Increasing numbers of local councils in New Zealand are switching to the single transferable vote (STV) system. An article by Tim Newman, Nelson Reporter (via Stuff), indicates that in “2022 Nelson will be one of 15 councils using the STV system, and one of four adopting it for the first time.”
The Nelson version of STV (which the article indicates is approved but still subject to an appeal process) will be somewhat more complex than I would think necessary.
Under the new model two general wards have been set up, Central and Stoke-Tāhunanui , with four councillors to be elected per ward. For each ward, the population per councillor will be approximately 6400.
Running parallel to the general wards will be the Whakatū Māori Ward, which covers the whole city and will only be eligible for those on the Māori Roll.
One councillor will be elected from this ward, which has a population per councillor of about 3300.
In addition to the wards, there will also three “at-large” councillors representing the whole city. The mayor will also be voted at large.
So if I am understanding this correctly, it will be doubly parallel. For electing the 12 council members there are both districts (wards) and a citywide component in addition to the Maori special district. And all by STV, except maybe the single Maori member (it is not clear if this is by STV (AV) or not). One would think they could simply use STV–either citywide or in districts–with a rule ensuring a minimal number of those elected are Maori. Or, slightly more complex than that, but less than what is now likely to be adopted, two sets of districts–general and Maori–but not three.
The current system seems to be MNTV, but the article is a little confusing on this point. It says:
In previous elections, voting in Nelson has been conducted “at large”, meaning that voters could vote for any of the 12 council candidates standing for election, along with mayoral candidates.
I am taking that to mean the voter had 12 votes and the top 12 were elected, but I wish it was clearer. The adoption of STV is a positive development, even if it has been done with more complex districting than seems necessary.
In yesterday’s review of the German election outcome, I used the extended Seat Product Model (SPM) formula for two-tier PR systems. I have done this many times, and Rein Taagepera and I (in our 2017 book, Votes from Seats) do explicitly include mixed-member proportional (MMP) in the category of two-tier PR systems.
However, there is one problem with that characterization. All other two-tier PR systems that I can think of entail a single vote, which is then used both for allocating seats in the basic tier and pooled across districts for national (or sometimes regional) compensation.
MMP, of course, usually entails two votes–a nominal (candidate) vote used only in the basic tier, and a second, party-list, vote used for determining overall proportionality. (In MMP, the basic tier is a “nominal tier” because the vote there is cast for a candidate, and the district winner earns the seat solely on votes cast for him or her by name.) This two-vote feature is a complex feature of MMP that is actually emphasized in my more recent coauthored book, Party Personnel Strategies, but which I may have tended to underplay in my comparative work on modeling the effects of electoral systems on party systems. Of course, by being two-tier, it is already a non-simple system, as Taagepera and I define that term. But we also say that two-tier PR, including MMP, is as simple as an electoral system can be and still be included in the complex category (see p. 263 and 299 of Votes from Seats).
Maybe that is not an accurate statement for two-vote MMP. Our definition of simple (pp. 31-36) concentrates on two features: (1) all seats allocated within districts, and (2) adherence to the rank-size principle, such that the largest party gets the first seat in a district, and remaining seats are allocated in a way that respects their relative sizes (i.e., by any of the common PR formulas). We further say that for simple PR, “the vote for candidate and for party is one act” (p. 35). This latter condition still holds for any two-tier list-PR system, because there is a list vote that applies both for allocating seats within a district, and also for the “complex” feature of the supra-district compensation mechanism. Obviously, however, MMP as used in Germany violates the principle that “the vote for candidate and for party is one act.” So maybe it is not “simple enough” to qualify as an almost-simple complex system. (Yes, that was a complex statement, but that’s kind of the point.)
If MMP were to tend to produce a party system more fragmented than expected from the extended SPM, it might be due to the “second” vote, i.e., the list vote. To test this, one could aggregate all the nominal votes and use them as the notional list votes in a simulated compensation. (This is how MMP in Germany worked in 1949, albeit with compensation only at state level. It is also how MMP now works in Lesotho.) The aggregation of basic-tier votes should work better from the standpoint of modeling the party system impact of the key features of a given MMP system–the size of the basic tier and the share of seats in the compensation tier.
