Economic Voting And Electoral Behavior: How Do Individual, Local, And National Factors Affect The Partisan Choice?

What impact do income and other demographic factors have on a voter's partisan choice? Using post‐election surveys of 14,000 voters in 10 Australian elections between 1966 and 2001, I explore the impact that individual, local, and national factors have on voters' decisions. In these 10 elections, the poor, foreign‐born, younger voters, voters born since 1950, men, and those who are unmarried are more likely to be left‐wing. Over the past 35 years, the partisan gap between men and women has closed, but the partisan gap has widened on three dimensions: between young and old; between rich and poor; and between native‐born and foreign‐born. At a neighborhood level, I find that, controlling for a respondent's own characteristics, and instrumenting for neighborhood characteristics, voters who live in richer neighborhoods are more likely to be right‐wing, while those in more ethnically diverse or unequal neighborhoods are more likely to be left‐wing. Controlling for incumbency, macroeconomic factors do not seem to affect partisan preferences – Australian voters apparently regard both major parties as equally capable of governing in booms and busts.