It's the economy stupid: Macroeconomics and federal elections in Australia

Abstract

In this paper we examine the impact of macroeconomic conditions on Federal electoral performance in 20th-century Australia. We find that the electorate penalizes a government for high inflation and high unemployment relative to trend. Real GDP growth and real wage growth were not found to have a systematic relationship with incumbent vote share at the Federal level. We also examine the voteshare of the Federal incumbent in three electorates: the safe Liberal seat of Kooyong, the safe Labor seat of Melbourne Ports, and the swinging seat of Latrobe. We find some evidence that unemployment affects electoral outcomes in the swinging seat, but no macroeconomic variables affect outcomes in the saf..