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Measuring Minor Party Impact: The Australian Greens in a Changing Party System
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In 2017, the Australian Greens celebrated its 25th anniversary as a national political organisation. Nine Greens senators and a single Greens member of the House of Representatives now sit within the federal parliament. But what impact does the party have on Australian politics? This thesis investigates the impact of the Greens in Australian politics by assessing the party’s influence over the party system. The dominant perspective in the literature characterises the Australian party system as a relatively stable two- or two-and-a-half-party system. As such, either the common characterisations of the party system are inaccurate, or the Greens possess little capacity to shape the competitive environment in which they operate. Employing novel techniques and approaches rarely used in Australian political science, this thesis investigates party competition, ideological polarisation, electoral volatility, government formation, voting behaviour, and the contest for legislative outcomes. The evidence reveals general change in what is a multidimensional Australian party system. Two-partism is giving way to a contingent multipartism; while the contest for government remains marked by two-partism, multiparty dynamics are consolidating in the electoral arena and the Senate. In this process of change, however, the Greens are a party of meaningful but nonetheless minimal impact, more constrained and shaped by their competitive environment than they are capable of bringing about its transformation. This thesis therefore furthers our understanding of the Australian party system, party competition, minor parties and, especially, the role and development of the Australian Greens.
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... The Greens, however, are ecologically centred, not focused. The party has increasingly sought to occupy left-redistributive policy space partly vacated by Labor, connecting issues of inequality, housing, workers' rights and public services with its environmental and climate objectives (Holloway et al. 2019). Bandt and Greens candidates pitched much of their redistributive agenda as a remedy for the increasing costs of living-a key issue as the election campaign wore on. ...
... The Greens, however, are ecologically centred, not focused. The party has increasingly sought to occupy left-redistributive policy space partly vacated by Labor, connecting issues of inequality, housing, workers' rights and public services with its environmental and climate objectives (Holloway et al. 2019). Bandt and Greens candidates pitched much of their redistributive agenda as a remedy for the increasing costs of living-a key issue as the election campaign wore on. ...
More than a year before the 2022 election, the Australian Greens made
their basic electoral strategy clear. In a press release, leader Adam Bandt
outlined the party’s targets: to win nine House of Representatives seats and
expand its Senate representation to 12 through gains in New South Wales,
Queensland and South Australia (Zhou and Remeikis 2021). Beyond reelecting Bandt in Melbourne, the Greens’ targets in the lower house spanned
Liberal and Labor seats in east coast capitals and the ‘rural’ NSW seat of
Richmond. Changes in 2016 to the Senate electoral system that removed
group voting tickets, as well as a consolidating voter base, made gains in
the Senate contest more likely. For the House, there were hopes that (and
active campaigns for) several of the Greens’ target divisions could be in play.
In Westminster systems, governments enjoy a privileged position in the lawmaking process that they can use to deliver on their campaign promises and achieve their policy goals. What policy areas do governments seek to affect through lawmaking? How stable is the executive lawmaking agenda? How responsive is that agenda to changes triggered by elections or by transitions in prime minister? This study uses a dataset of 3982 Australian bills introduced between 2000 and 2017 to answer these questions. While it finds considerable stability in the policy content of executive lawmaking agendas, the analysis also indicates that Australia's executive lawmaking agenda is more responsive to changes in prime minister than to changes in the party in power. As the first application of the comparative policy agendas approaches to government bills in Australia, this article offers new insights into executive lawmaking priorities during an especially turbulent period in Australian politics.
This book is probably the most important source of evidence published up to now on the consolidation of democracy in Eastern Europe. It provides estimates of party positions, voter preferences and government policy from election programmes collected systematically for 51 countries from 1990 onwards. Time-series are presented in the text. This also reports party life histories (essential to over time analyses) and provides updated and newly validated vote statistics. All this information and much more is available on the devoted website described in the book. The final chapter gives instructions on how to access the data on your own computer. For comparative purposes, similar estimates of policy and preferences are given for CEE, OECD and EU countries. These estimates update the prize-winning data set covered in Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors and Governments 1945-1998 - also published by OUP. A must-buy for all commentators, students and analysts of democracy, in Eastern Europe and the world.
The relevance of this book to central concerns of political and social science hardly needs emphasizing. Parties are the organizing force of democratic governments, giving coherence and direction to their policies and relating them to popular preferences. Election programmes are crucial to this role, providing electors with some insight into the policies they are voting for, and parties themselves with a starting point for their activity in government. Discussion begins with a comparative assessment of the impact of election pledges on government action. The book goes on to describe systematically the place of the programmes in the political process of nineteen democracies. It subjects them to detailed qualitative, quantitative and spatial analyses to answer such questions as: Who prepares election programmes and how? What is the nature of modern party divisions? Do they differ across countries? Is there indeed an 'end of ideology' or an intensification? Does the need to attract votes weaken old partisan attachments? Combining individual studies of each country with comparative analyses on a scale never previously undertaken, the book will interest country specialists and comparativists and prove indispensable to research on voting and party behaviour, coalition formation, ideology, and rational choice.
The relevance of this book to central concerns of political and social science hardly needs emphasizing. Parties are the organizing force of democratic governments, giving coherence and direction to their policies and relating them to popular preferences. Election programmes are crucial to this role, providing electors with some insight into the policies they are voting for, and parties themselves with a starting point for their activity in government. Discussion begins with a comparative assessment of the impact of election pledges on government action. The book goes on to describe systematically the place of the programmes in the political process of nineteen democracies. It subjects them to detailed qualitative, quantitative and spatial analyses to answer such questions as: Who prepares election programmes and how? What is the nature of modern party divisions? Do they differ across countries? Is there indeed an 'end of ideology' or an intensification? Does the need to attract votes weaken old partisan attachments? Combining individual studies of each country with comparative analyses on a scale never previously undertaken, the book will interest country specialists and comparativists and prove indispensable to research on voting and party behaviour, coalition formation, ideology, and rational choice.