New Zealand's Electoral Reform

Full Transcript:

Introduction: 

Hello and welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast where it is my job to discuss and compare democratic institutions.

New Zealand’s electoral reform of 1996 is an important case to know and understand for anyone interested in institutional change. So for people who want to learn about electoral reform this episode provides many insights and lessons learnt.

With Jack Nagel I discuss how New Zealand moved from a Westminster type first-past-the-post system to a mixed-member proportional representation, that we find in Germany for instance. The reform changed not only the character of its parliament but also of its governments. The reform has allowed smaller parties to be better represented and it also improved the overall balance of political power. Prior to the reform the Labour Party and the National party controlled the political regime, while now they mostly have to cooperate with smaller parties.

Together we discuss the major political events and developments prior to the reform and how many factors contributed to the reform movement and dynamics. We discuss the role that the parties in power, and also those groups excluded from power played, but also the important role of direct democracy that pushed the political system forward in major steps. In addition, an educational campaign on the various suggested electoral systems was crucial in giving the people the knowledge to make a solid decision.  

Jack Nagel is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences, where he studies democratic theory, voting systems, social choice, and political participation. He is the author of two books Participation and the descriptive analysis of power, and a co-editor of the book Representation: Elections and Beyond and he has written numerous articles published in journals such as the the American Political Science Review, the British Journal of Political Science, and World Politics.

Yet, most importantly for this episode, he closely followed and studied the process of electoral reform in New Zealand. And you can find more of Jack Nagel’s research on his website, and link to it in the show notes.

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the twenty-eighth episode of The Rules of the Game podcast. I am a political economist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland. And I previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Center for Global Development.

You find a full transcript of this episode on my website rulesofthegame.blog. I am always curious to hear your opinion, so just send me an email to [email protected], and please leave a review and share this episode with friends and colleagues. If you find my discussions interesting and you’d like to support my work, consider buying me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com and you find the link to it on my website rulesofthegame.blog. 

Interview:

Stephan Kyburz: Jack Nagel, welcome to the rules of the game podcast. I’m very happy to have you on the show.

Jack Nagel: Thank you Stephan, I’m very glad to be here.

Stephan Kyburz: So I start my episodes always with the same question and that is: What is your first memory of democracy?

Jack Nagel: Well, if you don’t mind I’ll give you two and I’ll put the gloss on them that I wouldn’t have added at that time but that I, in retrospect, I would put on. When I was about six years old in 1950,  president Truman fired general Douglas Macarthur for insubordination. This was at the time of the Korean War and my father who had worked on Macarthur’s staff in WWII, sent a telegram to president Truman and I don’t know what he said, I don’t remember. I don’t know if he was for or against it. But there are two things I’d take away from that; One is that in a democracy the elected officials rule, not the people who control military power or force. And the second was that any citizen can communicate to the head of government. I don’t know if it was read personally but those messages can be important and you can feel free to do that. And the second memory is a couple years later when I was 8 in 1952, there was a presidential election and in my third grade class in school there was a mock election held. It was a republican year in a republican town and Eisenhower won overwhelmingly, even though I’m pretty sure I voted for Stevenson. But in about the same time we had a class election for class officers and I was voted in as president of my class and from that I would take that in a democracy sometimes you win and sometimes you lose even with the very same electorate. Depending on what the issues are and their personalities and so forth.

Stephan Kyburz: Thanks for sharing those memories. I’m always impressed when memories go like, back into, you know, history. It’s amazing and also I feel like, you know, mock elections I have actually had another guest on the podcast who also talked about mock elections at school and about winning and losing and I think it’s actually probably an element that is is quite useful in school when we learn about, that sometimes we win and sometimes we lose.

Jack Nagel: Yeah I hope schools are still doing that sort of thing. I think in the US, at least, education for democracy, Civics Education has taken a backseat in recent years. I hope it’s being revived. 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah let’s hope of course. And today I’d like to talk with you about the electoral reform in New Zealand, the one in 1996. And you have done a lot of research on that reform. You were a scholar also traveling and living in New Zealand, if I get that correctly. 

Jack Nagel: Yeah.

Stephan Kyburz: You have followed that reform closely and so I think it’s going to be very interesting to hear from you. You know what you have analyzed and kind of the whole process of the reform.