The catch in all this is that, of course, till quite recently German MMP was under-fragmented, according to the SPM, despite using a separate list vote. Thus the issue did not arise. The New Zealand MMP system also has matched expectations well, after the first three post-reform elections were over-fragmented relative to model prediction. The graph below shows the relationship over time between the expectations of the SPM and the observed values of effective number of seat-winning parties (NS) in both Germany and New Zealand. For the latter country, it includes the pre-reform FPTP system. In the case of Germany, it plots NS alternately, with the CDU and CSU considered separately. As I noted in the previous discussion, I believe the “correct” procedure, for this purpose, is to count the “Union” as one party, but both are included here for the sake of transparency. In both panels, the dashed mostly horizontal line is the output of the extended SPM for the countries’ respective MMP systems1; it will change level only when the electoral system changes. (For New Zealand, the solid horizontal line is the expectation under the FPTP system in use before 1996.)
The German party system from 1953 through 2005 was clearly fitting quite poorly, due to how under-fragmented it was for the electoral system in use. The old CDU/CSU and SPD were just too strong and overwhelmed the considerable permissiveness of the electoral rules.2 So clearly the question I am raising here–whether the two-vote feature of MMP means it should not be modeled just like any (other) two-tier PR system–is moot for those years. However, perhaps it has become an issue in recent German elections, including 2021. The underlying feature of voter behavior pushing the actual NS to have risen to well above “expectation” would be the greater tendency of voters towards giving their two votes to different parties. At least that would be the cause in 2021, given that we saw in the previous post that the basic tier produced almost exactly the degree of fragmentation that the SPM says to expect. It is the compensation tier that pushed it above expectation, and the problem here (from a modeling perspective) is that the formula implicitly assumes the votes being used in the compensation mechanism are the same votes being cast and turned into seats in the basic (nominal) tier. But with two votes, they are not, and with more voters splitting tickets, the assumption becomes more and more untenable.
The previous planting on this matter emphasized that the SPM is actually performing well, even in this most recent, and quite fragmented, election. I am not trying to undermine that obviously crucial point! However, the marked rise in NS since 2009–excepting 2013 when the FDP failed to clear the threshold–may suggest that the model’s assumption that the two votes are pretty similar could be problematic.
Maybe two-vote MMP is more complex after all than its characterization as a two-tier PR system–the simplest form of complex electoral system–implies. In fact, maybe I should stop referring to MMP as a sub-category of two-tier PR. Yet for various reasons, it is a convenient way to conceptualize the system, and as yesterday’s discussion of the recent German election showed, it does work quite well nonetheless. It could be based on a flawed premise, however, and the more voters cast their nominal and list votes differently, the more that flaw becomes apparent.
A work in progress… in other words (fair warning), more such nerdy posts on this topic are likely coming.
Notes
1. The “expected NS” line for Germany takes the tier ratio to be 0.5, even though as I argued in the previous entry, we really should use the actual share of compensation seats in the final allocation. This would have only minimal impact in the elections before 2013; in 2021, it makes a difference in “expected” NS of 0.36.
2. Partly this is due to the 5% list-vote threshold, which is not a factor in the version of the SPM I am using. In Votes from Seats, we develop an alternate model based only on a legal threshold. For a 5% threshold, regardless of other features, it predicts NS=3.08. This would be somewhat better for much of the earlier period in Germany. In fact, from 1953 through 2002, mean observed NS=2.57. In the book we show that the SPM based only on mean district magnitude and assembly size–plus for two-tier PR, tier ratio–generally performs better than the threshold model even though the former ignores the impact of any legal threshold. This is not the place to get into why that might be, or why the threshold might have “worked” strongly to limit the party system in Germany for most of the postwar period, but the permissiveness of a large assembly and large compensation tier is having more impact in recent times. It is an interesting question, however! For New Zealand, either model actually works well for the simple reason that they just happen to arrive at almost identical predictions (3.08 vs. 3.00), and that for the entire MMP era so far, mean NS has been 3.14.
Just received: My copy of Party Personnel Strategies: Electoral Systems and Committee Assignments.
A preview of most of Chapter 1 is available for free at Google Books. More details, including the table of contents, can be viewed at the book’s Oxford University Press page.
The back cover has the short summary, as well as some very kind words from other scholars:
The country cases covered in the book, each with its own chapter, are Germany, Japan, Israel, Portugal, Britain, and New Zealand. The research design leverages the electoral-system changes in Japan and New Zealand.
