Howard’s victories: which voters switched, which issues mattered, and why

23 July 2010Murray Goot and Ian Watson look at the data in Inside Story

DESPITE winning at four successive polls, the Howard government’s electoral performance has attracted less attention from political scientists, and fewer satisfactory explanations, than we might expect. The consequence – as we can see in the current election campaign – is that speculative accounts of why the Coalition won those elections have continued to dominate discussion of Australian electoral politics. “Howard’s battlers” are still at war, “big pictures” are out of fashion again, and both main parties are chasing “aspirational voters.

In 2007 we set out to fill what we saw as a gap in the political science literature by looking in detail at the issues and forces that influenced the results of the elections held between 1993 (Labor’s last victory before John Howard became prime minister) and 2004 (the Howard government’s last victory)…

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Photo: Andrew Jeffrey

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