Electoral system change in New Zealand: from Westminster plurality to Continental proportionality.

Peter Aimer recently retired as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies, University of Auckland, where he is now an honourary Research Fellow. He was active in the Electoral Reform Coalition, and has recently co-edited a major study of New Zealand's first MMP election in 1996, "Voters' Victory?," published by Auckland University Press.

For more than 150 years New Zealand's political institutions and processes--its political culture--have been essentially British. The only notable departure from British practice was the creation in 1867 of four territorial Maori electorates (1) spanning the entire country and constituting a second tier of representation superimposed on the single-member electorates characteristic of Westminster politics.

With the advent of universal voting and the consequent development of organized, mass-based parties, representative government in New Zealand evolved in the twentieth century into the classic Westminster model. Its essential features were a plurality electoral system (first-past-the-post or winner-takes-all), two dominant political parties, an adversarial style of party competition, and one-party majority governments. Indeed, Giovanni Sartori, eminent scholar of parties and party systems, once identified New Zealand as a better example of the two-party model than Britain itself! Apart from a brief experiment in 1908 with majority (second-round) elections, the New Zealand voting system has remained unchanged.

New Zealand is essentially a constitutionally conservative country. Yet in 1993, by 54 percent to 46 percent, and with an 83-percent turnout of registered electors in a referendum held in conjunction with the general election, New Zealanders voted to replace their Westminster electoral system with the German model of proportionality, known in New Zealand as MMP.

MMP

MMP is a form of proportional representation (PR) and is short for "mixed-member proportional"--an infelicitous title which has been the butt of both friendly and hostile humour, trading on alternative translations of the acronym (e.g. "many more politicians"). The title describes the outcome of an MMP election, which is "proportional," in that parliamentary seats are allocated to parties in proportion to their share of the total vote (provided they have won at least 5 percent of the votes cast, or at least one territorial electorate), and "mixed," because some MPs are directly elected to represent territorial electorates and the rest are indirectly elected from party lists on the basis of their party's overall vote.

The switch to MMP involved major changes. The size of Parliament was increased from 99 to 120 seats, comprising 65 electorate seats (including the now five Maori seats), and 55 list seats.

Reducing the existing 99 territorial electorates to 65 larger electorates necessitated a comprehensive redrawing of electoral boundaries. Consequently, some MPs saw their seats vanish, and then found themselves in competition with party colleagues when staking a claim on a new or reconstituted electorate. Others found that their safe seats had become marginal. Some MPs, uncertain of getting a safe place on their party's list, announced their retirement from politics; others split from their parties to form and lead or join new parties, which they hoped would surmount the 5-percent threshold for proportional representation. Overall, while the opportunities for major party representation may have contracted, the opportunities for the minor parties expanded, as proportionality lowered the threshold of entry to Parliament.

Since radical electoral changes are comparatively rare anywhere, and certainly have been in New Zealand, the obvious question is: Why and how did it happen? The question is even more pertinent in the aftermath of the first MMP election, since, on the evidence of public opinion polls, MMP would most likely now be rejected in a referendum.

There are several themes to be traced through New Zealand's transition from first-past-the-post (FPTP) to MMP. First, given that the electoral system is not ordinarily a political issue of obvious relevance to people's material or emotional concerns, what brought the issue to a head? What made many people in a constitutionally conservative community receptive to the idea of radical electoral change?

A second theme, as for any major policy issue, concerns the role of the relevant elites and the resulting patterns of support for and opposition to the reform process. To what extent was it a partisan issue, with politicians divided on the merits of reform according to their party affiliation? To what extent did public response show a similar partisanship? Why did the opposition to reform fail? Was the opposition's case inherently unconvincing, or was its weakness more organizational and tactical than substantive?

The path to proportional representation

The process of electoral reform in New Zealand was not rapid. It took almost exactly 10 years from recommendation to implementation, a time span attributable very largely to the resistance of both major parties, Labour and National.

Nevertheless, the saying "rust never sleeps" applies to electoral reform. As long as New Zealand had FPTP, and especially after the Social Credit Political League began to contest elections as a significant third party in 1954, there were voices calling for PR. But for more than 20 years, they were voices in the wilderness of an indifferent electorate. Before the 1980s, advocacy of electoral reform was associated with eccentrics, zealous fringe groups, including Social Crediters, and a few academics.

