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 geography of public opinion in Australia
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 …
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I haven’t blogged in a while
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.
I’ve moved
In the off chance you know me, have stumbled across my blog, and we haven't spoken lately, I've moved. I am now a lecturer in Political science at the United States Studies Centre, at the University of Sydney. My details are here (also FYI - they jumped the gun on the Dr, officially it's almost Dr*). …
Papers presented at the 2016 APSA conference
I'm just finishing up at the 2016 Australian Political Studies Association annual conference in Sydney, and thought I'd post the slides of the papers I presented with colleagues Andrea Carson, Marija Taflaga and Yannick Dufresne. The first paper looked at the demographic and environmental predictors of concern about immigration in Australia. Immigration policy has been a divisive political issue …
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Public opinion and policy responsiveness in Australia
The case of same-sex marriage Last week I presented a paper at the US Political Science Association annual meeting in Philadelphia with some colleagues. In it, we look at the congruence between public opinion and the positions of parliamentarians on same-sex marriage. Our findings indicate that parliamentarians are generally representative of their constituents, giving some …
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Some initial thoughts on the election
Since the Australian federal election, held last Saturday, I've had a few thoughts. These are only half-formed, so bear with me. First, Coalition leader (and current prime minister) Malcolm Turnbull is getting a lot of heat for the relatively poor performance of the Liberal Party (and its various state-based permutations). Some of this is reasonable. The double …
Brexit
Over the weekend I was asked by the Election Watch team at the University of Melbourne to comment on the polling conducted for the Brexit referendum. The article that came out of this can be found somewhere on their blog, I'm sure. Here are the comments I provided in full (questions are bolded): 1. What do the …
Are there political differences between Sydney and Melbourne?
Even a casual observer of Australian politics will likely know that the Coalition tends to do better in some areas, and Labor in others. However, some important patterns are missed, either because geographic variation is often examined at the electorate level (sometimes obscuring important variation within divisions, which can be relatively large sptial areas) or because the mapping …
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Update: conference paper slides etc
I haven't posted in a while. Mostly that has been because I have been working on my thesis. Of course. There were also a few days off over Christmas,* some teaching (Applied Research Methods and Political Psychology at the University of Melbourne) and a few other things. Also, some other research. I presented a few papers …
