the political system in which it operates. In the case of the United States, trade-sensitive industries lobby the bicameral Congress and the executive branch for beneficial trade policies, and their geographic location strongly influences the strategies they adopt. Industries concentrated across heavily populated states will be more powerful in the House of Representatives than in the Senate. They will therefore ground their efforts in the House and form coalitions with industries that are powerful in the Senate. Industries that are concentrated across less populated states will be stronger in the Senate and will seek to form coalition partners that are strong in the House. A theory of political geography is used to explain the behavior of import/export sensitive industries in the 1980s and 1990s. The findings suggest that these industries choose coalition partners who bolster their political weakness in the House or Senate by extending, rather than replicating, their geographic base of support.     

Congress,Health Care Reform,and Reconciliation

This article explores the role of reconciliation in the passage of health care reform in the 111th Congress. Although counterintuitive, the analysis suggests that the loss of a filibuster-proof super-majority with the election of Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) aided Democrats in clearing the overhaul package by facilitating the use of reconciliation. Reconciliation provided the critical procedural mechanism enabling health care reform to be enacted into law. Despite reconciliation's importance, substantively the reconciliation “fixes” were relatively modest amendments. Moreover, notwithstanding the use of reconciliation, Congress passed the health care legislation with largely conventional means—separate health care reform measures cleared the House and Senate in 2009, in 2010 the House approved the Senate bill, and then both chambers quickly passed the reconciliation addendum. This research draws on discussions I had with over a dozen key actors after health care reform passed.     

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.     

The 1984 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Election Studies

This paper examines the role of leadership in the U.S. House in the context of arguments raised in Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government. It begins with a discussion of the speakerships of Henry Clay and Thomas Reed as counterexamples to Wilson's generalizations (a model that links the degree of preference homogeneity among legislative followers to a leader's decision about whether to exert policy leadership is presented in an Appendix). Next we argue that preference homogeneity, leadership style and institutional structure form a kind of equilibrium, drawing on the history of the House for supporting evidence. Finally we discuss the application of our theory to House Democrats in the 1980s.     

Gender and Patterns of Roll Call Voting in the U.S. Senate

Previous studies of gender and representation at the state legislative level and in the U.S. House of Representatives have shown that women tend to be more liberal than their male colleagues and are more likely to support women's issues. Because of the limited presence of women in the body over the years, there is scant empirical evidence to confirm whether this pattern is present in the U.S. Senate. Sound theoretical basis indicates that the institutional rules of the Senate, the Senate's individualistic culture, the Senate's six-year election timetable, and the national profile of U.S. senators may create conditions that allow gender differences in roll call voting to be more easily detected than is possible in more rigidly structured institutions such as the U.S. House. This study employs a longitudinal design that pools roll call voting data from the 103rd Congress through the 110th Congress to determine whether female senators compile substantively different policy records than their male colleagues. The results indicate that gender does systematically influence roll call voting patterns in the Senate. However, it is largely a function of female Republicans voting in a less conservative fashion than male Republicans on the basic left-right policy space and on a smaller set of issues of importance to women.     

Whose Mandate? Policy Promises,Strong Bicameralism and Polled Opinion

The political theory of Australian politics has been dominated, since the election of a Liberal-National Party government in 1996, by claims and counterclaims about electoral mandates. The government has privileged its position in the House of Representatives; opposition parties have pointed to their support in the Senate. This paper provides a historical re-examination of the meanings and merits of mandate theories; it outlines the difficulties posed by strong bicameralism for any mandate theory; and it shows how the rise of survey research has strengthened some claims to a mandate, especially in bicameral systems, while weakening others.     

Shirking and Ideology: Defense in the Senate

A repeated finding in political science is the influence of a representative's so-called ideology on roll call voting in the U.S. House and Senate. Many of these studies attempt explicitly to separate the impact on roll call voting of "personal" ideology from that of constituency ideological preferences. In these studies, personal ideology is viewed as a form of shirking in which members pursue their own policy preferences rather than those of their constituents. This paper shows, at least for the case of defense in the Senate in the 1980s, that the evidence is sufficient to reject the claim that shirking represents the consumption of personal ideological policy preferences. Instead, the apparent impact of shirking on defense voting was an instrumental, reelection-oriented response to President Reagan's ability to muster popular support for his defense build up, and thus cannot be regarded as shirking at all.     

