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Analyzes voting trends in Australia's 2001 federal election to identify patterns that could affect the 2004 election. Although security & terrorism dominated the political debate, domestic issues like health, education, taxes, & the environment were also important. There was evidence of an emerging generation gap among female voters with older women adhering to traditional conservatism & younger women exhibiting a progressive orientation. No substantial gender gap was evident in the relative importance of security & domestic issues; however, men & women who viewed security issues as more important than domestic issues were more likely to favor Prime Minister Howard than voters who gave greater priority to domestic issues. Women were more concerned than men about both security & domestic issues & were more likely to transfer those concerns into vote preferences. Security-oriented women were slightly older & less educated on average than security-oriented men. Although voters are concerned about international security, it is concluded that domestic issues will be equally important in 2004. 2 Tables, 8 Figures, 1 Appendix. J. Lindroth

Electoral change creates important and competing incentives for political parties, parliamentary elites and candidates to transform their campaign techniques in order to maximize votes under the new realities - a process constrained by continued reliance on familiar techniques. In this article I examine two significant moments of electoral change in New Zealand from partisan stability to dealignment in the late 1980s, and from an SMP/plurality system to Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) representation in 1996 - as a way of exploring inertia and change in the transformation of campaigns at the constituency level. Drawing on findings from in-depth interviews conducted with individuals responsible for the parties' campaigns in the 1987 and 1996 New Zealand general elections, I explore the extent to which political campaign elites, parliamentarians and candidates responded to incentives to adopt a fundamentally new election campaign logic - in these two cases, dictated by the new tactical centrality of marginal seats and geographically defined constituencies in the modern first-past-the-post (FPP) campaign, and then by the ascendancy in their place of the party list vote, issue constituencies and nationwide campaigns under MMP.