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What determines preferences for an electoral system? Evidence from a binding referendum

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Abstract

Much has been written about politicians’ preferences for electoral systems, yet little is known about the preferences of voters. In 1993, New Zealand had a binding electoral referendum on the same day as the general election where voters chose between keeping a single plurality system (First Past the Post) or introducing a pure proportional one (Mixed Member Proportional). This paper merges data from all nationwide polling stations to Census data on local voters to examine what drives citizens’ preferences for an electoral system. We find that strategic partisan interest was a key driver: voters overwhelmingly preferred the system that most benefited their favorite party. However, socioeconomic characteristics and social values also mattered; people who held more progressive values, were outside the dominant religion and lived in urban areas were much more likely to vote to change to a proportional system. Survey data show that these findings hold at the individual level, and further, that individuals who were angry with the economy were much more likely to vote against the status quo, regardless of their background, party preferences or social values. This behavior is likely to have ultimately balanced the result in favor of Mixed Member Proportional.

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Notes

  1. See Carey and Hix (2013) and Grofman (2016) for a comprehensive summary.

  2. Nakaguma (2015) uses a similar strategy to understand preferences for the form of government, presidential versus parliamentary, using data from the 1993 Brazilian referendum.

  3. The only exceptions we know of are Aimer and Miller (2002) which also examines the New Zealand referendum but only uses the NZES in a descriptive manner and Fournier et al. (2011) which examines a sample of citizens who chose to be part of a long-term deliberative process (one year, 20+ meetings). As the authors acknowledge, this has obvious self-selection issues.

  4. Fournier et al. (2011) is an exception but relied on self-selected participants who were all members of local assemblies in the Netherlands, Ontario and British Columbia.

  5. Voter anger was particular relevant at the time of this referendum because in the late 1980s New Zealand underwent a massive free-market de-regularization where campaign promises had been repeatedly broken by both major parties (Roper and Leitch 1995).

  6. However rational political agents may be assumed to be, the literature also recognizes that most electoral reforms cannot simply be explained by short-term self interest motivations (see, for instance, Benoit 2004; Katz 2005; Norris 2011).

  7. In particular, Aldrich et al. (2014) show that when voters expect a landslide victory of their favorite party, they prefer a ‘winner-take-all’ system, whereas when they are uncertain that their party will get the majority of votes, they prefer a proportional split. This is consistent with elites’ choices as shown in Trebbi et al. (2008).

  8. See Sidanius et al. (1994) and all work cited therein for a discussion on hierarchy-enhancing ideologies and social dominance theory. This hypothesis is also consistent with prospect theory: in their seminal piece, Quattrone and Tversky (1995) show that in the political arena people behave similarly as when making economic decisions. I.e., risk-averse in gains and risk-seeking in losses.

  9. See, for instance, Hooghe and Dassonneville (2018a, b), Kselman and Niou (2011) or Pop-Eleches (2010).

  10. It was “made in a context of ongoing pressure for a referendum on the electoral system, increasing public dissatisfaction with the political process and intensifying concern about the government’s willingness to override public opinion” (Vowles 2008, p. 24).

  11. The four possible alternatives were Single Transferable Vote (STV), Supplementary Member (SM), Alternative Vote (AV) and Mixed Member Proportional (MMP).

  12. A non-binding referendum was held in 2011, in which 57% of the population voted to keep MMP.

  13. Unless there is an ’overhang’, a situation in which the number of MPs may increase in very small numbers. Overhang situations arise when a party wins more districts than the number of MPs designated via the party vote.

  14. Parties are required to get greater than five percent of the overall party vote or win an electoral seat to get their full allocation of seats in parliament.

  15. As an example, suppose that a party wins 35% of the party votes and wins in 20 of the 71 electorates with the ‘electorate vote’. Given that 35% of 120 is 42, this party gains 42 MPs. The first 20 MPs are those who have won the local race via the electorate vote. The other 22 are the first 22 members of the nationwide party list. On the other hand, if a party wins more electorates than the MPs allocated with its share of the party vote, then a situation of an overhang arises. For example, if a party wins 6% of the party votes (which translates into 7 MPs) and 9 electorates, then the number of total MPs rises to 122, and the party gets to keep all its 9 locally elected MPs.

