Australian Election Study, 1993

Abstract

The Australian Election Study (AES) is designed to collect data for academic research on Australian public opinion and behaviour during federal elections. Each study is based on a national, post-election, self-completion (mail-in, mail-out) survey consisting mainly of multiple choice questions. The 1993 study is the third in the series initiated in 1987, and builds on the data collected earlier in the 1967, 1969 and 1979 Australian Political Attitudes Surveys. The series provides a long-term perspective on stability and change in the political attitudes and behaviour of the Australian electorate, and investigates the changing social bases of Australian politics as the economy and society modernise and change character. In addition to these long-term perspectives it examines the political issues prevalent in the election and assesses their importance for the election result. In some cases, questions are repeated in each survey so that trends can be observed over a long period of time. However, in each survey there are always new sets of questions or modules added to gauge public opinion on contemporary social and political issues in Australia. The 1993 survey replicates many questions from the 1987 and 1990 Australian Election Studies, but also introduces a variety of new questions including a section on foreign affairs and defence, and attitudes to Federal and State government. As in previous surveys, other sections covered the respondent's interest in the election campaign and politics, their past and present political affiliation, evaluation of parties and candidates, alignment with parties on various election issues, evaluation of the economic situation and economic policies, attitudes to a range of environmental issues, and attitudes to contemporary social policy issues including equal opportunity, censorship, migration, assistance for aborigines, abortion, criminal law, expenditure on social services, the monarchy and the Australian flag. Background variables covered include level of education, employment status, occupation, type of employer, position at workplace, trade union membership, sex, year and place of birth, parents' birthplaces, parents' political preferences, father's occupation, length of residence in state or territory, religion, marital status, number of children, income, and where applicable, the occupation, trade union membership and political preference of the respondent's spouse. The breakdown of the 1993 survey sections is as follows: Section A: The Election Campaign (11 questions) Section B: Party Preference and Voting (12 questions) Section C: The Candidates (8 questions) Section D: Election Issues (11 questions) Section E: Social Policy (10 questions) Section F: The Environment (7 questions) Section G: Foreign Affairs and Defence (11 questions) Section H: Attitudes to Federal/State Government (12 questions) Section I: Education and Work (7 questions) Section J: Personal Background (20 questions) For the 1993 study, a sample of electors for all Australia except South Australia was drawn from the Commonwealth Electoral Roll by the Australian Electoral Commission following the close of rolls for that year's election. The Commission supplied name and address information only, to be used only for this study. The South Australian sample was selected manually from the alphabetical microfiche list of electors available for that state in early February. The sample is stratified by State/Territory with an oversample in Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania to ensure adequate numbers for separate State analyses as well as national analyses. The data is available in a variety of formats including SPSS Portable, Stata v.8, Stata v.7, Nesstar Publisher, NSDstat, DIF, DBase, Textfile, Delimited, SAS and Comma Separated Value file. The data can be downloaded in a zipped folder together with documentation in pdf or xml format.