Australian Election Research Articles

Explaining the political under-representation of Asian Australians: geographical concentration and voting patterns

ABSTRACTIn terms of Asian Migrant and Ethnic Minority (MEM) representation, the Australian Parliament is one of the most unrepresentative when compared to other similar settler societies such as Canada and the United States. This article examines why the Australian Parliament still predominantly comprises members of parliament from British and European Backgrounds despite Australia’s rich multicultural heritage involving a long history of non-British and European migration. One of the main reasons put forward for the low participation of Asian migrant and ethnic minorities in the Australian Parliament is the lack of geographical concentration of Asian migrants and the declining importance of the ‘ethnic vote’, which in other similar settler countries has led to the selection and recruitment of MEM candidates to competitive seats. This article explores the geographical concentration of Asian migrants in competitive seats as well as voting patterns among Asian Australians using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Election Studies. In doing so, this research considers whether there is potential for the incorporation of MEM interests in the future through descriptive and substantive representation.

The 2007 Australian Election: Blue-collar Voters, Migrants and the Environment

The 2007 Australian Election Study shows that many blue-collar voters, the so-called Howard battlers, returned to Labor. Combined with earlier surveys it also shows that non-English-speaking-background migrants have consistently been more likely to vote Labor than the Australia-born. They were particularly likely to do so in 2007, especially if they were in blue-collar occupations. The Howard Government's Work Choices legislation probably played a role in these outcomes. However, the data also show that Labor's environmental policy also played an important part. Thirty five per cent of voters were influenced by an environmental issue during the campaign, more than were affected by any other set of issues. Concern about the environment is spread across all occupational groups, though it is rather more pronounced among professionals.

Persuasives Handeln: objektbezogen, multimodal, massenmedial. Gebrauch der „Taferln“ in österreichischen TV-Wahldebatten

Object-related and multimodal forms of persuasion. The case of “Taferln” small cardboard signs in Austrian TV election debatesAustrian TV debates are held as roundtable talks with little formal rules, in particular the use of documents and objects brought along is not prohibited. This paper deals with the persuasive use and situated history of “Taferln” small cardboard signs during the 15 one-on-one encounters produced live by the Austrian public service broadcaster ORF before the general election in 2013. The video data were coded in terms of object use, relevant sections further transcribed and evaluated in conjunction with the journalistic picture direction and camera work. The findings show that politicians employed “Taferln” in 12 broadcasts, usually to be seen in close-up on the TV screen, suggesting that “Taferln” are an established means in Austrian political discourse to argue and persuade. The qualitative analysis describes in detail how “Taferln” provide communicative benefits in the conversational situation: how “Taferln” can be used to refute statements of the counter party, how conversational roles are performatively constituted based on object use, and how affordances of the material objects are strategically exploited for persuasive action.

Does Religious Attendance Increase Immigrant Political Participation?: A Case Study in Australia

AbstractThe relationship between religion and immigrant political participation has not been rigorously investigated in the literature set in Australia. In this study, I test whether religious attendance influences electoral and non-electoral participation among immigrants. Drawing on data from the 2013 Australian Election Study, I demonstrate that the impact of religious attendance on political participation may be overstated. I find that religious attendance is not significantly related to electoral and non-electoral participation among immigrants in Australia. This result may relate to three factors: the ability of religious attendance to affect immigrants’ key political resources; competition between religious and secular organizations; and the political salience of particular religious denominations within the Australian context. This study does not provide the much sought-after empirical confirmation to associational theories of political participation, but instead sounds a note of caution about the universal applicability of such theories.

Changes in the style and content of Australian election campaign speeches from 1901 to 2016: A computational linguistic analysis

Abstract There have been significant social and political changes in Australian society since federation in 1901. The issues that are considered politically salient have also changed significantly. The purpose of this article is to examine changes in the style and content of election campaign speeches over the period 1901-2016. The corpus consists of 88 election campaign speeches delivered by the Prime Minister and Opposition leader for the 45 elections from 1901 to 2016. I use natural language processing to extract from the speeches a number of linguistic variables which serve as independent variables and use the year of delivery as the dependent variable. I then use machine learning to develop a regression model which explains 77 per cent of the variance in the dependent variable. Examination of the salient independent variables shows that there have been significant linguistic changes in the style and content of election speeches over the study period. In particular speeches have become less linguistically complex, less introspective, more focused on work and the home, and contain more visual and social references. I discuss these changes in the context of changes in Australian society over the study period.

The third dimension of political mapping: exploiting map interactivity for a better understanding of election and referendum results

Density-equalizing cartograms in the Euclidian plane are the usual cartographic solution for the discrepancy between the topographic nature of the GIS map, reflecting the extent of land surfaces, and the demographic nature of a vote, pertaining to the number of voters expressing a given political choice. Cartograms adapt map polygon areas to population sizes. Contemporary mapping technologies allow a different approach by giving access to interactive models in which the third dimension of space can be used to reflect a demographic variable while leaving the topographic base-map intact. This offers an answer to concerns about cartogram readability by the general public. Examples from Austrian election and Swiss referendum results are given to illustrate our approach.

