Public preferences: their influence through elections on the policy positions of incoming Australian federal governments

Abstract

This thesis sits within the broad topic of the relationship between public preferences and government policy. Its specific ambit is the influence, through elections, of majority public preferences on the policy platforms of incoming federal governments in Australia. It constructs a synthesis of each of the two key branches of theory that seek to explain the preferences-to-platform link: both parties in a two-party system deliberately adopting public preference-consistent positions in order to win electoral support, and voters electing a government on the basis of its public preference-consistent positions. By revealing the core underlying assumptions of the theories, this analysis facilitates an understanding of the contours of the debate and points the way to an empirical research strategy. Using a database generated from a comprehensive review of opinion polls and surveys in the periods leading up to the 2001-2013 federal elections, the thesis builds from calculating the level of public preference-holding, to placing public preferences in ideological space, measuring their congruence with incoming government policy platforms, and then examining the causal relationship between them. The research reveals significant preferences-to-platform incongruence and indicates that little congruence is attributable to the parties deliberately adopting public preference-consistent positions and even less to the public voting on the basis of its preferences. The parties are rarely motivated to deliberately follow public preferences and have many constraints on doing so. However, public preferences exercise a passive influence by curbing the parties’ policymaking. The public is offered limited policy alternatives, and many voters have minimal knowledge of those alternatives or do not policy vote. The additional contributions of the thesis are the synthesis of the theories, the formulation of an analytical framework, and the creation of the public preferences database.