Explaining Howard's Success: Social Structure, Issue Agendas and Party Support, 1993–2004

In this paper we re-evaluate explanations, derived from the Australian Election Study surveys, for the Coalition’s winning office in 1996 and holding it ever since. We show that, in occupational terms, electoral support for the major parties is less distinct than it was in the Hawke and Keating years. We document the shift to the Coalition, net of other factors, among older respondents, those with little education, and Catholics. And we show the shift to Labor among respondents from non-English speaking backgrounds. At the same time, we point to the failure of respondents on low or middle incomes to move in either direction. This leads us to an explanation for the Coalition’s success grounded not so much in Labor’s eroding blue-collar base but in terms of Howard’s ability to construct a form of populist politics. We also demonstrate the significance of various issues, the part played by perceptions of the economy and the state of household finances, and the importance of voters ’ thinking that election outcomes matter. If we are right, not only are earlier analyses mistaken, but much of the political history of the period needs to be rewritten. For a government elected (1996) and re-elected (1998, 2001, 2004) on four successive occasions, the Howard government’s electoral performance has attracted less sus-tained attention from academic political scientists, and certainly less satisfactory explanations, than one might have hoped. The academic studies on each of these elec-tions have carried only brief analyses of the Australian Election Study (AES) surveys (Bean and McAllister 1997; 2000; 2002; 2005). These, it is true, have been followed by more sophisticated analyses of the data in relation to the Coalition’s victories in