The book develops two “models” of party personnel practices, tested on the patterns of assignment of a party’s legislators to committees, broken down into three categories: high policy, public goods, and distributive. Under the expertise model, parties are assumed to want to harness the perceived expertise of their individual members by assigning them to committees with matching policy functions. We assume all parties in parliamentary democracies would like to achieve such matches, but, depending on features of the electoral system, they may have to trade off fulfilling the expertise model in order to assign according to an electoral–constituency model. Within the expertise model, there are also a series of issue ownership premises, under which parties of the center-right are expected to match experts to high policy and parties of the center-left to public goods (even if they do not expertise-match in other categories). As expected under our theory, the more that an electoral system makes seat-maximization depend on the geographic location of votes (as with FPTP) or on candidate’s personal votes (or both, as with Japan’s former SNTV), the more the electoral–constituency model dominates over the expertise model.
Although not the book’s central theme, a key subtext is that we now probably can take the question mark off of “best of both worlds” regarding the impact of mixed-member electoral systems, at least for the proportional (MMP) variant used in Germany and post-reform New Zealand. These systems show the highest reliance on the expertise model while simultaneously also fulfilling key premises of the electoral–constituency model.
The project was a long time in development. The book arrives thirteen and a half years after the original “central team” (me, Krauss, and Pekkanen) obtained the news that our NSF grant proposal was going to be funded. It was a complex collaboration, involving scholars specializing on each of the cases, who led the data collection and answered many a question we had. The book could never have seen the light of day without their effort. Nor could have been written without the addition to the author team of Matthew Bergman (originally the project’s research assistant, and central data manager, as well as the originator of our issue-ownership premises) and Cory Struthers (who brought new ideas about distributive policy to the author team, and was my first UC Davis Ph.D. student, not counting one who originally started at UCSD before I moved). We also benefitted from numerous other research assistants and the work of several undergraduate students at Davis, who are named individually in the preface.
As foreshadowed previously at this blog, the book is dedicated to one of the most important scholars ever of comparative legislatures, Gerhard Loewenberg, of blessed memory.
Datasets used in the book will soon be made public. They are not quite ready yet (pending review of a planned journal article that will introduce them to the wider public), but I will post a notification when they are available.
Earlier, I noted that in the New Zealand 2020 election, the Labour Party flipped several seats in mostly rural single-seat districts that are normally strongholds of the National Party.
Commenting on those swings, North Canterbury Federated Farmers president Cameron Henderson said:
There were definitely “strategic farmers” voting Labour in an effort to avoid a Labour-Greens government.
He added a caveat, that most of the vote swings in these seats came from urban voters within predominantly rural electorates. Nonetheless, his confidence that there were strategic farmers is a nice anecdote regarding what some political scientists have regarded as strategic voting motivated not by who can win locally but by which parties may form government.
As I noted in my election preview in late July, there were only two likely outcomes of this election: A Labour–Green coalition or a Labour single-party majority. There were no occasions over the last several months when a National-led government was likely based on any publicly available evidence. For most farmers, a government in which the center-left Labour Party has a parliamentary majority is a much more palatable outcome than one in which that party needs the Greens for its majority.
In Shugart and Wattenberg (2001) we ask if mixed-member systems offer a “best of both worlds.” That is, do they allow simultaneously for the benefits of local representation and individual-member accountability that are the (supposed) advantages of single-seat plurality (FPTP) and the representation of smaller national parties that might struggle to win districts but would be represented under proportional representation (PR).
There was a question mark in the book’s subtitle. Over time, I have come to believe that indeed the proportional type (MMP) does have a strong tendency to offer the best of both worlds. The reason is that members elected in districts have incentives to behave as local representatives at the time that there is close approximation between party vote and seat shares (assuming compensation is carried out nationwide or in large regions). The majoritarian type (MMM, as in Japan and Taiwan) probably does not; it is much closer in its overall incentive structure to FPTP, even though it does indeed permit smaller national parties to win seats.
For MMP, the “best of both worlds” argument assumes that parties nominate dually–meaning many elected members will have run in a district and had a (realistically electable) list position simultaneously. If they do, then even the list-elected members will have a local base, and should have incentives to act as the local “face” of the party, including possibly by offering constituent services. Both prior anecdotes I have shared from New Zealand (e.g., “shadow MPs” who win from the list and maintain a local office) and my forthcoming coauthored book, Party Personnel, offer further evidence that MMP does indeed work in this way.