Jack Nagel: Yes, I was in New Zealand as a Fulbright scholar in 1986. And I didn’t go there to study electoral reform. I didn’t know it was anything that might happen. But at that time there was a Royal Commission that had been appointed to study the electoral system. I didn’t think anything would come of it. But around 1991/92, my friends in New Zealand said there is going to be a referendum. There were actually two. And the second Referendum was in 1993. That was the one that was binding and resulted in the adoption of the Mixed Member Proportional system which was implemented for the first time in 1996. And I went back to New Zealand in 1993 to observe the referendum and interview a lot of people about it. And then I followed it from a distance for many years. I didn’t go back to New Zealand again until 2011 when they had a second referendum on whether to keep the system or move to something else. And that second Referendum voted pretty strongly to keep MMP. So I was there to observe that and interview people about that.

Stephan Kyburz: So we’ll definitely get back to these referendas. But before we discuss the, you know, how this whole reform came about, I’d like you to comment on something Arend Lijphart said who is a very well known political scientist. He said New Zealand, before the reform, was kind of a perfect example of a Westminster democracy. What did he mean and what were the elements of that type of government?

Jack Nagel: Well, the pure Westminster system would have a parliamentary sovereignty. No separation of powers into an elected executive and so forth. Either a unicameral system or a weak bicameral system, the house of lords doesn’t count for too much. New Zealand abolished its upper chamber long ago. First-past-the-post elections, which usually result in the dominance of two parties, one of which will control the government with an absolute majority after most elections and that party’s rule is pretty much unfettered. The New Zealand reform changed only one element of that collection of characteristics but that was a very important element that was the electoral system from first-past-the-post to a kind of proportional representation. But following as a result of that you don’t, any longer, have a pretty pure two-party system. You’re very likely to have a multi-party system and that’s very likely to result in some form of coalition government or more than one party having to agree on policies and legislation. And that all came to pass in New Zealand. So it was a quite crucial reform. Even though the other institutions of a unitary government parliamentary sovereignty and so on stayed intact.

Stephan Kyburz: And I definitely want to come back to that point of you know, forming government, how these coalitions changed over time. But before that let’s go back to prior to the reform. So it was a classical two-party system with the National party and the Labor party. And they pretty much power moved between them and the elections, what they produced were usually majorities in the parliament of seats. But often, or at least the few elections prior to reform were quite controversial, right? Because I think there were several times when a party didn’t win a majority of votes but essentially ended up with a majority of seats and that kind of created this criticism of the first-past-the-post system that, essentially there were kind of constructed majorities. Can you maybe elaborate on what was the situation before the reform and how did that public discussion, also on alternative electoral systems come about? And also the commission that you mentioned, the Royal commission of inquiry into the electoral system.

Jack Nagel: Yeah, well in any electoral system where votes are not aggregated system wide but are aggregated district by district there’s a possibility the nationwide total of votes will be different in who wins then the district by district aggregation actually controls. So we have that in the US in the Electoral College which has resulted in say Donald Trump receiving fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016 and yet he received more electoral votes as they were aggregated state by state. Well that can happen in a single member district parliamentary system such as Britain has or New Zealand had. And it happened twice in New Zealand. In 1978 and 1981 the Labor party received more votes than the National party over the nation as a whole but the National party won more seats and therefore controlled government. This by the way is not an uncommon pattern. Not just in New Zealand but many other countries because the party more on the left, which was Labor in New Zealand, tends to have its votes concentrated in urban areas and with the densely populated urban areas. It can run up very big margins in some constituencies and the party of the right tends to have a more evenly spread out vote in suburbs and rural and mixed areas. So there’s a structural advantage very often to the party of the right. That’s true in the US for the House of Representatives also. But anyway with those two wrong winner outcomes, Labor realized they were at a structural disadvantage. So they pledged in their manifesto or party platform to set up a Royal commission to have an inquiry into how to avoid that. In 1984 they won. There was a split in the National party; a third party got a substantial number of votes and that may have contributed to National’s loss and Labor did follow through to appoint a Royal commission. And now they were just looking to tinker with the system, they didn’t want to lose their position as a party that would control government from time to time and that would be part of a two-party duopoly but they wanted that two-party duopoly to be more fair to them. But the commission that was appointed was a very distinguished group of 5 individuals with great ability and integrity and they became in effect a runaway commission. They went around the world studying electoral systems in many countries and decided on one as the best system for New Zealand. They called this the Mixed Member Proportional. It’s actually based on the German system, a system Germany has had since WWII. So that’s how MMP got on the agenda but the story of how it adopted is far more complex than that.

