II. Social context, turnout, and the vote: Australian and British comparisons

Many studies have examined the importance of the social context in which an individual lives and the effect this has on their political behaviour. Almost without exception, social context has been found to be of substantial electoral significance. By applying multivariate analysis to aggregate- and individual-level Australian and British data, these claims are questioned. The paper argues, firstly, that findings which have emphasized the importance of context are greatly overestimated and caused by a failure to control for a sufficiently wide range of variables; once these controls are introduced, the electoral significance of context disappears in Britain, and is greatly reduced in Australia. Secondly, the small but statistically significant effect of context in Australia is the result of the compulsory voting system in that country. In Britain, it is argued that non-voters are most likely to take their electoral cues from their immediate context, but since they abstain, there is no contextual effect. In Australia, by contrast, they are forced to vote by law and cause the small contextual effect found there.