Issue Salience and Bill Introduction in the House and Senate

I propose that many if not most bills introduced in the House and Senate represent electoral position taking on the part of members. Thousands of bills are introduced every year, only a fraction of which are passed into law, much less seriously considered in the chamber. Moreover, bills are very good position-taking devices in that they can appear to voters to be a credible step in the electoral process. I search for electoral motivations by examining the content of the bills members introduce. For five different policy areas, and in both the House and the Senate, I find strong correlations between indicators of issue salience in members’ districts and the number of bills the member introduces within the policy area. In addition, in the House the relationship between salience and bill introduction is strongest among vulnerable members, although in the Senate vulnerability does not influence the relationship.     

Congress as Principal: Exploring Bicameral Differences in Agent Oversight

Previous theoretical and empirical work suggests differences in the way the congressional chambers approach the responsibility of agent control. The Senate should, the literature hypothesizes, exercise greater and qualitatively more systematic, substantive, and preemptive oversight of agents than does the House. Yet little research on congressional oversight has focused upon bicameral differences in principal behavior. This paper begins to fill the void by examining House and Senate oversight of the Federal Reserve. Specifically, I look at three types of oversight activity: monitoring of, and signaling to, the agent, and the principal's alteration of its contract with the agent. Utilizing original data and a variety of statistical methods, I show that there exist few, if any, quantitative and qualitative differences in House and Senate behavior. I then discuss theoretical reasons for my unexpected findings.     

The pitfalls of participatory democracy: A study of the Australian Democrats' GST

This article analyses the operation of participatory democracy within the Australian Democrats, with reference to the development of the party's 1998 Goods and Services Tax (GST) policy and its subsequent application to debate in the Senate. The study extends beyond an evaluation of the formal participatory mechanisms codified in the party's Constitution, to their operation in practice—revealing the tensions faced by a small participatory party within a competitive electoral system. Difficulties include the primacy of the parliamentary party in everyday political decision making, and the importance of leadership and strong personalities, which sit uneasily with the formal democratic power accorded to the membership. The study also highlights a key debate applicable to all parties: whether parliamentarians represent the membership, party activists or the electorate, and how these levels of representation may be reconciled.     

Political Knowledge and its Partisan Consequences

The study of political knowledge is an established field of research in the United States, although there is a dearth of such research in Australia. Knowledge of political facts and issues is important for making informed political choices. Age, gender, educational attainment and occupational status all distinguish knowledge of politics in Australia, although their impact varies across domestic and international political issues. Political knowledge also influences political behaviour. At the 2004 federal election, politically knowledgeable Australians were more likely to vote for the Greens than the Coalition in the House of Representatives, and more likely to vote for the Greens than for the major parties in the Senate. Political knowledge also increases the likelihood of voting strategically, particularly for the Labor Party in the House of Representatives and Greens in the Senate.     

The Vice President in the U.S. Senate: Examining the Consequences of Institutional Design

The constitutional placement of the vice president as the president of the Senate gives procedural control of the Senate to an individual who is not elected by the chamber. We argue that because the vice president frequently acts against the wishes of Senate majorities, senators have been reluctant to allow chamber power to be centralized under their largely unaccountable presiding officer. This fear has had a major influence on Senate development, preventing the Senate from allowing its chair to reduce dilatory action, as the House has done. Accordingly, delay, via the filibuster, has become commonplace in the Senate. Such delay has reduced the Senate's efficiency, but has largely freed it from the potential influence of the executive branch.     

(Re)assessing Parliamentary Policy Impact: The Case of the Australian Senate

A recent article in this Journal suggested that assumptions about the legislative influence of the Australian Senate may overstate its de facto power. Stanley Bach indicated that compromise with the Senate was relatively rare, and pointed out that most successful Senate amendments were government amendments. This paper provides an alternative view. We suggest that legislative influence is more subtle than Bach acknowledged, and that it is necessary to dig deeper in the data to fully understand the Senate's role. We therefore supplement his analysis in two ways: (1) through tracking the ultimate outcome of government defeats in the Senate; and (2) through analysis of two case study bills. We find that in confrontations with government the Senate ‘wins’ the great majority of the time. This shapes government behaviour in the chamber, such that many government amendments actually respond to non-government concerns. The most important element of Senate influence is therefore ‘soft power’– exercised through negotiation – backed up only in extremis by the ‘hard power’ of government defeat. This holds important lessons for the study of legislative influence more broadly, as well as demonstrating the true power of the Australian Senate.     

