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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.

 

 

 

 

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

 

 

AUSTRALIAN BUREAU of STASTICS.2002.Population.

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GRAETZ, Brian., and Ian McAllister..

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LOVELL, David, W., Ian McAllister, William Maley, Chandran Kukathas.

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