Typology of local patterns of voter support for political parties at the 2004 federal election

A distinctive spatial pattern has emerged for the Coalition and Labor vote in Australian federal elections, with voting landscapes associated with the particular demographic and socio-economic characteristics of local areas. The authors used Australian Electoral Commission data on voting at the polling booth level and socio-economic data on the areas surrounding each booth taken from the 2001 census. These two data sets were combined into a database, now available online. The current article describes the general socio-economic location of voters for the main political parties in 2001, and uses the model developed from these data to predict voting outcomes in 2004.