Left | Right | Out: How voters perceive their own politics and the relative positions of political parties in a left/right ideological space

Nearly a third of voters identify themselves in the political centre, another third right-of-centre, almost a quarter left-of-centre, and 13 per cent are not sure where they fit on a left/right political spectrum.

The electorate sees Labor as less ideological, or more moderate, than other parties.

These results indicate Labor has an advantage in the geographic distribution of these political positions, with most voters perceiving their political position being closer to Labor in a majority of seats.

However, the Coalition is currently estimated to be translating ideological proximity into votes more efficiently than Labor.

The main centre-right parties are also estimated to be gaining support precisely where they need to win the next election, obtaining larger swings in Labor-held divisions that are ideologically evenly split between voters closer to its own position, and Labor’s.

About this research

This research examines the self-reported ideological position of Australian voters, and how this compares with the perceived position of the Liberal and National Coalition parties, the Labor Party, The Greens, and One Nation.

The fieldwork for the survey on which this research is based was conducted

between Wednesday 6 and Wednesday 20 November. The sample of N = 3,511 Australian voters aged 18 and older, was recruited over online panel to fill quotas based on age, gender, location, education and vote at the 2022 federal election.

For descriptive analyses, rim weighting was used to apply interlocking weights for age, gender, education, religion and location. The efficiency of these weights was 77 per cent, providing an effective sample size of 2,692.

Based on this effective sample size, the margin of error (95 per cent confidence interval) for a 50 per cent result from descriptive statistics on the full sample is ± 1.9 per cent. This is larger for subsets of the data, such as age or location, and results based on these and similar breakdowns should be interpreted conservatively.

Electorate-level analyses are estimates from a model-based approach called Multilevel Regression with Post-stratification (MRP). This works by sharing information across electorates, with voters assumed to behave in a related way to other voters with shared characteristics in similar divisions. While we expect the model to be broadly accurate, these estimates may miss idiosyncratic electorates that behave substantially differently from similar divisions. See additional details on the methodology for this in the appendix.

The full report can be found here: