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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]

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The inheritance and continuity of party identification is usually traced to the predominant influence of parental political socialization. This paper applies multivanate analysis to Australian and British data to examine (1) the relative importance of parents' partisanship and social milieu on the respondent's own partisanship and (2) the influence of parents' partisanship on the preferences of the respondent in later life. The analysis shows that, in both countries, the social milieu of the family has little or no effect on the preferences of the children and it is the partisanship of the parents that is the dominant factor. In addition, we show that the influence of parents' partisanship is limited to early adulthood and to the first partisanship of the child; it has little or no direct influence on the respondent's subsequent electoral behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]