Stephan Kyburz: One question I have is what was necessary for this Royal Commission to get started. So labor was in government at that time when they appointed the commission right? Because it was like a campaign promise.

Jack Nagel: Yes. Well, the appointment of the commission was in the hands of the minister of justice who was also the deputy prime minister. His name was Jeffrey Palmer and he was a very unusual political leader because he wasn’t really a politician. He had been a professor of constitutional law and indeed had formerly been a member of the National party who switched for reasons we don’t need to go into. So he was more of a reformer than a politician and he was well plugged into intellectual networks of scholars and judges. So he appointed a commission that was of such people. And he was not steering them toward a PR or any particular system but he wanted them to look at the situation in an impartial, dispassionate way and come up with what they thought would be the best system for New Zealand

Stephan Kyburz: And was at that point the discussion already public? Was the public involved? Were different groups in Civil Society involved at that time?

Jack Nagel: Yeah. I need to back up a little bit. Besides the structural disadvantage for the Labor party, there were two other structural sources that gave some impetus to electoral reform; one is the rise of minor parties. In New Zealand being a small country, small constituencies and fairly permissive laws, it’s pretty easy for minor parties to get on the ballot but under the first-past-the-post system, even if they got a substantial number of votes they would not win any seats. Usually once in a while maybe two seats or something but way less than their vote. So the people who voted for these minor parties became a constituency for reform. They realized the system was stacked against their point of view. In addition, New Zealand has a substantial indigenous minority, the Maori people and from way back in the 19th century New Zealand had set aside 4 constituencies. It was a dual constituency system. So the map of the whole country was divided into the general constituencies which were numerous and then four Maori constituencies where initially only Maori could vote and it’s the only place they could vote. It was later liberalized so Maori had a choice of which role to go on. But anyway, by the time of the reform there were 99 seats in parliament and the Maori had only 4 of them. And the proportion of the population that had Maori ancestry was more like 15%. So the Maori were terribly underrepresented. And in addition by concentrating their votes in constituencies that are all Maori those constituencies were won overwhelmingly always, at that time by the Labor party. And that contributed to the wrong winner outcomes in 1978/1981. So the Maori people realized that the system was not fair to them. Now I should say that the system had been liberalized so that Maori candidates could run in general electorates. And sometimes they did win but in such constituencies but not very often. So you had the system being unfair to supporters of small parties, unfair to the Maori people and then unfair to one of the two big parties, the Labor party. And that gave some impetus for reform. But whereas the supporters of small parties and Maori people may have wanted a radical reform like proportional representation most people in the Labor party just wanted to tinker with the system to be sure that it would be more equitable to them but not to the others.

Stephan Kyburz: And also the representation of women was still quite low. Even though New Zealand was the first or one of the first countries to adopt women’s suffrage, right?

Jack Nagel: Yes, New Zealand was the first at a national level back in 1893, some time around that. But as in most first-past-the-post systems women were underrepresented in parliament.

Stephan Kyburz: So leading up to the first Referendum which was more like a consultative, it was not a binding referendum, in 1982 the National party was back in power and they were traditionally not in favor of Electoral Reform. What was kind of the push or why did they have to follow through with these referendums?

