McAllister, Ian. "Prime Ministers, Opposition Leaders and Government Popularity in Australia". Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol.38, No.2 (2003): 259-277.

McAllister, Ian. "Prime Ministers, Opposition Leaders and Government Popularity in Australia". Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol.38, No.2 (2003): 259-277.

• Since the 1950s, political parties have increasingly depended on strong leadership figures to unite parties and disseminate information to voters through a familiar face. This is often seen as a tactic to account for the decline in class voting by attracting individuals rather than social groups (259-260).
• Whereas traditionally parties were used a political shorthand to communicate policies to voters, allowing them to pay attention to parties rather than individual candidates, the proliferation of new media has allowed candidates to replace parties as the public face of political movements (275).
• The author suggests that this is not always the case, at least not in parliamentary systems, and depends on the popularity and charisma of individual politicians. When a politicians is charismatic, he is more likely to be the public face of the party, whereas unpopular candidates tend to depend on the party structure more (276).
• Unlike many other countries, support for governments in Australia is only weakly correlated to economic performance, with Australian voters likely to blame international economic conditions rather than the national government for economic growth or decline (261).
• Contrary to this expectation, the Prime Minister's popularity, although not necessarily that of his government, is significantly affected by economic factor. The rate of unemployment in particular, has a significant effect on the popularity of the Prime Minister (271).
• Almost all Prime Ministers experience a decline in popularity after the 'honeymoon' period of taking office elapses. Only rare political events, like the 9/11 terrorist attacks, can reverse this trend, although the general trend always points downwards (267, 270).
• The perceived charisma of the Australian Prime Minister has statistically significantly implications for his popularity, with Prime Ministers perceived as charismatic having approval ratings around 10 points higher than average (272).
• The popularity of a government and the popularity of its Prime Minister are deeply linked, with cases where the government and the Prime Minister are at different ends of a spectrum of popularity being extremely rare (273-274).