Narelle Miragliotta

Trading party preferences: the Australian experience of preferential voting

Abstract Political parties respond to electoral rules in ways which gain them partisan advantage and enable them to make strategic choices about the use of their electoral support. The alternative vote (AV) and proportional representation by the single transferable vote (STV) provide considerable opportunity for this kind of partisan activity. The ability of the voter under such electoral systems to rank candidates in order of the voters preference creates a kind of property which can be used by parties, especially minor parties, to influence the behaviour of both candidates and other parties. The paper investigates this aspect of preferential voting systems and the extent to which the context of electoral rules can encourage or discourage a trade in partisan preferences. Elections for the Australian House of Representatives and Senate are used to show how political actors can respond to electoral rules which permit the control and trading of preferences to be developed into a series of sophisticated transactions.

One Party, Two Traditions: Radicalism and Pragmatism in the Australian Greens

The 2004 Australian federal election established the Australian Greens (Greens) as the third largest political force in the country behind the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Liberal Party in electoral terms. Despite the Greens’ electoral achievements, the party has been largely dismissed as a radical single-issue political party. This paper will argue that while radicalism is an institutionally entrenched feature of the Greens in both organisational and programmatic terms, there are also strongly pragmatic aspects to the partys modus operandi. It suggests that the Greens are astute political operators who use radicalism in a highly pragmatic way to achieve their political objectives.

From local to national: Explaining the formation of the Australian Green Party

The rise of green parties in Australia follows a path that is well documented in the literature; the inability of other parties to accommodate environmental concerns, the increasing salience of green issues for governments and an electoral regime that permits party insurgency. This article examines how these factors have operated in Australia, and the extent to which a distinctive federal structure and federal electoral regulation of parties served to modify the emergence of a national green party.

Federalism and New Party Insurgency in Australia

The multiple forums for electoral competition that characterize a federal system might be expected to provide opportunities for new parties to use regional support as a springboard for success in national elections. Yet, since the 1950s, this has not been the pattern for new parties in the Australian federation; three of the four substantial party insurgencies in this period have had national, protest-based, origins. The exception has been the emergence of the Australian Greens with the partys origins in locally based environmental groups and its state organization. This study suggests that a subnationally orientated structure enables a party to take advantage of its federal institutional context and enhances the prospect of a new party enjoying a lasting presence in the party system.

Minor organizational change in Green parties: An Australian case study

A source of the strength of Green parties has been their willingness to realign their distinctive organizational characteristics to suit the external environment, with the effect of pushing such organizations closer to a more conventional party type. Major organizational adaptations by Green parties have been much studied but only scant attention has been paid to the cumulative effects that ‘minor’ change renders to such parties. This article examines the impact of minor organizational change through an analysis of one of the oldest statewide Green parties in Australia. It finds that minor organizational changes exert a subtle but equally powerful force in moving such parties away from their amateur status to a more professional party type, even in the absence of reform to historical party structures.

Legislative Recruitment and Models of Party Organisation: Evidence from Australia

This paper considers the relationship between the growing dominance of career politicians in the Australian federal legislature and models of party organisation. Using data on MPs in the Australian federal parliament, this study maps changes in models of party organisation to the occupational profiles of MPs between 1949 and 2007. The findings show a correspondence between the phenomenon of cartelisation and the appearance of legislators whose previous occupation was in the political sphere. The authors suggest that there is a relationship between different modes of party organisation and both the supply of candidates and the demand-side factors influencing party selectors. The paper concludes that theories of recruitment should include a greater emphasis on models of party organisation to explain better the uniformity of recruitment outcomes across advanced democracies.

Institutional dynamics and party think tank development: Britain and Germany compared

ABSTRACT Official party think tanks have been a fixture in a number of Western European democracies for many decades but not so in the Anglo-American democratic sphere even though think tanks aligned to parties have flourished. This article explores the reasons that party and think tank ties have evolved differently in these two settings through an examination of the party think tank scene in Germany and Britain. It is suggested that the predominant form of democracy operating in each of these settings helps to explain this critical difference. While the adversarial tendencies of the British political system militate against parties taking much of an interest in establishing official party think tanks, the consensual institutional dynamics associated with Germany’s political system has encouraged parties to sponsor their formation, and reinforced the perceived importance of the party think tank vehicle as agents of democratic linkage.

Issue competition between Green and social democratic parties in majoritarian settings: the case of Australia

ABSTRACT The emergence of green parties has injected new lines of competition into national party systems, with discernible issue competition effects for established, ideologically-proximate social democratic parties. Despite a burgeoning literature on green and social democratic issue competition tactics in settings where coalition government is common, we have less understanding of these same effects in settings where majority government is the norm. Using the case of the Australian Greens and the Australian Labor Party, we explore issue competition dynamics in a polity where the majoritarian electoral system reduces opportunities for coalition formation. We find that the absence of strong electoral imperatives for either party to enter coalitions has encouraged them to compete adjacent to one another, rather than in direct competition.

Elections and electoral politics: a review essay

The role of elections in selecting and endorsing leaders in representative democracies has long rendered the study of all things associated with their processes and outcomes a central preoccupation of the discipline. And with the spread of electoral democracy across the globe over the last four decades, the significance of its study has consolidated even further. However, as an area of academic inquiry, electoral politics is wide ranging in its interests, approaches and methodologies. A great deal of this scholarship is what might be reasonably described as concerned with the practice of elections. Such works engage with questions about the form, function and effects of electoral regimes. The focus of much of this literature is on how electoral politics affects the strategic, calculative behaviours of political actors and institutions, and its consequent representational and distributional outcomes. A second body of scholarship deals less directly with practical matters concerning the ‘who’, ‘what’ and mechanisms of elections, focusing instead on how electoral regimes condition the underlying dynamics of political systems in normative and philosophical terms. Electoral politics is explored chiefly in terms of what these practices should entail for individuals, and how they might be arranged so as to best shape the state and its relationship to its citizenry. Cutting across both broad areas of inquiry is a burgeoning scholarship on the performance of electoral democracy. In the context of consolidated democracies, several studies have documented the appearance of a ‘democratic deficit’, as measured by plummeting voter turnout, growing voter volatility, weakening partisan identification and falling party membership (i.e. Dalton 2004, 2014; Norris 2011). Similarly, the uneven record of

Managing midterm vacancies:: Institutional design and partisan strategy in the Australian parliament, 1901–2013

ABSTRACT This article explores how replacement rules for midterm vacancies affect legislative turnover in the context of majoritarian and proportional electoral systems. The differing electoral rules and replacement procedures for the two chambers of the Australian parliament over more than a century permit an analysis of the complex interplay between institutional rules, party strategy, and patterns of representation between 1901 and 2013. Since 1901, the Australian House of Representatives has been committed to single member electoral systems and by-elections for filling midterm vacancies, but major changes to both the electoral system and midterm replacement rules for the Australian Senate have played a critical role in enhancing party control of Senate careers.