Jack Nagel: Well, both parties and particularly National put their short-term campaign interest ahead of their long-term interest in keeping the system the way it was. And they did this by miscalculation, they thought it wouldn’t hurt. But in the election of 1987, the prime minister David Longie from the Labor party in a debate had made a promise to hold a referendum on the recommendation of the Royal Commission and almost immediately his party in parliament said: No no, no, we don’t want to do that because it might create a multiparty system and and we would no longer be in solem power so they backed away from it. Well in the 1990 election the National couldn’t resist seizing on that betrayal of a campaign promise and campaign promises were very important in New Zealand, they were supposed to be adhered to strictly. So National pledged to hold a referendum if they were elected into power and they were. Now at the time they made that promise they didn’t think that a reform would ever pass. But things… There were several ingredients that led to the reform being successful. One was the ongoing efforts of a grassroots group called the Electoral Reform coalition, which had been pushing all through this period for a referendum on the Royal commission’s recommendation. And they were very vigorous and they never gave up and that led to politicians having to respond in one way or another. The second was that both the Labor government from 1984 to 1990 and the National government that followed in power were implementing very radical economic reforms that greatly liberalized toward a free market kind of system, what had formerly been a very sheltered almost socialist system with full employment, more equality and not a lot of economic competition. Not a lot of openness. So these radical reforms were pushed through by those governments without majority support. Each of those governments had less than a majority of the electorate behind it and they could use party discipline in parliament and the dominance of the cabinet to push through reforms that really were supported by only a pretty narrow slice of the electorate. And so people more and more who were unhappy about the reforms or the way in which they’d been adopted without real consensus, without compromise, began to blame the electoral system for enabling one party to have sole power monopoly of power on the basis of, well, under a majority of votes I think the National government of 1990 or 1993 had only about 35% of the vote. So that led to more questioning of the electoral system per se. In addition, the immediate impact of the reforms was very bad on the economy and the economy went into a tailspin with high unemployment, a great increase in economic inequality and stagnation of the GDP, there was no growth for several years. So by the time the referendums were held, particularly the indicative referendum the first one in 1992, people were just angry. Not just because they didn’t like the electoral system but because everything was going badly.

Stephan Kyburz: And the distrust. There was a lot of distrust in government as well, right?

Jack Nagel: That’s right. And blaming politicians, blaming the system that gave them so much power and just wanting to vent frustration. So contrary, in 1990 National making that promise to hold a referendum thought: It’s okay, we can keep the lid on, we’ll control the outcome. But by 1992 they had lost control and it was a popular uprising. The vote was overwhelming that the first-past-the-post should be replaced. And then there was a second part to the referendum that said if it’s replaced which of four systems should be adopted and that part was also a very strong majority for the Mixed Member Proportional system that the Royal Commission had recommended.

Stephan Kyburz: So the alternatives were the MMP,  the Mixed Member Proportional system and then there was a Supplementary Member system and the Preferential system. So there were different types. Some were multi-member or multiseat districts and others…

Jack Nagel: Right. There were four options on the ballot; one was kept single member constituencies but used the preferential alternative vote. In the US it’s sometimes called the Instant Runoff system and that’s the Australian system for their House of Representatives, so it was quite familiar to new zealanders. A second system was also based on a rank choice or preferential ballot but had multi-member constituencies and this is called single transferable vote. It’s the system used in Ireland, in Malta and for the Australian senate. It’s a form of proportional representation but a less precise form.

Stephan Kyburz: So like, based on a rank choice ballot.

Jack Nagel: Rank choice ballot. The third system was this so-called Supplementary Member and that like the Mixed Member Proportional would have single-member constituencies and some people elected proportionally from a party list. But the people elected from the party list, there would not be any compensatory allocation of seats. So no adjustment of the list seats for the outcome in the constituencies. So it was not a truly mixed system. It added an element of proportionality to the same basic system that they already had and I think that’s the system that politicians in New Zealand had favored. If there had to be a reform, let’s put a little element of proportionality on it and that may enable the party that gets more votes to get more seats but it won’t change the fundamental single member constituency dominance.

Stephan Kyburz: Right. Because the proportional part would have been only a small minority of seats right? 

Jack Nagel: That’s right.

Stephan Kyburz: So the overall system wouldn’t have been very proportional. It would still… The two parties could have controlled that system. 

Jack Nagel: Exactly.

Stephan Kyburz: And why do you think this coalition behind the Mixed Member Proportional system grew that strong? Or why was the choice of MMP so strong? Was it just because the Royal commission was behind that choice as well or were there other reasons?

