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The election of four One Nation Senators at the 2016 Australian Federal election has been seen as part of a world--wide rise of populist movements that criticizes main stream politics and rejects pluralism, putting forward single concepts of "the people", that the movements claim to represent. While it is clear that Australian voters, like voters elsewhere, have been seeking alternatives to the major parties, it is less clear that the preferred alternatives fit this populist framework. Australia provides a good case study as the Australian electoral system makes it relatively easy for independents and minor parties to be elected to Parliament. This paper examines all independents and minor party candidates successfully elected in 2016 and at previous Australian Federal elections to determine whether the alternatives to the main stream parties elected since 1945 fit anti-pluralist populist models. It is concluded that, with the exception of the One Nation Party, most of the independents and minor party candidates elected to the Australian Federal Parliament have not fitted such models. However many of those elected do present a challenge to the electoral claims of the major parties. The article concludes by considering the implications of these findings for representative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We estimate the parameters of a reputational game of political competition using data from five two-party parliamentary systems. We find that latent party preferences (and party reputations) persist with high probability across election periods, with one exception: parties with extreme preferences who find themselves out of power switch to moderation with higher probability than the equivalent estimated likelihood for parties in government (extreme or moderate) or for moderate parties in opposition. We find evidence for the presence of significant country-specific differences. We subject the model to a battery of goodness-of-fit tests and contrast model predictions with survey and vote margin data not used for estimation. Finally, according to the estimated model parameters, Australia is less than half as likely to experience extreme policies and Australian governments can expect to win more consecutive elections in the long run as compared to their counterparts in Greece, Malta, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The article focuses on candidate preselection in Australian political elections, also known as parliamentary gatekeeping. Topics include how elected politicians shape legislation in Australia, the impact of long-standing dominance by political parties in the Australian government, and calls for primaries for Australian politicians to lessen the impact of party preselections and oligarchical control.

Research on the Australian monarchy—republican debate has considered arguments for and against the republic, the 1999 referendum and interpretations of the republic. Little attention has been paid to the debate's discursive construction. Therefore, this article analyzes the rhetorical strategies with which political parties and organized movements sought to persuade the public to adopt their position in the debate in the 1990s. The article discerns and analyzes various rhetorical strategies in terms of the patterns in their use among these elites. In contrast to the cognitive bias of much research in political communication, the article accounts for the embeddedness of these strategies in their public political, national-cultural and popular democratic contexts. It shows that the use of such strategies is a function of the sociopolitical context of actors' statuses as parties or movements. The article recommends combining deliberative democracy with discourse analysis to comprehend the dynamics of public political language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]