Social science has postulated two types of variables to account for social and political behaviour: on the one hand, there are individual characteristics, such as social class, age, sex and ethnic origin; on the other, there are contextual characteristics, for example, the class milieu, the urban, suburban, and ethnic composition of the areas in which people live. Observed patterns of behaviour result from the interaction between these individual and contextual characteristics. Drawing on data from the 1976 census, this paper examines the contextual, characteristics of Australian federal electorates. The paper aims to isolate the main structural dimensions of federal electorates, using factor analysis to distill the wide range of census variables into a small number of conceptually and statistically unambiguous scales, each consisting of a number of individual census variables. Four dimensions are delineated: ethnicity; socio-economic status; familism; and urban-rural differences. Secondly, the paper aims to provide data for each of these scales, enabling other researchers to easily use this information in their own analyses. The utility of the scales is illustrated by an analysis of voting in the 1977 Federal election.
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