Postmaterialist and Economic Voting in Australia, 1990-98

Recent research in Australian sociology and political science has debated the extent to which postmaterialist values and economic self-interest shape voting in federal elections. Some researchers have argued that postmaterialist values have partly displaced materialist concerns with physical security and economic well-being in Australian public life. This displacement, coupled with the adoption by major political parties of postmaterialist 'quality of life' issues such as the environment, has meant that voting in Australia has come to be more dependent on postmaterialist values than on perceptions of economic interest. Other research, however, has found no relationship between postmaterialist values and voting behaviour, while economic evaluations remain a strong determinant of voting behaviour. Part of the disagreement reflects methodological differences in the research. But different methodological problems compromise each of the previous studies. In this paper we use data from the 1990, 1993, 1996 and 1998 Australian Election Studies to investigate postmaterialist and economic voting in the Commonwealth House of Representatives and the Senate. Using various statistical methods, we first explore bivariate relationships between key variables and then use multivariate models of postmaterialist and economic voting to adjudicate between the contending positions.     

Surge and Decline: The Impact of Changes in Voter Turnout on the 2010 Senate Elections

Enthusiasm among Republican voters and a lack thereof among Democrats was cited by many post-election analyses as a contributing factor to the outcome of the 2010 midterm elections. Analysis of the aggregate county level voter turnout and results of the 2010 Senate races provides strong evidence of (1) a sharper decline in turnout from 2008 to 2010 in areas in which Barack Obama did well in 2008 and (2) a significant relationship between turnout changes from 2006–2010 and 2008–2010 and changes in the vote share of Democratic Senate candidates in 2010. In addition, a test of the referendum theory of midterm elections shows that declining presidential approval ratings, but not economic indicators, are predictive of the Democratic vote share in 2010. Despite previous findings that midterm and presidential electorates do not fundamentally differ, this analysis of the 2010 Senate elections provides evidence that differential turnout among core and peripheral voters is an important part of the explanation for the surge that occurs in presidential elections and the subsequent decline in voter participation during midterms.     

Postmaterialism and the Vote for the Senate in Australia

There is a disagreement in the political science literature regarding the impact of postmaterialism upon Australian politics. Elim Papadakis, and Ian McAllister and Clive Bean argued that postmaterialist values were expressed through support for the minor parties in the 1990 federal election. But David Gow, analysing the same data, found no evidence supporting postmaterialist theory. In this research note, I re-analyse the data and present fresh evidence which suggests that there is a postmaterialist effect associated with voting for the minor parties in the Senate. My analysis also addresses the question of modelling the vote for the Senate to adequately account for the representation of new politics values by the minor parties.     

Senate Amendments and Legislative Outcomes in Australia, 1996–2007

There has been a recurring argument in Australia about how the Senate should exercise its constitutional power to amend government legislation that it receives from the House of Representatives. Much less attention has been paid to how the Senate has exercised this power, and how often Senate amendments have resulted in legislative changes that governments otherwise would not have made. This article explores the legislative record and finds that, during the Howard ministry, Senate amendments did not often provoke negotiations leading to bicameral compromise. Most often, the House either agreed to the Senate's amendments, many of which were government proposals, or disagreed to them. In the latter cases, the Senate most often gave way, instead of insisting on the legislative changes it already had approved.     

The Representation of Small Parties and Independents in the Senate

Minor party and independent senators have played a critical role in supporting procedural changes which have given the Australian Senate the ability to play an independent role in the legislative process, and to scrutinise the executive branch effectively. This article examines how this situation has followed from the adoption of proportional representation (PR) for Senate elections since 1949. In looking at the evidence available in 1948, it is argued that the current symbiotic relationship between minor parties and the Senate could not have been foreseen. Whether intended or not, the adoption of PR and the representation of minor parties has done more to enhance the operation of parliamentary democracy in Australia than any institutional change since federation.