Essay from the year 2003 in the subject Politics - Region: Australia, New Zealand, grade: Distinction, Flinders University (Social Sciences), course: Australian Politcs a comparative study, language: English, abstract: This essay aims to explain the differences between preferential and proportional systems of voting and the consequences of these systems in Australia. The electoral system of Germany is examined in comparison. Why are electoral systems so important? Through elections, citizens of a county can express their views and choose the government they wish to see in power. Therefore, the electoral system is one of the significant features of a democracy and a representative government. The political outcome of an election can vary greatly depending on which of the different types (and/or variations of each type) of systems is in effect. Hence, the organisation of the political system strongly depends on the electoral system.1 The impacts of electoral systems on the political and party system will be examined after looking at the two systems of voting used in Australia at the Commonwealth/ Federal level: the preferential voting system and the system of proportional representation. Preferential voting in single-member seats is used for elections for the House of Representatives and is also often referred to as Alternative Vote.2 A distinctive feature of this voting system is that the winning candidate needs to receive an absolute majority of the primary vote, in other words 50% plus one. Alternatively, the candidate can win the election by securing an absolute majority after the distribution of preferences. 3 Under a system of full preferential voting, electors must indicate a preference for all candidates listed on the ballot paper. Voters show their first preference by giving the number “1” to their preferred candidate. They then rank all other candidates by distributing the remaining numbers in descending order from 2 to X (X = the number of candidates taking part in the election). In the first round of counting votes, the numbers of primary votes are registered. [...] 1 David W. Lovell et al., The Australian Political System, (2nd edition), Longman, South Melbourne, 1998, p. 269. 2 Ben Reilly, ‘The Alternative Vote in Australia’, 6 March 1999, Electoral Systems, Administration and Cost of Elections Project, , consulted 2 June 2003

This is the first book to define the current status of electoral studies in New Zealand. It canvasses various approaches that have been used to explain voting, illustrating the theoretical complexities involved. While studies of electoral behaviour have been a predominant concern since the early 1960s, much of the early research was descriptive rather than quantitative. Recent research--which is covered here--has turned its attention to the individual motivations behind voting, and the contributors to the volume are New Zealand's leading quantitative analysts.

The academic literature has long acknowledged that electoral rules have important consequences for voter attitudes and behaviour. However, few studies have analysed these consequences in comparative perspective, while no detailed, cross-time analysis has been conducted on the attitudinal and behavioural impact of Australia's unique institutional milieu. Composed of a bicameral parliament that uses preferential voting system in the lower house, and a single transferable vote form of proportional representation in the upper house, the Australian system also involves compulsory voting all eligible citizens being required to attend the polls. Of the relative few studies that have cast light on the effect of this electoral context, most focus on a single pattern of electoral behaviour, are based on a limited sample of election studies, or were undertaken between 10 and 20 years ago. No study has pursued an in-depth, longitudinal analysis of the influence of Australia's electoral environment on voter attitudes and behaviour. An evaluation of the connection between Australian voters and their political context that is able to transcend election-specific factors requires a larger study that examines several patterns of electoral behaviour across multiple elections. This study systematically examines the influence of electoral rules on voter attitudes and behaviour using data from eight separate Australian election studies across a period of 20 years. It re-examines American and British minor party, economic and leader-oriented models of voting in the context of Australian electoral rules. To highlight the influence of Australian electoral rules, it compares and contrasts the Australian findings for these three patterns of electoral behaviour with long accepted published results in the United States and Great Britain. In discussing these American and British patterns of electoral behaviour, this study also seeks to show the ways in which they reflect the plurality and voluntary voting frameworks of their origins a nexus largely ignored in the literature. This thesis not only extends our knowledge of electoral politics in Australia, but also expands our more general understanding of the impact of electoral rules on voter attitudes and behaviour. It makes three main overarching conclusions. First, the unique structural opportunities provided to voters by the Australian system ensure distinctive patterns of minor party, economic, and leader-oriented voting. Second, most established American and British models and patterns of voter attitudes and behaviour reflect system-specific assumptions that voters have few viable alternatives other than to vote for one of the major parties or abstain resulting in these models having limited utility in non-majoritarian contexts, despite their precepts regularly being couched in generalised language. Third, and most broadly, electoral rules matter voters respond in different ways to different electoral rules, even within a single political system. Models of voter attitudes and behaviour would benefit from acknowledging the impact of these institutional rules.

Citizens living in presidential or parliamentary systems face different political choices as do voters casting votes in elections governed by rules of proportional representation or plurality. Political commentators seem to know how such rules influence political behaviour. They firmly believe, for example, that candidates running in plurality systems are better known and held more accountable to their constituencies than candidates competing in elections governed by proportional representation. However, such assertions rest on shaky ground simply because solid empirical knowledge to evaluate the impact of political institutions on individual political behaviour is still lacking. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems has collected data on political institutions and on individual political behaviour and scrutinized it carefully. In line with common wisdom results of most analyses presented in this volume confirm that political institutions matter for individual political behaviour but, contrary to what is widely believed, they do not matter much.

Until the last quarter of the 20th Century, Western party systems appeared to be frozen and stability was generally taken to be the central characteristic of individual-level party choice. But during the 1970s and 1980s, in a spasm of change that appeared to occur in all countries, this ceased to be true. Voters in Western countries suddenly demonstrated an unexpected and increasing unpredictability in their choices between parties, often to the extent of voting for parties that are quite new to the political scene. Understanding these fundamental changes became a pressing concern for political scientists and commentators alike, and a matter of extensive controversy and debate. In the middle 1980s, an international team of leading scholars set out to explore the reasons for these shifts in voting patterns in sixteen western countries: all those of the (then) European Community (except for Luxembourg and Portugal), together with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the United States. In this book they report their findings regarding the connections between social divisions and party choice, and the manner in which these links had changed since the mid-1960s. The authors based their country studies on a common research design. By doing so, they were able to focus on the characteristics that the sixteen countries had in common so as to evaluate the extent to which the changes had a common source. This is a longitudinal study, extending over nearly a generation, of changes in voting behaviour that is as fully cross-national as it was possible to produce at the time. Its findings enabled the authors to break away from conventional explanations for electoral change to arrive at conclusions of far-reaching importance. The passage of time has not dated this book, and in this edition the original text is augmented by a new Preface that describes the ways in which the book's findings retain their relevance for contemporary scholarship, and by an Epilogue in which the main analyses reported in the book are brought up to date to the middle 2000s.