The unusually perverse election results of 1978 and 1981, an increase in electoral volatility and the resulting reduced dominance of Labour and National, and a deepening disillusion with politics and politicians contributed to the creation of an environment receptive to reform. Electoral reform would never have captured public attention it not for the anger that followed the radical economic reforms of the Lange-Palmer Labour government of 1984-90 and their acceleration under, combined with the broken promises of, the Bolger-led National government of 1990-1993.

Consecutive elections in 1978 and 1981 demonstrated with unusual clarity the unfairness of the FPTP electoral system. In 1978, an increasingly unpopular National Party government was returned to power with the support of 39.8 percent of the popular vote, the smallest share for a winning party since the emergence of the Labour-National two-party system in 1938. FPTP translated the National vote into a clear parliamentary majority of 55 percent of seats. Even more provocatively, and for the first time, the loser, Labour, had won a slightly larger share of the vote--40.4 percent. Moreover, Social Credit, harvesting the protest vote, attracted 16 percent of the vote but only one seat. This was repeated three years later when National won 38.8 percent of the vote for 51 percent of the seats, while Social Credit's 21 percent delivered only two seats.

The Muldoon National government was especially reviled by Labour activists, largely as a result of the Prime Minister's devastatingly pugnacious style. Labour, naturally, was aggrieved by the two election results. Social Crediters felt similarly robbed. As a consequence, anti-National political antagonism began to focus on the electoral system, with a growing belief that the system was unjust and unfair.

Other issues also cast doubt on the integrity of the electoral system. The electoral rolls in 1978 proved to be embarrassingly inaccurate. The following year, Geoffrey Palmer, a front-bench Labour politician and former academic constitutional lawyer, published an influential book which highlighted the lack of institutional constraints on governments elected under FPTP in New Zealand. Phrases like "unbridled power," the title of his book, and "elective dictatorship," and the quip that the New Zealand political system was capable of "the fastest law in the west" met with an increasingly receptive audience.

Palmer became the most senior and influential political advocate of electoral reform. Subsequently, a Labour conference adopted as policy that a future Labour government would appoint a royal commission to inquire into the workings of the electoral system. When Labour was elected in the snap election in 1984, Palmer, now Attorney General and Deputy Prime Minister, acted on the conference directive and appointed a five-person commission.

Dissatisfaction with FPTP was also increasing among the growing number of minor party supporters. The share of the vote won by the main minor parties rose to a new peak of 18.5 percent in 1978, rising again in 1981 to 21 percent, and dropping only fractionally to 20 percent in 1984. In 1993, the year of the crucial referendum on MMP, a third of all the votes cast went to parties other than Labour or National--including 18 percent to the Alliance Party (an amalgam of five small parties), and 8 percent to New Zealand First (formed only months before the election). Sympathy for electoral reform was strongly associated with minor party voting, both because of the heavy disadvantage they face in FPTP elections, and because support for third parties reflected the widespread disillusion with the performance of the major parties. A post-election survey conducted by the New Zealand Election Survey Programme (2) showed that in the 1993 referendum 82 percent of Alliance supporters voted for MMP, as did 69 percent of New Zealand First voters.

Disillusion with both major parties--exemplified by the growing volatility of New Zealand voters, up to 45 percent of whom changed their votes between 1990 and 1993--was an important precondition of electoral reform. By 1993, popular opinion towards politicians had been soured by nearly a decade of politically-driven change, first by a Labour government, and, when it was thrown out in 1990, by a National Party government which simply accelerated the rate of change along the same path.

Trust in Parliament, which was over 30 percent in 1975, had slumped to single figures by 1988 and remained there through 1993. Post-election surveys in 1993 found that National, the incumbents, were considered "untrustworthy" by 62 percent of voters; Labour, despite three years in opposition, was declared "untrustworthy" by 44 percent. By contrast, only 15 and 22 percent, respectively, saw the Alliance and New Zealand First as "untrustworthy." Overall, the 1993 data convey a clear message: hostility, distrust and cynicism were now deeply embedded in New Zealand's political culture.

Unintended outcomes

None of these predisposing factors made electoral reform inevitable, but once the Royal Commission had recommended the move to PR (3) the genie was out of the bottle. Given the extent of the cross-party opposition to PR, politicians might have been able to reverse the genie's progress, but the adversarial, winner-take-all culture of New Zealand politics, one of the targets of electoral reformers, made co-ordinated resistance to reform unlikely.