Now comes a terrific anecdote from New Zealand’s 2020 election. In this election, Labour won a majority of seats (64/120) with 49.1% of the nationwide party list vote. In the nominal tier of single-seat districts (electorates) it won 43 of the 72 available seats. Its win included some districts that are normally strongholds of the center-right National Party (which won 35 seats overall and just 26 districts).
Commenting on some of the Labour wins in mostly rural districts, Federated Farmers president Andrew Hoggard said:
in some “flipped” electorates Labour list MPs had worked hard to raise their profile and get involved with the community and this had paid off when they campaigned for the electorate.
This is an ideal description of how the “best of both worlds” argument works: list-elected members have incentives to attend to local needs of the district in which they ran for the nominal seat (but “lost”) in hopes of capturing the local plurality in the next election.
Of course, there were other factors at work as well. I will offer another planting about one of those factors separately. There is also some uncertainty at this stage just exactly the degree to which rural voters flipped, as the wins may have come in significant part from very large swings in the town areas within districts that also include large rural areas. Regardless, MMP offers the key advantage of giving most elected members, if dually nominated, a tie to a local constituency while ensuring close approximation of overall seat totals to party-list votes.
The following originally appeared here on 27 July. I am re-upping it because the election is 17 October–right now. I think most of what I wrote back in July still applies–other than the election date itself (and NZF appearing even deader now than it did at the time). The main question of the election remains what it was then: Will Labour win a majority on its own, or will it need a coalition or other agreement with the Greens? More recent polling suggests the answer might be the latter, but it looks like a close call.
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New Zealand’s general election will be 19 September (grrr, they are holding it on Rosh HaShanah). Given the generally good record of the government of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in handling COVID-19, at this point the question seems to be, how big will her win be? And how much will her two coalition partners suffer as Ardern’s party gets most of the credit?
Through today, there have been seven recent polls that have put Ardern’s Labour Party over 50% in votes. If this were to happen on election day, it would make for the first time since the mixed-member proportional system was first used (1996) that a single party won a majority of seats or votes.
The last poll showing the main opposition National Party ahead was conducted in February. The party has changed leaders not once, but twice, since then.
Obviously, with a majority, Labour would not need to take on coalition or support partners. However, it likely would want to retain its relationship with the Green Party and thus retain the latter in some decidedly junior position. That is, assuming the party clears the threshold. Even the polls that show Labour as far up as 60% (!) still show the Greens over 5%. So, it may be a close call, but they should at least remain in parliament. There seems to be only one poll in several months that has them below the party-vote threshold (mid-May, at 4.7%).
The other partner in the incumbent government, New Zealand First, is languishing far below the threshold in all polls. Its only faint hope for survival would be if it can take back the electorate (single-seat district) of Northland. The party’s leader, Winston Peters, won this seat in a by-election five years ago. The National Party won the seat back in the general election of 2017. Its candidate for the seat in this election, Shane Jones, is making his pitch for the seat.
For far too long we have tolerated substandard National Party representation for our Northland area. No power or influence. No bite and, in fact, not even a decent bark.
The just-linked NZ Herald article remarks that the by-election showed that “the government [then led by the National Party] knew so little about the North that it thought bridges were what everyone wanted.” Jones has said that most of the promised bridges were never built. (So, evidently they do want bridges, even if that’s not all they want.)
The episode is a nice reminder of how distributive politics can come into play in the MMP system. Despite effectively nationwide proportional representation, the district races are an opportunity for local factors to enter into the campaign. Nonetheless, it would seem a very tall order for New Zealand First to repeat in a general election what it pulled off in the by-election. With National crashing so badly nationwide, however, perhaps it is not out of the question that local National supporters could vote for Jones. The latter has emphasized that he could be in cabinet, while the National member would be an “obscure backbench MP,” continuing the alleged neglect of the region by both Labour and National. (Never mind that NZF is unlikely to be back in cabinet no matter what, if their votes are not needed, as they were after the 2017 election.)
Meanwhile, Peters has launched his party’s campaign with the rather odd slogan, “Back your future.” He is really pushing the idea that he is the only thing standing between New Zealanders and a radical government pulled further left by the Greens. It is about the best case he can make for a vote for his party. Given the overall competence Ardern has exhibited and the fact that the Greens would have hardly any leverage if Labour wins a majority on its own (or even if it is merely close to a majority), it is not a claim with much reality behind it. Still, the always colorful Peters has said that being in government has allowed him and his allies to block “woke pixie dust.”
