Plus ça change...? Institutional, Political and Social Influences on Local Spatial Variations in Australian Federal Voting

Abstract

It is often argued that features such as partisan de-alignment and targeted campaigning have led to certain kinds of local influences on voting (such as candidate and incumbency effects) becoming more important in recent decades, whereas theories of individualism and class de-alignment imply that the importance for voting of local contextual effects, such as ones based on social class context, should have reduced. In this article, I use an extensive set of multilevel analyses to explore the extent to which these outcomes are evident in Australia over the past four decades. As well as presenting and discussing several detailed findings of interest, relating to all of political and social factors and contextual effects, I also argue that the institutional structure has inhibited the extent of anything but short-term changes at the local level.