The electoral and political implications of reserved seats for Indigenous Australians

Abstract

Reserved seats for Indigenous Australians have been proposed as a means by which to stimulate the relatively low voting participation of Indigenous citizens and to afford them more effective representation in parliament. Yet, the idea of dedicated Indigenous seats is regularly rejected by committees of inquiry and there are significant obstacles to their establishment. One of these obstacles is the lack of agreement or understanding about how dedicated seats would work in practice. We aim to help clarify this issue by testing in a modelling experiment how reserved seats might affect the outcome of elections and the composition of the Federal Parliament. We then assess the relative merits of each model for ease of implementation and likely acceptability for both the public and political elites and find that there are viable models with good chances of finding acceptance.