The politics of electoral reform in New Zealand might appropriately be called the politics of miscalculation. The first miscalculation was Sir Robert Muldoon's calling a snap election in 1984, which Labour won. While Labour would likely have won had the election been held at the scheduled time later in the year, Muldoon's action raised the emotional heat of adversarial, two-party politics and demonstrated the lack of constitutional constraints on plurality-based governments. This, combined with National's two "stolen" elections of 1978 and 1981, helped to bring the normally hidden issue of electoral reform into greater prominence.

In power, Labour fulfilled its promise and appointed a Royal Commission on the electoral system. While advocates of reform welcomed the initiative, most were either pessimistic about the outcome or cynical of the government's motive. Certainly the Commission's radical recommendations could not have been predicted from its composition.

This was followed by Labour Prime Minister David Lange's extraordinary error during the 1987 election campaign when, in a TV debate, Lange promised a referendum on electoral reform. The referendum was not part of the government's policy (Lange later explained that he had misread his notes), and the promise, lacking either Caucus or Cabinet approval, had to be revoked after the election, thus providing ammunition to opposing parties' accusation of Labour vacillation.

The issue was also kept alive by the work of a Parliamentary Select Committee established to review and report on the Royal Commission's recommendation. The Committee received more than 600 submissions, many, of course, having their source in the Electoral Reform Coalition (ERC), the main pro-reform lobby group. As the pessimists had foreseen, the Review Committee's recommendations (4) were conservative compared to those of the Royal Commission and did not include the Commission's preference for PR. The Labour majority on the Committee, "mindful of the views expressed in submissions favouring PR," did, however, promote the idea of increasing the number of MPs to 120, as well as of a non-binding referendum on whether the additional members would be elected on a plurality or supplementary-member basis. At this point, therefore, while the advocates of reform had made progress, the politicians were still firmly in control, and the Royal Commission's recommendations were being selectively rolled back.

By now, the Labour government was in turmoil. In 1989, Geoffrey Palmer, a strong supporter of PR, replaced Lange as PM. But in the face of the anti-PR majority in his own Caucus, Palmer was unable to pursue PR or even to move on the Select Committee's recommendations. It was left to National to move the process forward.

As the National Party's representatives on the Select Committee had opposed the suggestion of a referendum (presumably sanctioned by the leadership and Caucus), the Labour government's paralysis on the issue should have been welcomed by the Opposition. But, as the 1990 election approached, Palmer's vulnerability on the issue provoked National to promise a referendum on electoral change.

Despite the imperatives of adversarial politics, National's stand is perplexing. There was little support for electoral reform from within the party hierarchy or the constituency. (5) Moreover, the policy was almost certainly unnecessary, as the polls were showing National heading for a landslide victory. National's referendum policy put the politicians' control of the issue at risk in order to highlight Labour's perfidy on the issue, while also neutralizing any further attempts by Labour to appeal to populist sentiments by again offering a referendum on electoral reform. Overall, National's decision to commit itself to a referendum that, up to now, it had opposed must be seen as a serious error of judgment.

With hindsight, it is now clear that National compounded its tactical error with a conceptual one. In upholding its promise to submit the electoral issue to a referendum, National contrived a two-referendum strategy, perhaps in the hope of killing off the proposal on the first round. The first referendum was to be a "stand-alone," non-binding referendum, in which electors were asked, one, to vote for change or no change, and, two, which of four possible electoral systems they preferred--MMP, single transferable vote (STV), supplementary member (SM), or preferential vote. Although the turnout was only 54 percent, there was an overwhelming 84 percent for change (in question 1), and 71 percent favouring MMP (in question 2). The rejection of FPTP and the focus on MMP were both sufficiently decisive to nullify the effect of the modest turnout. After all, as advocates of reform quickly pointed out, the proportion of electors who voted for change and MMP was at least as large as the share of the vote that had elected governments in 1978 and 1981.

The unintended effect of the 1992 referendum was to give the reform process and MMP, in particular, a powerful push. Since change had been overwhelmingly endorsed in the first part of the referendum ballot, the government was now committed under its two-referendum procedure to holding a second and binding referendum at the same time as the 1993 general election. This referendum was to take the form of a straight run-off between EPTP and the MMP, the option endorsed in 1992. Control of the issue was obviously slipping from the hands of politicians.

The strength of the vote for change was attributable to the public mood of dissatisfaction and cynicism mentioned above. That MMP overshadowed all other reform options, including STV, the so-called Anglo-Saxon form of PR, owed most to the legitimizing effect of the Royal Commission's recommendation, the resulting high visibility of MMP compared to other forms of PR, and, given the intrinsic appeal of certain of its features, the capacity of MMP to win support.

Mobilizing opinion: advocates

The Royal Commission was crucial to reform. Cynics might say that such commissions are a tool of prevaricating governments. But a Royal Commission report cannot be ignored by a government, even if not bound by its recommendations. In this case, the Royal Commission report, provocatively titled "Towards a Better Democracy," became a constant point of reference for advocates of reform. That they had been recommended by a non-partisan body gave the proposals an aura of objectivity, as did its method of analysis.

The Commission listed 10 criteria considered essential for an electoral system in New Zealand, then evaluated a variety of systems against these criteria. It concluded that PR performed better against the criteria than did FPTP, and that the most appropriate form of PR was MMP. As well as arming the advocates of reform, the Report tended to disarm its opponents. How, in the climate of popular opinion at the time, did one defend a system that produced election results that are "less fair" than those under PR? How could one oppose a reform that would reduce the power of government and make it more accountable to a more representative Parliament, or which spoke of greater consensus instead of adversarial bickering? Rather than directly address the Commission's arguments, critics of the report tended to dismiss it as the product of academics, or refer scathingly to other countries' (usually Italy or Israel) government instability under PR.

Sensing the authority of the Royal Commission's advocacy of PR, the Electoral Reform Coalition (ERC) adopted the strategy that all electoral reformers should speak with one voice--the voice of the Royal Commission. Thus, many supporters of STV in particular made a pragmatic decision to fall in behind the campaign for MMP. In the run-up to the 1992 referendum, therefore, MMP was the most publicized, visible embodiment of electoral reform. The ERC's only major caveat concerned the Commission's recommendation that separate Maori seats should be abolished. In its public utterances and subsequent submissions to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Electoral Reform, the ERC argued for their retention, a position shared by both major parties.

The ERC developed a branch structure throughout the country, with a core of committed activists in each major city and regional town. By means of public meetings, press statements, letters to editors, pamphlets and persistent lobbying of MPs, the ERC kept the issue highly visible. Through 1992 and 1993, with interest rising as the referendums approached, the pro-reform network widened significantly to include the Alliance Party (which included five minor parties, all supportive of MMP), the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, and several Labour and National MPs.

MMP, apart from being a snappy acronym, proved to be a saleable product. A transition from FPTP to PR is a radical move, but an advantage of MMP is that it achieves proportionality while retaining the traditional and familiar presence of the local MP. The Royal Commission had been right in sensing the normative strength of local representation embedded in West-minister politics.

Linked to the preservation of local MPs was another selling point in favour of MMP. At public meetings people proved warmly receptive to the prospect of having two votes (both optional), one for a candidate in the voter's "home" electorate, the other for a party from the list of registered parties. More generally, the value of "fairness" of representation under MMP struck a chord with electors, a significant minority of whom had in previous elections "wasted" their votes on minor parties which achieved little or no voice in Parliament, and which one-party cabinets could ignore.

Mobilizing opinion: opponents

Compared to the ERC, opponents of MMP were slow to organize. Even then, their case lacked an authoritative, coherent source equivalent to the Royal Commission's reasoned analysis in favour of MMP; and, unavoidably, the opponents of change were attempting to defend a status quo that had already generated widespread disillusion and cynicism.

Organized opposition to MMP first appeared in 1992 when prominent Labour and National politicians launched the Campaign for First Past the Post. The credibility of this initiative was undermined, however, by its self-serving nature--the spectacle of defensive bipartisanship was greeted with derision. As a result, and especially after the overwhelming vote for change and MMP in the 1992 referendum, politicians were less inclined to be prominently identified with defence of the status quo, and the Campaign for FPTP was disbanded.

Its place was taken by the ambiguously titled Campaign for Better Government. The CBG attempted a two-pronged strategy of denigrating MMP while at the same time arguing a popular line in favour of parliamentary reforms intended to improve the system under FPTP. As it locked horns with the Electoral Reform Coalition, the CBG concentrated increasingly on its first objective.

