Do Australia's politicians think like its voters?

On most issues the public sits well to the tougher side of the people who run for office — and weighting candidates by how their party actually polls only closes part of the gap. Pick from ~30 issues across seven topics; switch how opinion is measured. The red line under each chart flags where the two surveys' wording or scale differs — read those comparisons with care.

Not just the average — the whole distribution

The lines above track the gap over time. Here is the full spread behind a single election: how voters and politicians actually distribute across the answer scale. Pick an issue and a year.

How to read it. Each line is one group's opinion on the same survey question — voters from the Australian Election Study, politicians from its Candidate Study — and each line runs across all the years its survey asked the question (so they need not start or end together). Net is the % on the "tougher" / pro side minus the % on the other side; Average is the mean position on the 1–5 scale (higher = more pro). Vote-weighted reweights candidates so each party counts for its share of the first-preference vote, not its share of candidates. For 2019 this uses the restricted-access release of the Candidate Study (the public file censors candidate party). The Voters of / Politicians of pickers narrow either line to one party's voters (by House vote) or one party's candidates — groups with fewer than 8 respondents on an item are dropped, and candidate party is only available from 1990 onwards. When a party is picked, its candidates get the party's full colour and its voters a lighter shade of the same colour.

"Coalition (Lib+Nat)" is not a single party: it combines the Liberal Party and the National Party (and their state variants, the Queensland LNP and the NT Country Liberals), which contest elections and govern together as a bloc. They're grouped here because they whip together and the Nationals are too few in the surveys to stand alone (e.g. 6 National vs 27 Liberal candidates in 2016). Labor and the Greens are single parties.

Source: Australian Election Study (voter, 1987–2025) and Australian Candidate Study (candidate, 1987–2019), Australian Data Archive (ADA). The 2022 and 2025 waves add voters only — no candidate survey exists for those years yet, so the voter line runs to 2025 while the voter-vs-candidate comparison ends at 2019. Voter figures use the AES survey weight where provided (2010–2025; 1990–2007 have none, shown unweighted). The candidate study carries no survey weight; "vote-weighted" reweights candidate party-means by each party's survey-weighted voter share. "Politicians" are candidates standing for election; sitting-MP data is access-restricted at ADA. The immigration item uses a different response scale on each survey, so that one is approximate. Built with the jessefrederik.com interactive house style.

Data sources

Australian Election Study — voter surveys (australianelectionstudy.org/voter-studies) and candidate surveys (australianelectionstudy.org/candidate-studies) — voter waves 1987–2025, candidate waves 1987–2019 — distributed by the Australian Data Archive (ADA) Dataverse. Full per-wave dataset DOIs: bibliography · BibTeX · RIS.