ANGER AND CONSTRAINT? NEW ZEALAND'S ELECTORAL POLITICS 1992 TO 2014

Abstract

New Zealand's electoral referendum in 1993—at which New Zealand abandoned first-past-the-post in favour of mixed member proportional representation—has been described as ‘an electoral earthquake’ after ‘generations of dormancy’ [Norris, P. 1995. Introduction: the politics of electoral reform. International Political Science Review 16 (1): 3–8, p. 4]. Alan Renwick [2010. The Politics of Electoral Reform: Changing the Rules of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] has argued that the referendum is an example of electoral reform by elite–mass interaction, which is very rare in Western democratic nations. New Zealand is, therefore, a valuable case for analysis of electoral reform. Even more exceptional by international standards was the follow-up referendum New Zealand held in 2011/2012 on the electoral system. This article brings analysis of New Zealand's electoral politics up-to-date to include these recent events; it specifically asks whether Renwick's theory of elite–mass interaction also explains the outcomes of New Zealand's electoral politics in 2011/2012. It reveals that the 2011 referendum does not fit easily with the stages in Renwick's model (and New Zealand's previous experience) because the 2011 referendum was manufactured by government elites, not demanded by the New Zealand public. But the principle underpinning Renwick's model—that mass discontent with the general state of politics acts as a legitimacy constraints on elites—still has important analytical value in explaining the New Zealand case; unlike in 1992/1993, in 2011/2012 the New Zealand government was able to ignore the (complacent) public's electoral system preferences without fear of being punished at the polls.