Gendered Voting at the 2010 Federal Election

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Notes

Bruce Tranter is Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Sociology and Social Work at the University of Tasmania. The author thanks Felicity Picken and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments.

¹Also see Aitkin (1982) regarding the tendency for tertiary-educated and younger women to support the ALP.

²Missing data are coded to 0 for all dummy variables, replaced with the mean score for age and coded to the mid-point for the leader evaluation variables and party identification.

³The aim is to contrast identification between major parties with the Australian Greens, other parties and the non-affiliated coded to the scale mid-point. Identification with a particular party implies the influence of parental socialisation, with political affiliations claimed to form during adolescence. Therefore, identification with ‘young’ parties such as the Australian Greens who formed in 1992 is conceptually only applicable to a small proportion of younger Australians.

⁴Analyses of differences in mean scores of the individual items measuring leadership qualities (mentioned above) for 2010 AES data indicate highly significant gender differences on all nine items for Gillard (women more favourable), while only five of the Abbott items were favoured by men more than women at the 95 per cent level or better, one at borderline significance (p = . 042).

⁵A question included in the 2010 AES asked: ‘Do you approve or disapprove of the way the Labor Party handled the leadership change in June of this year, when Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd?’ (response categories: Strongly approve; Approve; Disapprove; Strongly disapprove). A dummy variable coded approval = 1; disapproval = 0 included in the regression model in Table 3 reduces the size of the gender gap only marginally, from an odds ratios of 0.67 in model 1, to 0.61 when the leadership change variable is added (remaining significant at p < 0.001).

⁶A June 2011 Newspoll conducted for The Australian newspaper found 30 per cent of men and 34 per cent women would vote Labor if an election were called, while 48 per cent of men and 42 per cent of women would vote for the Coalition. The poll also found that 39 per cent of men favoured Julia Gillard as prime minister compared with 47 per cent of women; with 42 per cent of men and 33 per cent of women favouring Tony Abbott.