Political landscape of Australia

Bryan · Wednesday 18 April 2007 · 8:10 am

I have been looking at Professor Roger Stimson’s 28 March 2007 Parliamentary Library presentation on his ecological analysis of the 2004 election using the data from the 7576 polling booths and the 2001 census. The presentation was based on research by Stimson, Dr T- K Shyy, and Dr Prem Chhetri.

Absolutely fascinating.

For their analysis the researchers categorised each polling booth on which major party (Labor, Liberal, National and Country Liberal) won the most votes, and whether a minor party (Greens, Democrats and Family First) won more than 20 per cent of the vote. Then taking 46 variables from the 2001 census, the researchers used multiple regression to see whether socioeconomic or demographic characteristics could explain the variability in voting patterns.

Their key finding was that three discriminant functions explained more than 96 per cent of the variability in terms of the seven-fold categorisation of polling booths. The first two functions were:

  1. The monocultural/older - multicultural/younger discriminant function, which accounted for 54.7% of the variance [this function comprised 16 census variables]
  2. The disadvantage - advantage discriminant function, which accounted for 28.9% of the variance [this function comprised 11 census variables]

If you take the first two functions, and map the centroid of the distribution of polling booths by the seven-fold category onto a Z-score Cartesian plane, you get some interesting observations on the core voting base of the major parties.

According to Stimson,

  • The Labor Party is clearly separated from the other political parties, being located within the multicultural/younger – disadvantage quadrant of the graph.
  • In contrast, the Liberal Party is located within the opposite monocultural/older - advantage quadrant of the graph.
  • The National Party is located in the monocultural/older - disadvantage quadrant of the graph.
  • The Australian Greens Party and the County Liberal Party are both located in the multicultural/younger - advantage quadrant of the graph.
  • The widest separation is between the Nationals and the Greens.
  • There is a wide separation between the Nationals and the Liberals within the Coalition, with the results from the discriminant analysis modelling demonstration just how much the voting constituencies for these Coalition partners are differentiated.

Using spatial mapping techniques, Stimson also created maps of the political landscape of Australia, including the following:

Stimson described the 2004 political heartlands as follows

Coalition

  • The government Coalition parties have captured most of the settled rural and regional areas, and it is not just the Nationals but also the Liberals that have widespread ‘heartlands’ of political dominance.
  • Within the big cities the, dominance of the Liberal Party is not only across wedges of the higher socio-economic areas of the mostly middle suburbs, but it has also extend across the large belts of the outer suburbs and even more widely across the outer fringe areas to capture many areas in what used to be Labor’s ‘heartland’ as transform them into Liberal ‘heartlands.’
  • Much of the outer areas of the big cities where most of the population growth continues to occur are now more Liberal ‘heartland’ than domains of Labor dominance.
  • These new outer suburban and urban fringe Coalition ‘heartlands’ are the places where many of the so-called ‘aspirational voters’ live with their families.

Labor

  • The Labor ‘heartlands’ are predominantly found in the central city and inner suburbs of the big cities, and in suburbia the now more restricted belts of Labor dominance are clearly associated with populations characterised by immigration and multiculturalism as well as the traditional areas of disadvantage.
  • In rural and regional Australia, Labor’s ‘heartland’ is spatially relatively confined to some of the old industrial regional centres and some of the mining towns as well as the areas with concentrations of Indigenous populations in remote areas of Australia.

Others

  • The Greens have clearly defined and spatially restricted areas of concentration of higher levels of primary vote support, and those are typically found in the ‘café latte’ trendy inner suburbs of the big cities as well as selected more advantaged suburban areas, and in regional Australia the Greens vote tends to be concentrated in selected coastal and tourism-oriented regions.
  • The Australian Democrats primary vote collapsed at the 2004 federal election, and it is very low and thin across just about all of the nation. The few pockets of concentration of primary vote support for the Democrats are a handful of outer suburban and fringe areas in Adelaide and Perth and in parts of regional South Australia.
  • The Family First Party, contesting its first federal election in 2004, had its primary vote spread thin with the areas of concentration being in the more advantaged outer suburbs .and in some parts of regional Queensland.

Want to know more

Hat tip

Thanks to Mark Rodrigues for the copy of the presentation.

Election 2004 ·