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'Localizing the National' PARTY POLITICS VOL 9. No.5 pp. 583–600 Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications London Thousand Oaks New Delhi www.sagepublications.com ‘LOCALIZING THE NATIONAL’ The Rediscovery and Reshaping of Local Campaigning in Australia Ian Ward ABSTRACT Pippa Norris provides a schematic account of the evolution of campaigning through premodern, modern and postmodern stages. In particular she points to an emerging postmodern phase of electioneer- ing characterized by a renewed emphasis upon direct forms of engage- ment which resonate with an earlier period in which campaigns were locally fought and largely dependent upon the canvassing efforts of party workers and volunteers. Norris’s analysis offers a useful prism with which to view recent developments in electioneering in Australia. In the past several elections the rival Labor and Liberal parties have attempted to achieve a synergy between their centrally conducted and constituency-level campaigns by ensuring that their national campaigns are locally relevant and address local concerns. Their efforts to ‘localize the national’ meld the use of sophisticated software with elements of a traditional ‘meet and greet’ politics and suggest that local campaigning may now have a new shape and importance. KEY WORDS Australian elections constituency/local electioneering Ⅲ localizing national campaigns Ⅲ postmodern campaigns The Transformation of Electioneering Over the past several decades electioneering has undergone a metamor- phosis variously described as ‘Americanization’, modernization, or pro- fessionalization. In essence there has been a drift away from a labour- intensive, localized campaigning reliant on the efforts of volunteer campaign workers and party members. Instead, election campaigns have increasingly evolved into high-cost, high-tech, highly calculated and centralized opera- tions that depend upon the professional skills of hired pollsters, advertising 1354-0688(200309)9:5;583–600;035035 PARTY POLITICS 9(5) specialists, marketers and other communications consultants. Several recent comparative studies confirm that campaigning in a range of democracies has evolved in this same way (see Bowler and Farrell, 1992: 232–3; Butler and Ranney, 1992: 279–80; Kavanagh, 1995: 10; Mancini and Swanson, 1996: 2). A general conclusion which is easily drawn is that, where it survives, local-level campaigning matters little. Indeed, as Pippa Norris (2000b: 137) observes, ‘many accounts have noted the decline of traditional forms of party campaigning, such as local rallies and door-to-door canvass- ing’. However, a careful analysis of contemporary electioneering practice suggests, at least in Australia’s case, that local campaigning has obtained a new-found importance. Norris’s (2000a, 2000b) own schematic account of the evolution of elec- tioneering provides a useful tool for explaining why it is that the two parties which dominate electoral politics in Australia,1 Labor and the Liberals, have each recently placed new emphasis upon local-level electioneering in national campaigns. As do Jay Blumler and Dennis Kavanagh (1999) and David Farrell and Paul Webb (1999), who also trace the evolution of political communication in broadly similar fashion, Norris identifies three ‘primary stages’ – premodern, modern and postmodern – through which electioneering has passed in response to technological and social changes experienced by post-industrial societies.2 Her analysis seems to broadly account for a transformation of campaigning in Australia first apparent in the 1960s and 1970s, and for the development thereafter of more highly professional campaigns that have resurrected the importance of, and reshaped, local campaigning. Premodern campaigning, Norris (2000a: 4) writes, featured ‘campaign organisation . based upon direct and active forms of interpersonal communications between candidates and citizens at [the] local level, with short term, ad hoc planning by the party leadership’. Such campaigns were ‘concentrated within local communities’ where ‘local parties selected the candidates, rang the doorbells, posted the pamphlets, targeted the wards, planned the resources, and generally provided all the machinery linking voters and candidates’. In Australia’s case, premodern campaigning evolved in the late nineteenth century alongside ‘the first mass party, the Australian Labor Party’ (Hughes, 1992: 89). It lasted until the 1960s when levels of active involvement in party membership collapsed to the point where neither major party could widely sustain labour-intensive forms of local- level electioneering. Much of the published research exploring local- or constituency-level campaigning in Australia dates back to the late 1950s and early 1960s. For example, the Hughes and