Search

The rise of green parties in Australia follows a path that is well documented in the literature; the inability of other parties to accommodate environmental concerns, the increasing salience of green issues for governments and an electoral regime that permits party insurgency. This article examines how these factors have operated in Australia, and the extent to which a distinctive federal structure and federal electoral regulation of parties served to modify the emergence of a national green party. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the relationship between the growing dominance of career politicians in the Australian federal legislature and models of party organisation. Using data on MPs in the Australian federal parliament, this study maps changes in models of party organisation to the occupational profiles of MPs between 1949 and 2007. The findings show a correspondence between the phenomenon of cartelisation and the appearance of legislators whose previous occupation was in the political sphere. The authors suggest that there is a relationship between different modes of party organisation and both the supply of candidates and the demand-side factors influencing party selectors. The paper concludes that theories of recruitment should include a greater emphasis on models of party organisation to explain better the uniformity of recruitment outcomes across advanced democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent elections in the English-speaking world have thrown up results that were both unpredictable and history-making. In particular, the advent of multi-party and minority government in Britain and Australia, neither of which have proportional representation, raises questions about the capacity of major parties to remain dominant, and the place of minor parties and independents in the future. Here we argue that while the idiosyncrasies of the Australian political system have fostered the rise of independents in ways we are unlikely to see elsewhere, other features of the post-election negotiation process in the wake of the 2010 Australian election highlight the adaptive and innovative potential of major parties seeking office, and the resilience of smaller parties or independents seeking policy and votes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]