The United States midterm elections are being held on Tuesday, 6 November. This offers the first nationwide referendum on the presidency of Donald Trump. Presidential elections are held every four years, in conjunction with votes for congress, state governors and other positions. Midterm elections are held half-way between presidential elections (in the middle of a …
Continue reading "What are the mid-terms?"
This is something I wrote up a while ago but did not get the chance to post here until now. Queensland Senator Fraser Anning’s widely condemned call for a “final solution” to the Australia’s “immigration problem” the other month should not be viewed in isolation. While his rhetoric was stronger than what we’re used to …
Compared to Australia, the United States has a trust problem. Recent polling we commissioned from YouGov, surveying both Australians and Americans, showed Australians consistently reporting higher levels of trust than Americans. It didn’t matter what we asked about — the national government, state governments, family and friends, media, political parties — Australians appear to be …
In September 2017 we launched a new, regular poll in the United States and Australia with YouGov. (By we, I mean those of us at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney). This poll is being run by me, with USSC CEO Professor Simon Jackman, and is intended to track perceptions of …
I have published a guest post on the The Political Organisations and Participation group blog on the same-sex marriage postal vote / "survey".* This post discusses the findings from one of my papers, published in the Australian Journal of Political Science (read the full version) with Andrea Carson and Yannick Dufresne. In this post (and the paper) …
Research undertaken with my colleagues Andrea Carson and Yannick Dufresne has been accepted by the Australian Journal of Political Science, and will be published in a future issue sometime soon (you can read it here)*, we examined whether Australian federal legislators’ policy positions are congruent with public opinion. This paper examines the congruence between the …
I have published a guest post on the The Political Organisations and Participation group blog.* This post discusses the findings from one of my papers published in the Australian Journal of Political Science (read the full version) that discusses how we should view Australia’s major political parties as interest aggregators pursuing specific policy outcomes, rather …
Continue reading "Guest post on the Political Organisations and Participation blog"
Some of the work from my thesis (plus a little additional research) will be appearing in the next issue of the Australian Journal of Political Science. This paper examines whether Australia’s major political parties continue to fulfil a representational role. This was often the traditional view of the parties, but has been much criticised in recent …
The maps below are preliminary results based on work done with Simon Jackman and Luke Mansillo on ways to obtain estimates of public opinion in smaller geographic areas using unconventional data. We use data collected over the 56 days of the 2016 Australian federal election. Each of the maps below shows the probability that voters in each electoral …
Continue reading "The geography of public opinion in Australia"
That's it, really. Just an observation. I now have the internet connected at home (after far too long with terrible hotel wifi and then no connection at all) so perhaps I will have the chance to blog more regularly now. Based on past behaviour, this seems unlikely though.
