One Nation's electoral support : economic insecurity versus attitudes to immigration

While acknowledging that our study represents “a considerable advance on other studies of One Nation, its electoral support and social foundations“, and “correctly identifies the importance of conservative social attitudes of One Nation supporters“, Turnbull and Wilson take issue with three things: one of our key findings, based on the 1998 Australian Election Study (AES), that the vote for One Nation was driven by attitudes to immigration (among other things) rather than by a sense of economic insecurity; our argument around the fundamental difference between explaining the One Nation vote and distinguishing it from the vote secured by any of the other parties; and our refusal to cringe before the “comparative evidence about neo-populist parties“ or to defer to the superior wisdom of that political scientist extraordinaire, Australia’s present Prime Minister, John Howard.17 None of the points they make in relation to any of these things is even partly persuasive; for the most part, they are marred by errors of logic, fact, or interpretation. Each, however, is important - or potentially so. They merit, therefore, a response.4 page(s