The Greens are also looking for ways to differentiate themselves from both of their partners. Co-leader James Shaw remarked,
We’ve known for a long time, that the closer we got to election, the more likely it was that NZ First would start misbehaving.
…If you look at some of the difficulties that the Government has had over the last three years, a lot of them have come down to NZ First ankle-tapping them and blaming them for saying they can’t get anything done.
I know they like to say they are a force for moderation; it’s more like an agent of chaos.
Green MP Jan Logie has also called attention to New Zealand First’s opposition to the Sexual Violence Legislation Bill, which she is championing.
The Greens are also at work differentiating themselves from their senior partner, albeit with less divisive words, and a policy focus. For instance, they oppose Labour’s policy on charges to New Zealanders returning from abroad and needing to quarantine. (National supports Labour’s plan, so the latter can pass it without the Greens’ support in the current parliament.)
Peters and David Seymour, the leader of another small party, Act, have done their part to keep the campaign especially classy.
Act is enjoying a bit of a surge lately, from polling oblivion a few months ago to 5% in one recent poll and over 4% in several. It just might clear and win multiple seats. Seymour currently holds an electorate seat. Because New Zealand’s MMP has an alternate threshold–five percent of the party-list vote or a single district win–there is a chance the party could elect more than one member for the first time since 2008 even if it remains below 5%. I’d think their odds are reasonably good, as some more ideological right-wing voters may see National as hopeless to form a government and instead vote Act.
The current government was a somewhat strange one when formed. Labour’s 2017 result was ten seats behind the then-governing National. Even with Green support the left-leaning post-electoral combine was two seats seats short of National (54-56). They needed New Zealand First (9 seats) to choose them over National, which of course it did. Now the government looks to be one more case for the common political-science finding that governing as a junior partner is perilous for a party’s electoral support. New Zealand First may be shut out of parliament altogether, and the Greens may be down a seat or two from their 8 in 2017 and facing a partner that possibly has a majority on its own.
The New Zealand Maori Party has introduced its party list for the 2020 election, now set for 17 October. The press release boasts of the backgrounds of the candidates, including some sports celebrities and experienced local officeholders. Interestingly, one of the co-leaders has adopted a “burning bridges” strategy–being placed too low on the list (7th) to be elected if he does not win his district (electorate) under New Zealand’s mixed-member proportional (MMP) system. (In some past elections, the party has won only district seats; it did not win any seats at all in 2017.)
In our list we have champion athletes: the founder of Iron Māori (Heather Te Au Skipworth); a coordinator for the diploma in sport and recreation- and a crossfit trainer (Fallyn Flavell); a fourth dan black belt in aikido (Mariameno Kapa-Kingi) and competitive rower (Tumanako Silveria).
We have candidates with vast expertise and experience in local government (Merepeka Raukawa-Tait, Elijah Pue, John Tamihere, Rangi Mclean, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer); a former Cabinet Minister Hon Tamihere; two past youth MPs (Eru Kapa-Kingi and Elijah Pue); and former candidates for the Māori Party, Mana Motuhake, Alliance Labour, and the Christian Heritage Party.
It also has this lovely nugget:
“We are campaigning on the mantra of MMP: More Māori in Parliament” said Che Wilson [party president].
Regarding co-leader John Tamihere, Waatea News quotes him as explaining his taking such a low list position:
This is the Māori thing to do and I could not go back to Parliament if I didn’t have the mandate of the people on the street… My six fellow candidates have put themselves and their whānau up for this challenge and this is my way of showing my support for their sacrifice.
In 2017, the party was within five percentages points in only one of the Maori set-aside electorates, Te Tai Hauāuru. Labour won all seven of them. Back to 2014, the party won two of the electorates, plus one list seat (which I believe is the only list seat it has ever won).
I have not seen polling of the Maori electorates. Perhaps someone reading this has. But with Labour currently running so far ahead of its 2017 showing in national polls, it would seem the Maori candidates have their work cut out for them if the party is to recover.
(The idea of candidates in mixed-member systems “burning bridges” by not taking an electable list rank comes from Krauss, Nemoto, and Pakennen, 2011.)
As already flagged in a couple of comments at the earlier planting on the New Zealand election (thanks, Errol), there is now some discussion of a delay in the polling date. The dissolution of parliament did not take place Monday as had been expected. This does not immediately mean the election date, 19 September, has to be pushed back. But it means it is possible.