  16. The “Electoral Act (1993)”, reprinted as of July 1, 2017, can be found at http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0087/latest/DLM307519.html.

  17. Labour traditionally won all of the Māori seats which may be an additional reason why many party members were supportive of changing to MMP.

  18. Electoral Amendment Act, 1945, Nov. 12, No. 10; Electoral Amendment Act, 1950, Oct. 6, No. 32; Electoral Amendment Act, 1956, Oct. 26, No. 107.

  19. According to the ‘Voter and non-Voter Survey Report’ issued by the Electoral Commission, 93% voted in a polling station closest to their home in 2008, whereas 92% did so in 2011. There is no data available for previous elections, but there is no reason to suspect that patterns have recently changed in any particular direction.

  20. We are able to geolocate all but seven polling stations which we exclude from our analysis.

  21. The few area units that have three or more polling stations are generally large ones in rural areas. In the Supplementary Materials (Tables IV, VI and VIII) we show that when we cluster standard errors at the area unit level all results hold.

  22. This dataset is not publicly available and was obtained directly from the Electoral Commission. It contains data from 1998. Since the changes in roll composition were minor from 1993 to 1998, we take this as an adequate proxy for the 1993 roll composition.

  23. A special vote is a vote made by an elector who is unable to visit a polling place in their own electorate on election day, or is not on the electoral roll on election day.

  24. Table II in the Supplementary Materials shows the descriptive statistics for the sociodemographic characteristics we include in the regression.

  25. Our preferred specification in all tables is the last column. We report different specifications to provide evidence that results are consistent throughout, and not a result of our particular choice.

  26. Table III in the Supplementary Materials shows that results are robust to including all polling stations from Māori electorates.

  27. Table V in the Supplementary Materials shows that all results hold when including Māori and votes in polling stations that are not located geographically (i.e., “special” votes).

  28. Technically, citizens can also cast their vote in other electorates, but this involves a serious amount of paperwork and very few voters resort to it.

  29. Unfortunately, the 1993 NZES survey did not include respondents’ perceptions of the left (0)–right (10) position of these parties, but the 1996 survey did so. On average, New Zealand First was placed at 5.4, whereas the Christian Coalition, the coalition that included Christian Heritage and the Christian Democrat Party, was placed at 6.9. For reference, National and Labour were at 6.9 and 3.7.

  30. We would like to note that these results hinge on a small subset of our respondents: in our sample, there are 102 voters of New Zealand First (7.9% of the total) and 18 of Christian Heritage (1.4%).

  31. Most specifications show that Māori are significantly more likely to support MMP. Nonetheless, Māori are highly underrepresented in the 1993 sample. Hence, given the small number of observations, we prefer to take this result with a grain of salt.

  32. For more on the discussion of the growth (or lack thereof) of anti-establishment voting and policy platforms, see Goodwin and Heath (2016), Hooghe and Dassonneville (2018a, b) and Hanley and Sikk (2016).

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Acknowledgements

Financial support from Yale-NUS College is gratefully acknowledged. We would like to thank Kai Ostwald, Julien Labonne, Risa Toha, Rene Saran and the audiences at the National University of Singapore, the University of Montréal, and the Political Economy Workshop at the University of New South Wales for their comments. We would like to especially thank Liang Yun, Yaow Yu Hung and Weiliang Tan for excellent research assistance. All errors are ours.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IPERG, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Guillem Riambau

  2. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Steven Stillman

  3. University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Geua Boe-Gibson

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  1. Guillem Riambau
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  2. Steven Stillman
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  3. Geua Boe-Gibson
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Correspondence to Guillem Riambau.

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Riambau, G., Stillman, S. & Boe-Gibson, G. What determines preferences for an electoral system? Evidence from a binding referendum. Public Choice 186, 179–208 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-019-00770-9

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