Postmaterialism and postmodernization in Australian electoral politics

In this paper we explore recent Australian electoral politics using both Inglehart's ideas on postmaterialism and also a broader conception of postmodern attitudes. We begin by demonstrating that the widely-used postmaterialism measure based on Inglehart's four-item question Gives completely counterintuitive results for the most recent significant Australian party, the One Nation Party. This appears to support Warwick's argument that this measure actually reveals pro-democracy propensity. Subsequently, we develop a much broader measure of postmodern attitudes and use this in conjunction with an index of left-right attitudes to explore the positioning of party supporters in the resulting two-dimensional space and the practical consequences of this. Among other things, this demonstrates that a single left-right dimension is inadequate to describe the positioning of minor parties in particular, but that it is overall of more significance in predicting vote than is the postmodern dimension. (C) 2002 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.