This uncertainty is due to the recent return of COVID-19 cases to the country, and all the complications that could cause for holding the election. There are provisions of the election law, added rather recently, that would permit delay under specified conditions even after a dissolution.
Earlier in December, the Justice Minister of New Zealand, Andrew Little (Labour) announced that there would be a binding referendum on recreational cannabis use concurrent with the 2020 general election. There may also be a question on euthanasia, and–of core interest to this blog–electoral reform.
It has been floating around that if we’re going to do a bunch of referenda, why wouldn’t we put this question about whether we want to make those final tweaks to MMP, reduce that 5 per cent threshold to 4 per cent, get rid of the one-seat coat-tailing provision.
These proposals were part of the Electoral Commission’s MMP Review, but the government at the time (National-led) did not act on them.
The multiparty nature of the New Zealand political system that MMP has institutionalized is apparent in these issues being on the table. Having a referendum on cannabis use was a provision of the confidence and supply agreement that Labour signed with the Green Party after the 2017 election. In addition, Labour’s other current governing partner, New Zealand First, has indicated support for a bill on euthanasia sponsored by the leader of ACT, another of the smaller parties (a right-wing partner to opposition National).
Both provisions that the MMP Review recommended changing have had past impacts on current parties. The ACT has depended for its representation in parliament on the so-called coat-tailing provision (a term I do not like for the alternative threshold) in several elections. The New Zealand First once was left out of parliament for having a vote share between 3.5% and 5%, despite other parties (including ACT) being represented, due to winning a single district (electorate) plurality. (Obviously, 4% would not have helped NZF in 2008, as it had only 3.65%. But the point is that the current provisions produce potential anomalies; I have suggested before that the two thresholds should be brought closer to one another.)
Also of note: Little said that the cabinet had discussed, but decided against, having a citizen’s assembly to deliberate issues related to cannabis (and perhaps also euthanasia).
I am just digesting the news. This is quite remarkable. Jacinda Ardern has been leader of the Labour Party for not even three months, and now she is about to be PM.
Discuss…
(Some of you have already been doing so, at the election thread.)
We are entering days of convergences. Over the next two days, the Jewish and Islamic new years and the first day of Autumn coincide. Then, on the weekend, we have the convergence of elections in the two countries that offer our best examples of mixed-member proportional (MMP) representation electoral systems: Germany and New Zealand. (Lest I be accused of hemispherism, let me hasten to note that in one of those countries, the election will be the day after the start of spring.)
In the case of Germany, which votes Sunday, there really has been no doubt for some time that the CDU/CSU alliance would place first, but it will be down from its 2013 result. There is also little doubt that the two parties that missed the 5% party-vote threshold in 2013 will clear it this time: the center-right FDP and the far-right AfD. The SPD, which briefly flirted with the lead in the polls some months after changing its leadership, looks like it may struggle to break 25% of the vote. The real question is what the coalition will be, after the election results are known.
I would expect the SPD to want a period of opposition to recollect itself after what looks sure to be another disappointing result for the party. Thus it may not be willing to renew the current CDU/CSU+SPD big coalition (what we should stop calling a grand coalition; my more direct translation of the German term is more apt). If the FDP has enough seats to combine with the CDU/CSU, we might see a return to the center-right combo that governed from 2009 to 2013, as well as in many past terms. There is just enough error in the projections from polling to allow for the possibility that this could be a viable combine. (Mouse over the numbers in the table at that link for the range of vote and seat projections for each party.)
However, the most likely result seems to me to be Jamaica! I will admit to rooting for this: CDU/CSU + FDP + Green. (The name refers to the parties’ colors.)
In New Zealand, the contest for Saturday’s election is much more uncertain. For months it seemed National, which heads the current multi-party governing arrangement, was cruising to another win. Then Labour changed its leader and surged (similar to the German pattern). By a few weeks ago, the two largest parties were running neck and neck, while the Greens stumbled badly and looked at risk of failing to clear the 5% party-vote threshold. This scenario was posing a potential difficult challenge for center-left voters: Do you vote Labour to bolster its formateur status (as the largest party, although there is no formal right of first attempt to the largest in New Zealand)? Or do you vote Green to ensure there is a viable partner for Labour other than Winston Peters and his New Zealand First (NZF) party? Given that the electoral system is MMP, you can do both: vote for Labour in your district (electorate) and vote Green on the list. However, while that might be a voter’s way of making a statement of preferred coalition, only the party vote affects the overall balance of seats in parliament. (Some exceptions to that statement, as I will get to below, but none likely relevant to the Labour-Green situation discussed here.)
