Institutions, Australia and the Democrats in ‘08
Last weekend Labor trounced John Howard’s conservative government Down Under, and the result continues to reverberate. Even Howard lost his own district (they’re called divisions in Oz). As E.J. Dionne notes in the Washington Post:
For the first time in the country’s history, wrote Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald, a government was tossed out in unambiguously strong economic times.
Americans who care about Australia’s election are divining lessons for the Democratic Party, namely, how to smash the GOP in 2008.
Lesson one: be a Democrat. For Dionne, Labor’s Kevin Rudd reached out to unions and the middle class, constituencies that felt the squeeze of 11 years’ conservative rule. Iraq no doubt played a role. Howard had been in lock-step with Bush there.
Lesson two: galvanize Progressives. Rudd supplemented his old-left flank with a “generational” set of new-left positions: Internet access, education and, above all, the environment.
Writing for Brookings, Justin Vaisse sees both lessons as given features of a completing cycle. Worse yet for conservatives, there was long-term electoral suicide in Bush’s failure to ram immigrant “amnesty” through Congress last summer. “Pour le Parti républicain, les défis s’accumulent.”
Lesson three: take election reform seriously. Rudd campaigned on environmentalism. Greens like environmentalism. Greens accounted for 8% of the vote. Because Australia uses instant runoff voting (IRV) to elect the House, those votes transferred to Rudd’s Labor party.
Without the environment, Green Party and IRV, the Man of Steel still would be running Australia. In her blog at the Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel spells it out:
In Australia, IRV was introduced in 1918, and has historically benefited parties on both the left and the right. Last Saturday, it helped the Australian Labor Party – but not before the Australian Greens were able to run a strong campaign and collect 8 percent of the parliamentary vote, and perhaps push debate further on issues like climate change and the Iraq War than Labor wanted to go. In the initial tabulation Labor won only 44 percent of the vote, but with IRV most of the Green votes ended up being awarded to Labor. The party had worked hard to be the second choice of Green voters, and designated former Midnight Oil lead Singer Peter Garrett – “a-rock-star-environmentalist-turned-politico” – as their likely environment minister. In the end, Labor ended up with 54 percent of the two-party tally.
I would add two other institutional factors to the mix: compulsory voting and a rational election day. Australians vote on the weekend, and they have to pay fines to avoid the polls. Turnout is regularly over 90%.
IRV has worked to Australian conservatives’ advantage in the past. Though my sympathies are evident, the point is not to rig results à la Putin. If a partisan cycle is completing, it would be nice to see our leaders expand democracy as we enter the next. Lonely issue dimensions cry out for it.
MSS on 09 Dec 2007 at 6:01 pm #
Perhaps one should add to this list the fact that Australia is parliamentary. I would actually argue that is the biggest factor in the differences between the US and OZ that are articulated in this fine post. In fact, by far the biggest factor.
Jack on 09 Dec 2007 at 8:08 pm #
Good point, which I take to be that this parliamentary system “nationalizes” otherwise local contests, presenting an incentive to go vote.
The most responsive constituency in the US would be those who vote in presidential elections but not mid-term House races.
If turnout is the dependent variable of concern, wouldn’t eliminating the mid-term elections be an improvement? As a side benefit, wouldn’t that reform mitigate the effects of members’ “perpetual campaign?”
MSS on 11 Dec 2007 at 1:11 pm #
I used to really, really dislike midterm elections. However, recently I have been reassessing…
Yes on the parliamentary “nationalization” point (with the proviso that if there are regional parties, as in India, the point obviously is not as operative).
Midterm elections would normally be thought of as less nationalizing, in part due to the turnout matter you mention and in part simply because the president is not actually on the ballot. However, an election like 2006 in the USA was obviously very nationalized. But that’s unlikely to become typical, I suppose.