Voting, trends, psephology, statistics, and how Australia
sees itself at the polls.
This essay is about the voting trend in Australia.
It concentrates on voting trend which is defined as voter behaviour and is thus
interpreted in voting trend statistics. Trend changes are discussed, also, some
of the many factors that influence trend change are discussed. It aims to
conclude that the voting behaviour has changed to some degree; and is in reply
to the essay question: In what ways and to what degree has the voting behaviour
of Australians changed since the 1960s. It introduces the constitution as the
instrument giving the individual a right to vote, it moves on to discuss
external effects on voting outcomes, gives some statistics; discusses the
socio-political influencers of voter behaviour and concludes with a statistical
analysis of psephological outcomes.
Firstly, however it is important to point out that not all citizenry
are allowed to vote. People who are not allowed suffrage (the vote) at an
election are: immigrants who do not have Australian citizenship, any person who
is convicted of a crime that is punishable by five years or more in prison,
persons of an un-sound mind and any person found guilty of treason,
The section of the
Australian Constitution that instructs national suffrage to be allowed to the
citizenry is Section 41. Section 31 provides the citizenry with the opportunity
for state suffrage. These two sections allow every qualifying individual the
right to vote for any political entity of their choosing within the
commonwealth and its states, thus affecting the degree of change in voting
behaviour.
There are at least five
different types of voting systems that are and may be used at any given
election. They are:- First-past the post voting, Preferential voting,
Proportional representation and the Hare-Clark and d’Hondt variants of
Proportional representation.
These five voting variants
each have their individual effect on the national voting behaviour and
psephological outcomes. Malapportionment has an effect as well. This effect can
be enacted by a party that seeks to gain more value from the electorate than
that which is afforded to it by an election. Malapportionment comes in several
guises that can be applied by political parties. Zonal malapportionment is one
system, whereby the boundary of the electorate is shifted as required to gain
the power of a vote that was originally beyond the pre-existing locale.
Gerrymandering (another) is a legislation based malapportionment system that
involves the appointment of political favourites who can enhance one electorate
at the disadvantage of another. This will sometimes result in some unusual
electoral boundaries, as well as unusual behaviour at the polls and strange
electoral trends.
One example of how unequal
(and un-democratic) malapportionment can be, occurred in South Australia in
1968. There at that time, one rural vote held the equivalent value of one-third
of one metropolitan vote. As the population in the region grew, so too did the
malapportionment ratio. It peaked at a level where the largest
metro-electorates’ voting strength was equivalent to seven of the smallest
rural electorates,). Clearly, what needed to take place (but had not been done)
was an electorate re-zoning that would re-distribute the balance of power that
was held by the pertinent electorates.
Nonetheless, the Australian Labor Party -whom have
been long term proponents of ‘one-person one-vote’- were able to abolish most
of the systems that were used to create malapportionment; this was achieved in
the 1970s and the 1980s,
Malapportionment can also
occur naturally as well, with demographic expansion that occurs on a scale that
is greater than that which is planned for by Local, State or Federal
Government. Malapportionment is a separate manipulator of electoral trends, whereas
the individual vote has a direct influence on electoral trends and the degree
to which they alter.
Universal suffrage (as
voting is named) is the publicly and constitutionally mandated way of affecting
voting trends, and thus to what degree they might be affected. The overall
trend has been toward the non-Labor governments. This has been stable, with the
major coalition parties reaping the benefits. Whilst there has been some
fluctuation in trends through the effects of causality, malapportionment, and
cleavages; the ‘issue of the day’ voting has generally drawn governance away
from the Labor party.
In fact, Labor has held office for a total of about forty years
since Federation; and sixteen of those years since 1960. This equates to Labor
having held office for thirty eight per-cent of the time since 1960 while the
Liberals have held office for fifty seven per-cent of the same period. In total
Labor has held office for twenty seven per-cent of the Governing regime since
Federation, in 1901. This trend then, has been toward the Right-wing
conservative parties for most of the time with the occasional swing to the Left
(by a maximum degree of 4.4 per-cent) since 1960.