Jack Nagel: I think that was the reason. Although I’ll say a little more about why it was the reason. In any electoral reform movement there would be different reforms that might solve the same problem. We see that in the US right now where there’s division among would be reformers. Some favor the Instant Runoff alternative vote systems, some favor something called Approval Voting, some favor others and because they can’t get together they’re unlikely to ever be successful. So you need reformers to converge on a focal alternative, where they say this is the one that we will all come together on. And the fact that MMP had been recommended by the Royal Commission made that the focal alternative that they could converge on. But it wasn’t just that it was recommended by the Royal Commission. The Royal Commission issued a report that was a book-length report and it is a remarkable document. It’s a very fine work of applied political theory and because they made such a thorough and convincing case people were persuaded that… Many people were persuaded that this really was the best system for New Zealand. Now there may have still been some supporters of say Single Transferable Vote which was the traditional preferred reform in the anglo-american countries because it involves voting for individual candidates, not for party lists. So there may have been some people who still wanted that but they, with the Royal Commission report establishing MMP as the likely option and persuading so many people that it was really the best one, they came along and joined the coalition.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, and also probably the experience in Germany, right? 

Jack Nagel: That’s right.

Stephan Kyburz: Which was overall quite successful I think. 

Jack Nagel: Yes

Stephan Kyburz: Was probably a good reason right?

Jack Nagel: if you’re going to have a new reform it always helps for it not to be entirely new but something that’s been tested.

Stephan Kyburz: Exactly. So there was in 1992 the indicative referendum, as you call it, when 85%, if I get that right,  of voters were in favor of changing the electoral system. 

Jack Nagel: That’s right.

Stephan Kyburz: And then 70% were in favor of and MMP of, you know, the ones who wanted to have the change and then… 

Jack Nagel: Against the other 3 options.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly. So the MMP was clearly the winner. And then in 1993 there was the binding Referendum. So essentially the National party government they had to follow through, right? They couldn’t just ignore this indicative referendum. 

Jack Nagel: Yeah, when you had that overwhelming vote in the indicative Referendum they had to go along. And at that point the politicians were demoralized. One of them told me that, we were so unpopular that – we the politicians – that if we came out for MMP that would hurt it. Any position that we took the voters would go the opposite way. So most of them laid low, stayed quiet and maybe worked behind the scenes. The forces opposing the reform came more out of the business community and they had very substantial funding for a campaign to vote NO in the referendum.

Stephan Kyburz: And would you agree, you know, like you say that the business community was quite clearly against the reform. So they were probably afraid of losing power. Also probably in a more proportional system with more parties it’s harder to do lobbying. Would you agree with that?

Jack Nagel: I don’t know about the lobbying aspect. Maybe. And I don’t know that all the business community opposed MMP but a lot of them did. And the reason was that they had been very strong supporters of the economic reforms, the economic liberalization and they saw that that had been made possible by the first-past-the-post, one-party government. And so they were loyal to that system. Even though MMP would make it harder to change the existing economic system, the new status quo. And some of them understood that but most of them didn’t realize that if you had to bargain among multiple parties it would be harder to introduce any kind of radical reform. Such as going back to the previous state dominated economy.

Stephan Kyburz: The coalition, as you said, was like growing. So I read that there was a women’s electoral lobby and then there was the smaller parties who also joined this movement in favor of the change. Was the role of these smaller parties that were not yet really represented in parliament very well, was that an important push for the reform? I guess.

Jack Nagel: That was certainly an element in the Referendum there were votes from smaller party supporters but they of course were not a majority of voters but just an element in the coalition. Also many of the activists in the electoral reform coalition came out of parties like the Green party. But there were a lot of Labor supporters who came out in support and voted for the reform. Even though most of the Labor parliamentarians ,either sat in the sidelines or were opposed. Another big element, important element in the reform coalition were Maori voters who voted overwhelmingly for MMP.

Stephan Kyburz: Because it would improve their representation, right? Overall. 

Jack Nagel: Yes, yes.

Stephan Kyburz: And what was the role of the media? I’m not sure how much you know about this but I also read that the media had quite an important role in pushing for it right? Or was it mixed I guess.

