About the Australian Election Study
The Australian Election Study aims to provide a long-term perspective on stability and change in the political attitudes and behaviour of the Australian electorate. The surveys investigate the changing social and attitudinal bases of Australian politics as the society changes. In addition to these long-term goals, the AES examines the political issues and personalities in each specific election and evaluates their importance in shaping the election result.
The AES routinely collects data among a nationally representative sample of voters and among major party candidates standing for election. Both the voter and candidate instruments combine a common set of questions. More details on the general methodology used are detailed in the relevant sections for the voter and candidate studies. Specific information about the methods used for a particular election are available from the downloadable documents for that election.
The studies have been running as a series of surveys beginning in 1987 that have been timed to coincide with Australian Federal elections. In addition, a survey was also conducted in conjunction with the 1999 Referendum on the Republic and the 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum. The series also builds on the Australian National Political Attitudes Surveys conducted in 1967, 1969 and 1979, providing a unique half-century long perspective on Australian political behaviour.
All of the datasets and the associated documentation are freely available for download and analysis through the Studies & Data page and on Dataverse.
The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES)
The AES was a founding member of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) group, a collaborative program of cross-national research among election studies conducted in over fifty states. Established in 1996, the CSES has conducted five waves of data collection, with the fifth completed in 2022. Australia has been part of all five waves.
The CSES is composed of three tightly linked parts:
– a common module of public opinion survey questions included in each participant country’s post-election study,
– district level data are reported for each respondent, including electoral returns, turnout, and the number of candidates, and
– system or ‘macro’ level data report aggregate electoral returns, electoral rules and formulas, and regime characteristics.
This design allows researchers to conduct cross-level, as well as cross-national analyses, addressing the effects of electoral institutions on citizens’ attitudes and behavior, the presence and nature of social and political cleavages, and the evaluation of democratic institutions across different political regimes.
The Comparative Candidate Survey (CCS)
The AES was a founding member of the Comparative Candidate Survey, a joint multi-national project with the goal of collecting data on candidates running for national parliamentary elections in different countries using a common core questionnaire to allow for cross-country comparison. Data collection comprises surveys among candidates as well as relevant context information concerning the constituency of the candidate and the political system at large.
Partly as a result of recent changes in the functioning of political parties as intermediaries between citizens and the state, individual candidates – their activities, attitudes and beliefs – have become a most attractive and promising research object. To respond to this growing importance CCS surveys parliamentary candidates at national legislative elections in as many different countries as possible.
The CCS focuses on the relationships between the candidate, the party and the voters. Campaigning is a major topic in this core questionnaire, but other domains like recruitment and carrier patterns, issues and ideology, and democracy and representation are also included in the questionnaire. CCS is conducted in modules that are in the field about five years.