The Demographics of Australian Voters in 2010

The next speaker at CMPM2014 is Gavin Lees, via Skype link (uh-oh). His interest is in the segmentation of political supporters in Australia, and the political targetting strategies which emerge from this; and this builds on Roy Morgan data on the demographics of some 42,000 Australian voters covering the periods before and after the 2010 election.

Amongst the variables examined by this study were gender: National voters were slightly biased towards men, Green voters slightly toward women; age: National biased toward older, Greens towards younger and against older voters; income: National biased towards low-income, Greens slightly biased towards higher income groups; socioeconomic groupings: National biased towards E, F, G (lower socioeconomic) and Greens towards A and B (higher socioeconomic) groups; and education: Greens strongly biased towards higher degrees, Nationals slightly biased against higher degrees. There were few clear differences between Labor and Liberal voters on these variables.

Roy Morgan also uses a set of in-house "landscape groups" which define various segments of the population. Amongst Liberal voters there were slightly more "success stories", amongst the Nationals many more "farming heartland" and amongst the Greens many more "urban professional" people (not sure about the correct name of the last category).

Such voter demographics are likely to change over time, of course, and it will be interesting to study these developments on a longitudinal basis, as well as compare them across countries. For the moment, the limited differentiation of Labor and Liberal voters will have caused some difficulties in political marketing (though this may have changed again in subsequent years).