The third dimension of political mapping: exploiting map interactivity for a better understanding of election and referendum results

ABSTRACTDensity-equalizing cartograms in the Euclidian plane are the usual cartographic solution for the discrepancy between the topographic nature of the GIS map, reflecting the extent of land surfaces, and the demographic nature of a vote, pertaining to the number of voters expressing a given political choice. Cartograms adapt map polygon areas to population sizes. Contemporary mapping technologies allow a different approach by giving access to interactive models in which the third dimension of space can be used to reflect a demographic variable while leaving the topographic base-map intact. This offers an answer to concerns about cartogram readability by the general public. Examples from Austrian election and Swiss referendum results are given to illustrate our approach.

Compulsory Voting and Voter Decision Making

Compulsory voting is known to produce a relatively weak match between voters’ ballot choices and their preferences. We theorize that this link, in part, exists because compelled voters are relatively unlikely to seek out political information during an election campaign, even after differences in political sophistication across compelled and voluntary voters are taken into account. To test our expectations, we use a simulation of an Australian election, through which we track participants’ information searches. Our findings show that those who do not turn out voluntarily under Australia’s compulsory voting law tend to spend less time seeking out political information, and they engage with less information. While differences in political sophistication between those who feel compelled to vote and those who do not account for a portion of this pattern, feeling compelled also has an independent effect on information seeking. This suggests that the negative relationship between compulsory voting and the quality of votes is partly due to the fact that those who are compelled to turn out expend less effort when deciding how to cast their ballots.

Beyond salience and position taking

This article examines aspects of election manifestos that are largely ignored by extant manifesto-based studies focusing on issue saliencies and policy positions. Drawing on the literatures on negative campaigning, retrospective voting, party mandates and personalization, we develop a scheme of categories that allows for the analysis of attacks on competitors, references to a party’s track record, subjective and objective policy pledges and the prominence of party leaders in manifestos. We also show that these elements are present in manifestos of major European parties. The relevance of these categories, we argue, should be influenced by a party’s status in government or opposition, its ideology, its size, the relative popularity of party leaders and the occurrence of early elections. Our systematic examination of 46 Austrian election manifestos produced between 1986 and 2013 demonstrates that many of these expectations are supported by the evidence. Most notably, it emerges that government and opposition parties write manifestos that differ with respect to all of the five characteristics analysed. This suggests that there are systematic differences between government and opposition party manifestos that should be taken into consideration by scholars engaged in manifesto-based research.

Trends in migrant and ethnic minority voting in Australia: findings from the Australian election study

ABSTRACTA review of the research literature on migrant voting in Australia shows that the “ethnic vote” has almost disappeared now that migrants tend to vote in a similar way to the rest of the population according to traditional class cleavages. In addition, it is argued that migrants in Australia predominantly reside in safe Labor seats that are represented by cabinet or shadow cabinet ministers. As such their group-based interests are often neglected by the major parties. Using findings from the ABS census and the 1993–2013 AES, this article re-examines whether there is a migrant vote, and if so, the extent to which migrant voting patterns have changed since the 1990s when the migrant and ethnic vote reached its peak. This study reveals patterns of migrant voting among certain birthplace subgroups that are more volatile than in previous decades but at the same time distinctive.

Are Perceptions of Candidate Traits Shaped by the Media? The Effects of Three Types of Media Bias

Media coverage can influence how citizens think about their political leaders. This study explores how three types of media bias (visibility bias, tonality bias, and agenda bias) affect voter assessments of politicians’ traits. Bias effects should be stronger for political traits (such as competence) than for nonpolitical traits (such as likability). Biases may also interact in their effects: Specifically, visibility bias should moderate the impact of tonality bias. Combining media, party, and survey data through manual content analysis of newspaper coverage ( N = 2,680) and party press releases ( N = 1,794), as well as a three-wave voter survey ( n = 927) during the 2013 Austrian election campaign, we find substantial effects of tonality bias and agenda bias on political trait perceptions. The effects are less clear for nonpolitical trait perceptions. Although visibility bias has no direct impact, there is evidence that it moderates effects of tonality bias on candidate perceptions.

Party Advertising in Newspapers

Journalists increasingly fear that their work may be influenced by advertisers’ interests. While studies have found that commercial advertisers exert pressure on news producers, equivalent research on political advertising is scarce. Using a rigorous methodological approach, we investigate whether party advertising led to three different forms of media bias in newspaper coverage of the Austrian general election in 2013. We combine data on party newspaper advertising (N≈1300), party press releases (N≈1900) and coverage in seven newspapers (N≈4200). There are no statistically significant effects of party advertising on media bias, though there is indicative evidence of differences between media genres. Our findings advance the study of advertiser pressure in the field of political journalism and political communication and clarify a heated public debate.