Jack Nagel: Well I’m not sure about the media. But what was important was a publicly funded educational campaign. New Zealand has a great tradition of political fairness. Even though the electoral system wasn’t really fair, but many things they do in a very fair way. So they set up an educational campaign because Mixed Member Proportional was new to new zealanders and a rather complex system, needed a lot of explanation. And the campaign, they appointed a couple of outstanding political scientists to provide the technical information. But then they hired an advertising agency to produce the materials, the videos, the TV spots, the pamphlets and so on. And they did a very imaginative way of presenting information. The information was accurate. With the input from the political scientists but it was presented in a way that people could grasp and it was fair. It was always; Here’s one choice, here’s the other, here’s what that will do to the party system, that’s what this will do to the party system. And it would end with: well, what’s it going to be? And leaving the question up to the voters. And the funding for that campaign exceeded the funds that the so-called committee for better government, which was the anti-reform group, were able to amass from their donors. So educationally people came to understand electoral systems remarkably well which is not a subject that most people and least in the United States have any inkling about.

Stephan Kyburz: So that the direct democratic element really pushed people to have to understand right? What was happening and also the implications it would have.

Jack Nagel: By the way we should back up about that direct… This whole reform and the referendum were possible because the electoral act in New Zealand which had been adopted in the 1950’s had a provision that the the act itself was entrenched and could only be changed if there were a 75% vote in parliament which would mean the two major parties, most of them, would agree on it. Or if there were a majority vote in a nationwide referendum. So the provision for the Referendum was already established in the electoral act and the Royal commission said that that option should be followed. So that’s what made the Referendum possible.

Stephan Kyburz: That’s super interesting that it was already kind of in law right? These two options and that the commission then proposed the Referendum. So in 1993 the Referendum was approved. Not as clearly as the previous indicative referendum but still but still a majority.

Jack Nagel: Yes. No and what happened is there, I guess, there were 3 things. The indicative referendum had been an off year. So turnout was a bit lower than in 1993 where the referendum coincided with the general election. Secondly the economy had begun to improve, had come out of this depression, almost, and so things were looking better. And thirdly the anti-reform group, the committee for a better government mounted a very vigorous campaign also with clever advertisements. So the vote was not nearly so lopsided as in 1992.

Stephan Kyburz: Obviously I’d also like to talk about, you know, the consequences of the reform. It was implemented then in the subsequent 2 years. 

Jack Nagel: 1996, yes.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, then first used in 1996. And you have written also extensively on the consequences of the electoral reform. So can you elaborate on what happened after the reform and in this first election? And also in subsequent elections?

Jack Nagel: Yeah. In the first election it worked in that minor parties got representation pretty much proportional to their votes and there was one minor party called New Zealand First that got very substantial vote. And became the kingmaker party in deciding which of the big parties would govern. And they negotiated with both National and Labor and eventually formed a coalition with National. And that had two effects. First of all the National government which had very radical free market policies had to moderate those policies a lot to get support of New Zealand First which was more of a centrist party on economic matters. In that way the system was working to produce a majoritarian moderate outcome. But the Labor party people felt betrayed because National government was extremely unpopular but by cutting a deal with New Zealand First they were able to stay in power. And so a lot of Labor and other people who had supported MMP now felt it wasn’t working. And if you had had a new referendum then or through most of the 1990’s, MMP would have been rejected. So I think it’s important to try a reform out for several elections. And the New Zealand act that it established the referendum said there should be a review in 2001, if I remember correctly. And so they did run 3 elections and in 1999 the Labor party did come back to power in a coalition with Greens and others. And so they said: oh the system can work for us. So the 2001 review which was just within parliament said let’s keep this system and by then it was locked in any decision made by parliament. Most members of parliament were elected because of the new system. The people from small parties would not have been there without it and many of the people from the two major parties had got in on the party list, not in the constituencies. So you weren’t going to get a change out of parliament at that point. So since then I don’t know how many elections we’re talking about, almost thirty years. And they have elections every three years in New Zealand. And both major parties have had substantial periods in power but they’ve always had to govern with the support, either in a formal coalition or an understanding of support on votes of confidence and of supply budget. With the exception of the current government. And the current governments, the Labor government led by prime minister Jacinda Ardern. And she became something of a national hero or international hero.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, yeah, the news was always presenting her everywhere. Yeah.

