Legislative turnover Down Under 1946-2017: trends and (some) explanations

Parliamentary, legislative or simply turnover refers to membership change in legislatures from one term to the next. It has been described as a ‘kind of seismographer’ that detects shifts in the foundations of politics and policy (Putnam 1976); a ‘democratic thermometer’ (Crowther and Manytone 2007) that measures the competitiveness and quality of a democracy; a ‘policy barometer’ (Gouglas 2017) that can make policy change possible. The topic has attracted attention since the seminal work of Wilfredo Pareto (1916) on elite circulation, yet the first systematic study came from Charles Hyneman (1936) on US state level legislatures in the 1930s. Legislative turnover research witnessed a revival in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to the debate on term limits in the USA. Since 2012 turnover has attracted the attention of the Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU) mainly due to concerns about extremely volatile parliamentary personnel in developing democracies. Today, legislative turnover remains primarily an American topic despite a fast emerging literature outside of the US context. Internationally comparative research, as well as single country research on its determinants remains very limited. Australia is no exception. The systematic scoping review, which was conducted on studies that were published in the period 1965-2015, revealed that there is no empirical work on the phenomenon in Australia at the federal level (Gouglas, Maddens, Brans 2017). The only data on turnover in the Australian lower chamber is to be found in Matland and Studlar’s (2004) internationally comparative study covering 25 industrial democracies in the period 1974-1994. What we know about legislative turnover in Australia we learn it from a comparative study, published as a conference paper, on Australian state legislatures (Moncrief 1997) and in certain cases from studies that touch upon turnover in single states, like the work by Sharman (2013) on turnover in the Legislative Council (upper chamber) of Tasmania. In the present presentation I attempt to cover this empirical gap by presenting data on legislative turnover in the Australian House of Representatives in the period 1946-2017, as well as on turnover of MPs within Australian political parties. I will then speculate on the political and institutional causes behind variability in turnover rates across legislatures and parties. The current research is supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and is part of a broader project the aim of which is to map and explain legislative turnover rates in developed democracies across the world.