查看文章

All elections are unique, but the Australian federal election of 2010 was unusual for many reasons. It came in the wake of the unprecedented ousting of the Prime Minister who had led the Australian Labor Party (ALP) to a landslide victory, after 11 years in Opposition, at the previous election in 2007. In a move that to many would have been unthinkable, Kevin Rudd’s increasing unpopularity within his own parliamentary party finally took its toll and in late June he was replaced with his deputy, Julia Gillard. Thus, the second unusual feature of the election was that it was contested by Australia’s first female prime minister. The third unusual feature was that the election almost saw a first-term government, with a comfortable majority, defeated. Instead it resulted in a hung parliament—for the first time since 1940—and Labor scraped back into power as a minority government, supported by three Independents and the first member of the Australian Greens ever to be elected to the House of Representatives at a general election (previously, the Australian Greens’ candidate Michael Organ was elected at a by-election in 2002). The Coalition Liberal and National Opposition parties themselves had a leader of only eight months’ standing, Tony Abbott, whose ascension to the position had surprised more than a few. This was the context for an investigation of voting behaviour in the 2010 election.

The analysis in this chapter is based on the 2010 Australian Election Study (AES), conducted by Ian McAllister, Clive Bean, Rachel Gibson and Juliet Pietsch immediately following the federal election in August (McAllister et al. 2011). The data come from a national …