Headed by a prominent businessman and supported by the powerful Business Roundtable, the Employers' Federation, and Federated Farmers, the CBG worked with a budget estimated at nearly NZ$2 million, far outspending the ERC. This advertising financed a professional advertising campaign that focused in particular on the alleged instability of PR-based systems, the enhanced power of (extreme) minorities (the tail wagging the dog), the consequent lack of decisive government, the loss of governmental accountability within the framework of coalition governments, and the "facelessness" of list MPs, beholden not to the electors but to party bosses. (6)

The campaign met with some success, and polls taken during 1993 showed the gap closing between support for MMP and FPTP.

At the same time, however, the opposition to reform tended to be self-defeating. The David and Goliath character of the contest was a strategic disadvantage for the CBG. Its financial backers and spokes-people personified the arrogance of institutionalized power that had come to be associated with the radical economic reforms of successive "unbridled" Labour and National governments.

The CBG's allegations were not necessarily wrong, but they were less convincing in 1993 than they would have been 10 years earlier. Decisive government was exactly what electors had experienced since 1984, and many had suffered the consequences of economic liberalization. The electoral mechanism of accountability had been shown to be flawed in 1990 when the defeated government's successors continued with the same policies. There was widespread belief that under FPTP the checks on executive power were too few and ineffective.

Another fundamental weakness of the CBG's campaign was its overt association with big business. This was sensed by many to be as self-serving as had been the politicians' Campaign for FPTP in 1992. The nature of the CBG inevitably cued left-of-centre electors to vote for MMP in the referendum. In the end, 68 percent of Labour voters did so, comprising 44 percent of all votes cast for MMP. When added to the 27.8 percent from among Alliance voters, over 70 percent of support for MMP came from the two main components of the left bloc. In contrast, National voters, who marginally outnumbered Labour voters, accounted for only 8 percent of the vote for MMP.

In detail, the story of MMP is a very New Zealand one. Yet the New Zealand experience also fits into a broad pattern of change familiar to other liberal democracies--a rise in voter volatility, a weakening of the electoral alignments between parties and social groups, and the development of more pluralistic social structures. In this context, and even before the introduction of MMP, New Zealand's plurality-based, two-party system was fragmenting into a multi-party format more compatible with a proportional electoral system.

References

Jack Vowles, Peter Aimer, Helena Catt, Jim Lamare, Raymond Miller, Towards Consensus? The 1993 Election in New Zealand and the Transition to Proportional Representation, Auckland, Auckland University Press, 1995.

Jack Vowles, "The Politics of Electoral Reform in New Zealand," International Political Science Review, 16, 1995, pp. 95-115.

(1) . What New Zealanders call "electorates" or "territorial electorates" are known in Canada as "constituencies."

(2) . These and other polls cited are, in general, from the New Zealand Election Studies Programme. NZES began in 1987 and was expanded in 1990 to a fully nation-wide, random sampling of registered electors. The NZES is funded by the Foundation for Research Science and Technology, which administers the Public Good Science Fund. Principal researchers are Jack Vowles, University of Waikato, and Peter Aimer, University of Auckland.

(3) . Report of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System "Towards a Better Democracy," Wellington, Government Printer, 1986.

(4) . Report of the Electoral Law Committee, "Inquiry into the Report of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System," Wellington, Government Printer, 1988.

(5) . We know that in the 1993 referendum only 7 percent of National MPs and conference delegates--the influential core of the party membership--voted for MMP (Vowles, et al, 1995:178).

(6) . The Electoral Act (1993) requires parties to select and rank their lists of candidates in a manner which is compatible with democratic practices. This means that candidates must be either directly selected by the party membership or by selection committees, which themselves have been elected by members. Different parties employed variants of the second option, with procedures for achieving first a set of regional lists before integrating these into a final nation-wide ranking.

Opponents of MMP had argued that ranked, closed lists, which could not be altered by electors, were conducive to behind-the-scenes manipulation by the organizational and party leaderships. This allegation took root as a widespread perception, which appeared to be confirmed by controversy over Labour's list placings, especially of some sitting MPs, and was further reinforced by disputes within New Zealand First, the clear implication again being that the party leadership had intervened in the process.

In the debates prior to the referendum, during the transition to MMP, and since the first MMP election, the status and role of the "list MPs" has been contentious. To many people they are second-class MPs, not elected by "the people"; worse, they may be unsuccessful electorate candidates--losers who are nonetheless winners, and, thanks to a favourable placing on a party list, are beholden to party bosses rather than electors. There remains a whiff of illegitimacy about being a list MP, a fact exploited by New Zealand's most popular satirical TV program.