Knox (1961: 202–4) case study of the 1958 federal campaign in Brisbane describes the holding of street corner meetings at which candidates addressed assembled voters from the back of a utility truck via a loudspeaker attached to a car battery, before driving to a new location to repeat the process several times a night, each night 584 WARD: ‘LOCALIZING THE NATIONAL’ for several weeks before election day. For both Labor and Liberal candi- dates these meetings were the ‘principal means’ of reaching voters, and were supplemented by the ‘large-scale distribution’ of pamphlets and a ‘house-to-house canvass by teams of party workers’. On election day the major parties contesting Brisbane turned out about 400 volunteers to hand out ‘how-to-vote’ cards (Hughes and Knox, 1961: 204, 210). A study of a campaign for the same 1958 election in the Melbourne constituency (or seat) of Yarra provides further insight into the local party machines that carried the burden of campaigning. The local Labor branch – not the state Branch office – kept extensive written records on cards containing infor- mation about the views of individual voters, arranged by name and street (Wilson, 1959: 2). These were used to identify where the candidate might conduct street corner meetings to reach ‘voters who did not bother [to] attend political meetings’, and to guide the distribution of literature and house-to-house canvassing. Ian Wilson records that these voter lists were, in part, assembled by recording responses ‘received each time the vote is canvassed’. But they were also constructed by less formal means. In densely settled and ‘closely knit’ inner-urban, working-class suburbs, privacy was minimal and it was ‘possible for an individual to have very accurate know- ledge of the views and life of nearly everybody in his area if he wants to exploit the contacts he can build up’ (Wilson, 1959: 2). Norris (2000b: 139–40) holds that premodern campaigns of the kind Wilson recorded gave way to modern, as party and group loyalties eroded. She defines modern campaigns as ‘those with a party organisation coordi- nated more closely at a central level by political leaders, [and] advised by external professional consultants like opinion pollsters’. Professional advisers conduct ‘polls, design advertisements, schedule the theme de jour, leadership tours, news conferences and photo opportunities, handle the press, and battle to dominate the nightly television news’. Modern campaigns were typically conducted at a step removed from ordinary voters and constructed around television – by the 1970s the ‘principal forum for campaign events’ and chief means of reaching mass audiences. Indeed, ‘in most advanced industrialised democracies the critical shift towards the modern campaign developed with the rise of television in the 1950s’ (Norris et al., 1999: 23). Television was introduced to Australia in 1956, although its political potential was not immediately recognized (Ward, 2001). By the late 1950s the full range of social forces that were to transform Australia’s cities and to erode party and group loyalties were well in train. Post-war immigration, increasingly widespread use of motor cars to commute to work, and the development of sprawling outer suburban areas predicated upon widespread car ownership were all helping to undermine closely-knit suburban communities and the intimate ‘face-to-face’ local politics that they had permitted. These changes eroded the social foundations on which branch-based mass political parties had been originally built (see Weller and Young, 2000: 158). With the exception of rural areas and country 585 PARTY POLITICS 9(5) towns where community ties and networks persisted, and where the National (or erstwhile Country) Party was able to sustain a relatively large branch membership for much longer, grass roots involvement in political parties shrivelled. One measure of this was that in the late 1930s Labor had had 350,000 members. Three decades on, in 1967, it retained just 43,0003 (Weller and Young, 2000: 158). Writing in 1964, James Jupp (pp. 198–9) reported that the ‘mass basis’ of parties had contracted to a point where participation in parties had fallen below aggregate levels that existed prior to World War I (when Australia’s population was far smaller). Hitherto local party branches – especially in the case of Labor ‘in country towns and industrial suburbs’ – had been ‘social centres’ providing a ‘corporate spirit’ which, in turn, helped ‘to keep a team of election workers together’ from one campaign to the next (Jupp, 1964: 70–2). As Louise Overacker (1952: 89) observed, during elections local branches became campaign committees ‘of great importance’ and assumed responsibility for canvassing, leafleting and ‘filling the halls or the street corners when
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