Jack Nagel: Well the 2 big events were the horrible Christ church massacre where her response was widely praised and then the pandemic where New Zealand, under her leadership, had a very strong response to the pandemic. Shut down the borders, had a lockdown that was very successful. So New Zealand had only like 25 deaths in the whole pandemic when she got a lot of support out of that so they held an election. During the pandemic in 2020 and Labor got an absolute majority of seats. That’s the only time that has happened, if I got it correct. They had 65 out of the 120 seats. Even so they formed an agreement with the Green party where the greens didn’t join the cabinet but had some ministerial positions outside of cabinet and were cooperating with Labor. And I think Ardern and others thought that the principle of multi-party government and more than just one party running was an important thing to retain. And it also gave her some leeway in dealing with her own caucus which has had some fractious members and she only had a majority of 5 seats, so if any of them got too obstreperous she could turn to greens.

Stephan Kyburz: And were there any periods when forming a government was difficult? Because this is always an argument right? Of people against proportional representation and obviously if you have a lot of fragmentation in parliament, building parliamentary governments is much harder. Was this ever an issue?

Jack Nagel: Yes, it was in the very first MMP election 1996, because the negotiations between New Zealand First and the two major parties took a very long time. By New Zealand standards. I mean they were used to governments forming immediately after an election and it was weeks. I don’t remember how many but quite a while. And that was another thing that soured people on MMP. But following that the politicians got more used to using the system and sometimes they had pre-electoral agreements about who would form a coalition with whom. And the New Zealand First support fell very precipitously in the next election because people felt that they had behaved in a cynical opportunistic way. So I don’t know the exact length of time in all the subsequent elections but there’s not been anything that protracted that I’m aware of.

Stephan Kyburz: And the politicians, I guess, also have to become used to the new system right? To actually building coalitions while before the party could just solve that issue within the party.

Jack Nagel: Yes, and they learned to work with it. I think one thing that the major parties learned to do is to turn less often to formal coalitions but to have minority governments very often where they could play off the minor parties against each other. And for one piece of legislation go to one minor party and for another go to another and that prevented any minor party from having too much power. And sometimes the minor parties preferred to be outside of cabinet because if a minor party goes into formal coalition with a big party, the big party will get credit for most of the gains and the minor party will be seen by its followers as having sold out if they don’t get their core demands. We saw this in Britain with the Liberal Democrats in coalition with the conservatives. It turned out to be quite disasters for the Liberal Democrats. And that was true for New Zealand First in 1999, they had a big fall. So there was a bit of wariness of formal coalitions and willingness to form minority governments that would bargain issue by issue.

Stephan Kyburz: And how did the situation change for the Maori minority?

Jack Nagel: Well, the system worked beautifully for the Maori and from the very first election they were about proportion to population. Initially 15%. I think currently there are about 20% of parliament who are of Maori ancestry. In that first election 1996, the leader of the New Zealand First party was himself a half Maori man named Winston Peters and he later became a member of the Labor led government. Though every government that’s come into power has had support from Maori, not necessarily all the Maori members. A feature we haven’t talked about is that the reserve seats for Maori, the dual constituencies have continued under and MMP. This was something the Royal Commission wanted to get away from but the Maori people themselves wanted to retain those seats and part of the reform then was to allow them to increase in number depending on how many Maori enrolled on the Maori list as opposed to the general list. So currently, there are 7 Maori seats as opposed to 4. But a great many Maori are also elected off the party lists. All the parties have an incentive to have Maori on their list as well as people from other minorities and women. And the representation of women has increased greatly. It’s close to 50% now. The representation of Maori, their representation of pacific islander minority community, asian minority communities. And I think there are currently 7 LGBTQ members of parliament which is quite a high proportion including the deputy prime minister.

Stephan Kyburz: And one thing we haven’t talked about is the threshold. The voting threshold is at 5%. I think there were discussions to lower that threshold. What’s your opinion on that?

Jack Nagel: There are actually two thresholds to qualify for list seats. A party has to either win 5% of the list vote or to win at least one constituency seat. So there is that back door by winning a constituency seat. My opinion is that the… And I gave this advice in 2011. A number of other political scientists did too, that the threshold should have been lowered. Maybe to 3%. A lot of the strengths of the system are due to its proportionality and the threshold leads to an element of disproportionality because the votes cast, the party votes cast for small parties under 5% are wasted. For example in 2020, the Labor party won just over 50% of the party vote but got 65 out of the 120 seats, so instead of getting just 60 or 61 out of the 120. So that extra bonus of 4 or 5 seats was due the votes wasted for small parties. But anyway the party, the decision was to keep the 5% threshold.