Tweeting to save the furniture: the 2013 Australian election campaign on Twitter

Past years have seen continuing experimentation in the use of social media for political campaigning. By the time of the 2013 Australian federal election, social media of various forms had become comparatively mainstream in Australia and were widely used by members and candidates: more than 350 candidates operated Twitter accounts during the campaign, for instance. This article explores the key patterns both in how politicians and their parties campaigned on Twitter during the 2013 federal election campaign and in how the public responded to and engaged with these campaigns. It documents significant, systematic differences between the major party blocs and interprets these as reflecting the Coalition’s ‘small target’ strategy and Labor’s last-ditch attempts to ‘save the furniture’, respectively.

Limited Resettlement and Ongoing Uncertainty: responses to and experiences of people seeking asylum in Australia and Indonesia

In the wake of the Coalition Government’s narrow victory in the first Australian election since the adoption of policies known as Operation Sovereign Borders, this special edition of Cosmopolitan Civil Societies focuses its attention on the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers . It explores some of the experiences of people both in Australia and Indonesia who are seeking a life of safety, as well as the responses of civil society groups and governments, following the commencement of policies that have vastly reduced the opportunities for refugee resettlement in Australia.

Climate change and the welfare state? Exploring Australian attitudes to climate and social policy

Despite growing evidence of significant impacts from human-induced climate change, policy responses have been slow. Understanding this policy inertia has led to competing explanations, which either point to the need to build a consensual politics separated from economic partisanship, or which encourage solidarities between environmental and social movements and issues. This article analyses a recent successful mobilisation, leading to the passage of the Clean Energy Act in Australia, to explore the relationship between attitudes to environmental and social protection, particularly among the core constituency in favour of stronger climate action. Using social survey data from the Australian Election Study, the article finds evidence of independent associations between prioritising environmental concerns and support for welfare state expansion, and a realignment of materialist and post-materialist values. This we argue is consistent with Polanyian analysis that posits a link between social and environmental causes based on resistance to commodification.

Young people and intentional informal voting in Australia

ABSTRACTCompared to most other advanced democracies, Australia experiences fairly high levels of both intentional and unintentional informal (or invalid) voting. Using survey data obtained predominantly from the Australian Election Study and aggregate-level data derived mainly from the Australian Census, we explore whether young people are more likely to cast intentional informal votes. We also reflect on why they might do so. We find that young people are strongly implicated in the rising intentional informal vote rate. We also find that their motivations are linked to the following factors: the young are less likely to be members of political parties, less interested in electoral politics and tend to value voting less than the average citizen. Young people also report higher than average levels of cynicism about politics and lower levels of satisfaction with Australian democracy.

Valence politics and immigrant voting in the 2013 Australian election

ABSTRACTUsing data from the 2013 Australian Election Study, this article investigates voting patterns among Australian voters from non-English-speaking backgrounds (NESB). It reveals that a valence politics model – comparing images of the two major parties and their leaders, partisan attachments, and judgements about party performance on economic issues – outperforms rival models. That is, it provides a powerful explanation of the decisions NESB voters made. In deciding between competing parties in the 2013 election, NESB voters resembled Australian voters who emigrated from English-speaking backgrounds and Australian-born voters. The findings of this article offer new insights into electoral research in Australia, indicating that previous studies have underestimated the important role of the valence politics model in explaining voting patterns among Australian voters. The article also provides plausible explanations for the convergence between various cohorts of voters in the 2013 election.

The politics of categorization – political representatives with immigrant background between “the other” and “standing for”

ABSTRACTHow is the category immigrant background (IB) politically made? Which meanings do political actors ascribe to the term IB and to which extent do these meanings include both connotations of ethnic, religious and cultural otherness and migration-related social and economic experiences? This paper deals with the politics of categorization within the field of political representation of ethnic minorities. It empirically examines the making of the IB category in public discourse about candidates for the 2013 Austrian general elections. Our analytical framework takes its cue from Rogers Brubaker’s category pair, analysis and practice, as well as Dvora Yanow’s account of categorization. The findings indicate that the politics of categorization along IB is characterized by a boundary contraction of origin and a gender-specific boundary expansion of the IB category to include religion. Regarding the discursive filling IB is used to stigmatize candidates as “the others”, but also refers to migration-related experiences, thereby “taming” othering. Still, the IB category rather appears as a burden than as a benefit ascribing cultural difference and signaling “they are not from here”.

Voter Targeting Online in Comparative Perspectives: Political Party Websites in the 2008/2009 and 2013 Austrian and German Election Campaigns

The web allows political parties to segment and microtarget specific groups of voters. This paper seeks to measure voter targeting online focusing on catch-all parties and client parties’ websites during the 2008 and 2013 Austrian general elections and the 2009 and 2013 German federal elections. Thereby, this comparative longitudinal analysis also aims to provide insights into the development process of political targeting strategies. From a theoretical perspective, catch-all parties try to appeal to a diverse spectrum of potential voters, whereas client parties are aiming at a more specific type of voter. The results of the content analysis show that (a) information and services on parties’ websites increasingly focus on addressing the general public and (b) differences between catch-all and client parties have been reduced between campaigns.

Europe's New Identity: The Refugee Crisis and the Rise of Nationalism.

Europe's New Identity: The Refugee Crisis and the Rise of Nationalism.