This means that the
electoral pendulum ‘became stuck for long periods’ as Jaensch) describes it.
And even more so in sub-national contests he suggests. He goes on to explain
that the Two-party preferred vote system is flawed and explains how this may
have an effect on the apparent stability of the voting trend. As he and
Mackerras (argue: ‘no elector who wishes to cast a formal vote can avoid
casting a vote which expresses either a higher preference for the Liberal-CP
candidate or a higher preference for the ALP candidate’.
There is no doubt that the pendulum,
the two-party preferred vote, and political socialisation can be combined to
display a stable (if not preferred) electoral outcome. This is reflected in a
stable socio-political trend. Jaensch) concludes some of his analyses of the
trends with: ‘there is sufficient evidence to justify a conclusion that
Australia’s electoral contests are not characterised by monotonous homogeneity.
State personalities, issues and political environments do matter’.
These personalities, issues and political environments all exert
an influence upon the attitude of any prospective voters’ behaviour. This can
then be inflected in voting behaviour and measured in degrees of trend. A
common thread in voting behaviour is attitude. The demeanour and disposition of
the individual will be the guiding influence for how that individual votes. The
study of the “Attitude” and how it is correlated with universal suffrage began
in the 1940s with the inception of mass opinion surveys. With the results of
these studies, researcher’s found that the ‘attitude’ had an independent affect
on a vote, Graetz & McAllister (They argue that ideology is tied to the
vote, and that adherence to an ideology may not be widespread. However, this is
more likely to be referring to the ‘issue of the day’, rather than the common
sociological paradigm that is associated with the term ‘attitude’ as expressed
on a daily basis by the community at large.
This attitude Graetz &
McAllister argue, is responsible for an underlying socio-political cleavage
that is used as the forte` for Australian class division. They assert that: ‘In
Australia this has resulted in the evolution of a political culture based on
early nineteenth-century English working-class ideas and values’. And that:
‘collectivism has combined with widespread material affluence to create an
authoritarian but politically stable society’,
This collectivism when
combined with the cleavage factors can create ‘Issues of the day’. They have an
effect on the voting trend and the pendulum. Common motivators of the voting
public are said to be the: “issues of the day”. These are factors like: taxes,
socio-economic status, socio-political beliefs, gender, religion, the
environment, rural/urban locale, immigration and defence; they have all moulded
from cleavages into issues of the day.
Whenever there is an
occasion to vote these factors will play a conspicuous role alongside the other
major issues or events that are present in the political arena at that time. A
combination of individual attitude and issue voting will give rise to a plain
voting outcome under ordinary circumstances. That is to say that a normative
psephological result will occur even when traditional cleavages are included.
However, if there is some
type of unordinary event or event’s taking place in the Political arena such as
the Menzies affair in 1975, or an international condition of war; then a
different result is likely to occur. The populace may have a stronger opinion
about the extra-ordinary issues compared with the normative domestic features
of an election in a stable era, and thus they will vote accordingly; ignoring
the traditional cleavages. In Australia the trend since the 1960s has been
toward the ALP during extra-ordinary conditions.
Kemp held the belief that:
‘the traditionally important cleavages of Western industrial societies --class,
religion, and the urban-rural cleavage-- are of decreasing significance because
of structural trends in these societies’; they are receding in their relevance
to universal suffrage. Whilst this may have been so in the 1970s, those
traditional triggers are still significant today; enjoying public exposure on
an annual basis. This relevance (of the triggers) is mainly due to the fact
that in a post-modern society which is enjoying stability, these are the only
issues a party may come to an election with. Any deviation in trend that does
occur is likely to be slight, and it may be re-adjusted at the next election,
retaining no permanency.
