GIS-Enabled Mapping of Electoral Landscape of Support for Political Parties in Australia

The article—which is illustrated with GIS-enabled visualization—illustrates how clearly differentiated “voting landscapes” are evident, both within the large metropolitan cities and across rural and regional Australia. Distinct geographic patterns have been emerging in how people vote for political parties at federal elections in Australia. The application of GIS is demonstrated using the results of the 2004 federal election. A Web-accessed GIS-enabled database to map the patterns of voter support for political parties at the local level of polling booths is developed. The socioeconomic factors which explain the variations across the polling booths in levels of support for all political parties in the nation’s federal electorates are identified. A statistical model is used to predict the different spatial patterns of political party’s voting dominance. Finally, GIS tools are used to map those places across Australia that are the heartlands of voter support for the Coalition parties and for the Labor Party and to identify those local areas which are highly marginal where the gap between the primary vote for the government and the opposition is small.