Stephan Kyburz: And what would you think or would you say are the lessons learned? If you look at other countries. Are there lessons that we can take away from this example that maybe translate… Well, it’s never… Each case is different, right? But from your point of view what are the most interesting points to take away for other cases.

Jack Nagel: Well, the biggest takeaway is that electoral reform is possible working through an established system. That it isn’t just something that when a country is starting from scratch after a revolution or when it’s just democratized. That an established democracy can have a radical reform of its system. But it’s also clear that it’s not easy or it would happen more often. And the ingredients that made it possible in New Zealand were numerous. It wasn’t one thing you could point to such as – oh one of the big parties was at a disadvantage – Yes, that’s true and that was a necessary condition but it wasn’t sufficient. There were a lot of other things including the availability of an extra parliamentary decision mechanism, the referendum, the ability to set the reform option outside of parliament, so that you wouldn’t have politicians tinkering with reform to their own advantage. So the reform would be perceived as to the benefit of all of the country as a whole. So the mechanism of the Royal Commission was important there. The existence of a very strong and vigorous and persistent grassroots movement. And I could go into the list a bit further but it is encouraging to see that it can be done and to look at what made it possible in New Zealand and see when those conditions apply or don’t apply elsewhere or how they could be made to apply, how they could be put into the mix by delivered action. I think when political scientists look at electoral reform, and there’s been a lot of literature on this, they tend to look at structural factors and rational behavior. Usually interpreted in terms of party self-interest, partisan interest. And those are important but… And looking at New Zealand reform it was more than that. It was some people in parliament who were idealistic. Almost nonpartisan actors, the way Jeffrey Palmer acted. There was the element of agency by grassroots reformers and some people in parliament and by the Royal Commission. The intellectual element of coming up with a really good system and then there’s the element of contingency, the chance thing that the referendum was held just at the time when people were really upset because of the economic situation.

Stephan Kyburz: So the dynamics are really important right? It’s not a linear process.

Jack Nagel: Yeah, definitely.

Stephan Kyburz: And people need to learn about new systems and that actually change is possible. And I think, you know, examples from other countries always help when we see how it can happen right?

Jack Nagel: And the other element I would emphasize, which is under-appreciated, is the educational campaign that was very fair, very well funded and very well done. And I’ve looked at reform attempts in Canada and Britain and some of them which were to have MMP in some of the Canadian provinces and they foundered and very often they failed because there was no real good educational campaign. Not one that was well funded and imaginative. So people said oh I don’t understand that system, so I’ll stick with what I know.

Stephan Kyburz: So for people who’d like to read up –  You know, I definitely link to your work, to your website but can you recommend any other papers or books on this case or maybe on cases in general?

Jack Nagel: There was one book length study published shortly after the reform called “New Zealand adopts proportional representation” is by Keith Jackson and Alan Mcrobie , political scientists in New Zealand. I don’t know how widely available that is outside of New Zealand. Two New Zealand authors of that time still around that I would recommend strongly are Jack Vowles – V O W L E S –  he had a very good paper in the International Political Science Review in about 1995. And Jonathan Boston. Jonathan particularly looked at the follow-up effects on parliamentary procedures and rules and coalition formation. I’ve got a number of papers, the ones actually most relevant I’ve never bothered to publish. I’ve been retired for a while and you don’t worry too much about publishing but some of them are available online or I could send them to you, are about this question of can the New Zealand example or lessons from it be applied elsewhere. I also had a 2012 paper that was published in New Zealand that looked at the consequences from a democratic theory point of view of the reform up till that time. And that was for a semi-popular audience. It’s in a journal called Public Policy I could send that to you as well.

Stephan Kyburz: I’ve read that and I will definitely link to it. So Jack Nagel thanks a lot for taking the time to be a guest on the Rules of the Game podcast. I enjoyed the conversation a lot and I learned a lot. So thanks and hopefully we can have maybe another conversation at some later point.

Jack Nagel: I would welcome that. Thank you Stephan. And thank you for what you’re doing to spread awareness of these very important matters that underlie democracy.

Stephan Kyburz: Thank you.