Abstract
GIS technology has been used to build an e-research facility whereby it is possible to (a) investigate and visualise on-line spatial patterns of voter support for political parties at the local level of scale at federal elections in Australia, and (b) model the relationships between those voting data and variables derived from census data on the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of local populations. Using data on voting at the 2007 federal election and from the 2006 census, the paper shows that patterns of voter support for political parties have a distinct geography across Australia’s cities and regions. Spatial and statistical modelling is used to derive spatial typologies of voter support for political parties and to identify key demographic and socio-economic factors that discriminate voter support for political parties. Clear socio-political landscapes are evident. The position of political parties in a two-dimensional socio-political space has changed over the last three federal elections, the first two of which in 2001 and 2004 saw the Coalition Government returned with strong majorities, while the third election in 2007 saw a marked voter swing to oust the Coalition parties and put the Labor Party into government.
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Notes
The e-research facility may be accessed on http://e-research.geosp.uq.edu.au/aus_voting2007.html or through the web site http://ssis.edu.au, go to Shared Research Resources and follow the instructions to access the voting databases.
This is now being repeated for the 2010 federal election.
The design of the e-research facility is explained in detail in Liao et al. (2009).
This reflects the fact that many agricultural and pastoral regions are the homeland of voter support for the National party in the Coalition.
Note that in the metropolitan regions and many of most of the larger non-metropolitan urban centres in Australia it is the Liberal Party that represents the Coalition.
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Acknowledgments
The research on which this paper is based has been funded by the Australian Research Council through ARC Discovery grant # DP0558277. The authors thank the Australian Electoral Commission for providing the 2007 federal election results. The on-line GIS-enabled socio-political data base referred to in the paper has been developed by the authors under the ARC Research Network for Spatially Integrated Social Science Shared Research Resources program, and the e-research facility being developed under ARC LIEF grant #LE0775716.
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This paper is based on Presidential Address by R. Stimson delivered at the WRSA 2010 49th Annual Conference luncheon in Sedona, February 21–24.