In recent days, some polling suggests that National might be pulling ahead again. The result could be very close, and it could be a situation in which NZF is pivotal (although that may be less likely than it seemed some weeks ago). That is, assuming NZF makes it. The party has been tending downward and is hovering near 5%, as are the Greens . Here is where the electorate (district/nominal) vote comes in. The threshold provision for a party to participate in nationwide proportional allocation is 5% of party-list votes or one electorate. (Additional MPs elected beyond the electorate candidate are what I have termed “piggyback MPs“, not to be confused with that other MMP creature, the “shadow MP“.) The Greens do not have an electorate where they are viable, but NZF does.
Peters, the NZF leader, currently holds an electorate seat, Northland, having won it in a by-election in 2015. He is the party’s candidate again for the seat. If he retains it, his party would qualify for additional list seats, even if it fell below the 5% party-vote threshold.
The other electorate contests that matter include the one in Epsom, although it is not really a contest. The seat is safe for the one Act MP, David Seymour, who is quite certain to return. It is probably not likely that the Act party vote will be sufficient to earn the party a second seat, although I saw one projection a week or so ago that suggested it was possible. Act has been a governing partner with National since 2008.
Then there is Waiariki, one of the Maori set-aside seats. (Voters who claim Maori descent can choose to vote in their special Maori electorate or in the general electorate seat in which the reside.) Te Ururoa Flavell is fighting to hold the seat, which is the only way his party will retain a presence in parliament. That is quite a change for the party, which has been a National governing partner since 2008. In the past it has won as many as five electorate seats (in 2008) and in 2014 it had sufficient party votes to win a list seat for the first time, in addition to its win in Waiariki electorate. This time, it may end up with just one seat–or zero.
One electorate we know will not matter this time is Ohariu. United Future leader Peter Dunne resigned in August, after a 33-year career as an MP. This effectively kills the party, which has been a support partner to every government, whether led by Labour or National, since 2002. Only in 2002 did the party clear the party-vote threshold, and since 2008, Dunne has been its only member.
In an interesting twist on the Ohariu story, the Greens had initially decided not to contest the seat, in order to give the Labour candidate a chance to defeat Dunne and thereby knock a National partner out of the government-formation equation. When Dunne resigned, the Greens announced a candidate for the seat. With Dunne not running, there is no scenario in which this electorate will matter for the parliamentary balance, so there was no reason for the Greens not to have “local face” on the party (even though many of its voters will split their vote and give their electorate vote to the Labour candidate anyway). Running a candidate is thus another example of what I have called green contamination.
Two MMP elections in one weekend. Now that will be something to watch!
In New Zealand’s MMP system, there are by-elections if there is a vacancy between general elections in a single-seat district. This is not a mandatory feature of MMP systems; Germany, for example, has no by-elections. A vacancy in a district is filled off the list of the party of the vacating member.
Nigel Roberts, a leading New Zealand expert on elections and electoral systems, writes in the Dominion Post that New Zealand should end the practice of by-elections. In making the case, he refers to a by-election in the constituency of Mt Albert, which is a safe Labour seat. The Labour Party’s candidate in the by-election, Jacinda Ardern, already is an MP, via the party list. Thus the effect of her winning (which she did) is simply to shift the type of mandate she has*, and have her replaced as a list MP by the next available candidate on the Labour list from the preceding election.
Roberts suggests adding a regional component to the lists in order to ensure that the replacement is from the same region as the district in which the vacancy has occurred.
A potential problem with the proposal is the fact that sometimes a by-election really does shift who controls a district and sometimes can even change the nationwide balance between parties (as happened in a recent case in Northland district). Roberts takes the position that this is better avoided, so as not to change potentially the majority for the government. “Party votes cast in general elections should make or break governments – not electorate votes cast in by-elections,” he says.
I am curious to know what readers think of the proposal.
* As well as, sadly, deprive us of my favorite case of a list MP “shadowing” the district-elected MP.
The first of the two rounds of deciding on a potential new flag for New Zealand has been completed. The winner is Silver Fern (Black, White, and Blue). It will go head-to-head (hoist-to-hoist?) against the current flag in a second postal ballot next March. The proposed alternative shares with the current flag the stars of the Southern Cross.