The result of this
socio-political stability Kemp
(p348) says of the
nineteen-seventies, is a: ‘phenomenon of convergence in electoral behaviour’,
whereby the old traditional cleavages that were held to be central
to life and politics; with much emphasis attached to them, were losing there
significance as divisive issues, and so the trend is toward a blending, a
lessening of impact. Now in the post-materialist Australia, the issues are
still relevant but may not be as divisive as they once were. This claim is
reflected in a graph that displays Party Identification. This graph shows that
in 1967 the difference between Labor and Liberal party identification (personal
attachment to a party), was as much as ten per-cent, but by 1979 this had
reduced to about two per-cent and had retained this equal trend through to
1993; by 1996 this had converged even further to about one per-cent, Lovell). This is the greatest degree of change
in political behaviour that has taken place since the 1960s. Graetz &
McAllister (argue that: ‘The importance of economic power in these results suggests
that this aspect of voters’ beliefs is the most highly politicised. The main
division between the political parties is economic’.
Therefore, this convergence
of ideology’s into normative electoral behaviour has become a characteristic of
the voting trend since the 1960s. It is possible to determine causal effects
and shifts in psephological outcomes; these shifts have sometimes been enough
to alter the balance of power, but the trend has always been a stable and
coherent society. The various voting behaviours have combined to allow an
affluent and politically stable environment, as asserted by Graetz &
McAllister.
Even with the inception of
new political parties the trend has still remained for the two major parties to
dominate. For example, up until 1974 there had been no more than seven
Political Party’s standing for election; with the exception of 1943 in which
there were eleven. In 1975, with the fall of the Whitlam government, suddenly,
twelve parties stood and there afterward high numbers of contestants became
normal. Yet at every election since the 1960s the trend was toward the two main
parties (Labor and the Liberal coalitions), with each of the smaller parties
receiving no more than 10.78 per-cent of the vote, (figures derived from: The People Say.
It is significant that three
major events coincided with an empirical voting swing toward the ALP. These
were World War Two, the Vietnam-War and the Gulf-War. The Vietnam-War was the
most contentious, attracting the largest voting swing since 1960 of 4.4
per-cent in 1966. This equates to about five hundred and twenty thousand votes
gained by the Labor party at about the 1967 era, from a population of twelve
million. And in 1972 with the population at thirteen million the swing gave
Labor five hundred and forty six thousand extra votes. In 1990, a 3.6 per-cent
swing brought labour six hundred and twelve thousand extra votes. These
approximate figures were derived from Lovell
the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
The figures overall reflect
a very stable voting behaviour when they are assembled as a voting trend and
outcome indicator for Australia. The first three election periods after
Federation saw some electoral instability; however the trend was entirely
stable through until 1931 and 1934 when there was some fluctuation. There was
stability again until 1966 when there was a fluctuation and again in 1977 and
1990. Therefore, the conclusion is that apart from occasional major issue
voting, the Australian socio-political voting trend is stable and normative and
does not indicate alternative behaviour such as a large swing toward an
environmentalist party or a regrettable political fragmentation.
Today issue voting is the
trend, political cleavage has converged into issue voting, political stability
is outwardly obvious, and the need to make any huge political change
un-required. Therefore, issue voting and occasional swings are at the forefront
of suffrage activity; the issues of the day are what create the statistics and
indeed the behaviour that have become an homogenised and stable trend since the
1960s.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
AUSTRALIAN BUREAU of
STASTICS.2002.Population.
www.abs.gov.au
GRAETZ, Brian., and Ian
McAllister..
Dimensions of Australian Society. 2nd
Edn.
JAENSCH, Dean.. ELECTION!.
JAENSCH, Dean.. The Politics of Australia. 2nd
Edn.
KEMP, D,A.. SOCIETY AND ELECTORAL BEHAVIOUR
IN AUSTRALIA.
LOVELL, David, W., Ian
McAllister, William Maley, Chandran Kukathas.
.THE AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL SYSTEM.
LOVELL, David, W., Ian
McAllister, William Maley, Chandran Kukathas.
.THE AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL SYSTEM.
AUSTRALIAN ELECTORAL COMMISION. The People Say