This round selected from five alternatives, using a preferential (ranked-choice) ballot. The winning option did not lead on first preferences. That leader was ” Silver Fern (Red, White and Blue)”, which had 41.76%, against 40.16% for the eventual winner. The leader in first preferences was the only one of the five designs without black in its color scheme. Apparently, via the sequential elimination and then transfer of preferences, the consensus was fern and stars with some black.
This first round originally was to be among four alternatives, but a social-media campaign of especially passionate supporters managed to get a fifth design, Red Peak, included. Red Peak, however, did not fare so well, coming in a distant third with 8.69%. Another silver fern option, which was all black and white, and a black-and-white Koru design ended up way back.
The preferences round by round suggest the Red Peak was by far the second choice for Koru supporters. When black and white fern was eliminated, its ballots put the black-white-and-blue fern design in the lead, narrowly, for the first time. This made Red Peak the swing bloc, and those ballots split 54.34%-45.66% for–perhaps a little ironically–the option with no red on it–but with that consensus black. The final count was a vote division of 50.53%-49.47% between the two fern-and-stars design.
The long list from which the five ballot contenders were selected by a panel had 39 options. The panel had 10,292 designs to sift through.
There was an interesting little tussle between the ACT New Zealand and the Greens this past week. The matter concerned a private member’s bill that would allow the opening of bars in the wee hours of the morning so that New Zealanders could gather to watch live matches at the next Rugby World Cup (which will be played in Britain next month).
The bill was sponsored by the sole ACT MP, David Seymour. As I understand the parliamentary procedure (with the help of some New Zealand friends), if a private member’s bill does not win the regular lottery for consideration by the House, it is possible for an MP to introduce it directly. However, this requires unanimous consent to proceed. The Greens turned down this request.
ACT leader David Seymour said, under his bill, licensed premises would have been able to open for an hour before a match started, and an hour after it had finished.
But the Greens’ health spokesperson, Kevin Hague, said the party could not support the bill as it had the potential to cause real harm to communities.
He said the move was a ham-fisted attempt by Mr Seymour to be a ‘man of the people’ but it actually had the potential to cause real harm to communities.
“Under David Seymour’s bill, boozed-up people will be spilling out of bars just as parents are dropping their children at school or are on their way to kids’ weekend rugby and netball games.”
Mr Seymour called the Greens “party poopers” after they blocked the bill.
However, the very next day, the Greens changed course and allowed the bill to go ahead. RNZ again:
Mr Seymour told Parliament ACT had offered to make changes to the bill to get the Greens’ support.
“Politics is often the art of compromise and if this bill emerges with at least the All Black games and finals applied to then that, I believe, will be a great victory,” he said.
The article has some brief overview of the concessions (which seem minor to me).
I have to wonder if the Greens really wanted to garner a reputation as the party that is against World Cup viewing in bars. One further report that I heard on RNZ suggested that the party took a great deal of criticism for the initial veto.
The bill seems now set to go ahead with National Party support and Labour declaring it a personal (free) vote.
Winston Peters, leader of the New Zealand First Party, has won a by-election in the electorate of Northland.
In the mixed-member proportional (MMP) system in New Zealand, unlike the generally similar one in Germany, by elections are held to fill vacancies in single-seat districts. In this case, the winner is a sitting list MP. So what happens next? There is no party vote in a by election, nor is the compensation mechanism engaged in any way. So when Peters relinquishes his list seat to take up the electorate, his party would be entitled to a fill the list seat with the next candidate on its own list. In other words, the party can gain a seat by this mechanism!
As it happens, NZF may not exercise its right to claim a new seat; it may simply leave the seat vacant. (Updated: It looks like NZF just might take the additional seat to which it is entitled after all.)
Peters won with a little indirect assist from the Labour Party, whose leader admitted in the days before this election that its candidate had no chance. He said that Northland voters “are going to look around and they have to make the decision about what’s best. If they want to say they are sick and tired of being neglected, they are going to have to decide how they do that and vote accordingly,” said Andrew Little.
Peters held an electorate seat as recently as 2005, Tauranga, which is rather far from Northland. He is, however, originally from Northland.
Below is a comparison the results, showing only those parties that won at least 5% of the votes in either the 2014 general election or this by election; “–” indicates the party did not run a candidate in the given election.
Fruits and Votes 