New Zealand has used Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) since 1996 to elect members to the New Zealand Parliament. But finding clear information on the elections there is difficult. This blog is an attempt to address this.
An easy way to picture MMP elections is this explanation :
Mixed-member proportional (MMP), about half the representatives are elected from single-member districts (SMDs) and half from party lists, but seats won in SMDs are subtracted from list allocations so they do not diminish overall proportionality. (from "Proportional Representation" by J.H. Nagel, in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, 2001)
The system used in New Zealand is more complex because some parties (ones with less than five percent of the party vote) do not get seats, unless they take at least one district seat. Thus the proportion of the seats that successful parties receive is larger than the proportion of the votes that they receive.
Here is how New Zealand did it in 2020:
The 2020 New Zealand general election was held on Saturday 17 October 2020.
It is noteworthy because it gave one party a majority of seats. Majority win is common in Canada's winner-take all elections --- usually because a party with a minority of the votes wins a seat count far in excess of its popularity.
The 2020 win stands out because it is thought that PR automatically means a minority government.
Also note that Labour won majority government after it won a majority of the party vote across the country. Unlike Canada's majority government wins, NZ's Labour Party actually deserved its majority win! Most governments in Canada never get a majority of the vote so do not deserve majority status.
And to kick it all, even though Labour got a majority of the party vote, and legitimately won majority government, it decided to share power, inviting the Green members into a coalition government.
Here is how the election went:
The election elected 120 members to the House of Representatives,
72 from single-member districts (through winner-take-all FPTP elections) and
48 from closed party lists.
From Wikipedia "2020 NZ election" -
New Zealand uses a Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) voting system to elect the House of Representatives. Each voter gets two votes, one for a political party (the party vote) and one for a local candidate (the electorate vote). Political parties that receive 5 percent of the party vote (or one electorate seat) receive seats in the House in proportion to the percentage of the party vote they receive.
72 of the 120 seats are filled by MPs elected in FPTP district elections.
(Within these 72 seats, Maori have seven designated seats where only those who identify as Maori can vote. If a voter votes here, he or she can't vote in any of the 65 standard electorates. The Maori electorates cover the country in a system of districts separate from the standard districts system.)
After the district elections are resolved, 48 seats are filled by candidates from each party's closed party list. The 48 seats are allocated based on the number of seats each eligible party is due based on the separate party-list vote minus the seats the party has won already through the district elections.
But only parties that win five percent of the party vote or a district seat are eligible for any supplemental seats.
"Overhang"
If a party wins more district elections than the number of seats it is entitled to under the party vote (an "overhang"), the House will add extra seats to the other parties to bring that party's proportion down to what it should be.
No such overhang occurred in the 2020 election.
Each voter casts two votes
Under New Zealand's MMP, voters cast two votes, one for district election and one for party popularity (the party vote).
Sometimes the local vote varies from the party vote.
Labour received 50.01 percent of the party vote across the country, but it received 48 percent of the votes cast in district contests.
Through the miracle of FPTP, this (large) minority of the vote gave it victory in about 64 percent of the district contests.
Meanwhile, Labour had a lead (had plurality) in the party vote in 71 of the 72 district elections. So judging by the party vote, it would have won all but one of the district seats, although with only 48 percent of the votes cast in district contests (what NZ-ers call electorate contests).
That is, in about a third of the districts the local Labour candidate was not the most popular.
But the largest voting block in almost all districts cast their party-list vote for Labour to form government. (However, note that proportionality is based on percentage of votes overall, not plurality in local districts.)
Parties that won representation
Every party that won seats in this election did so through winning at least one district seat.
(No party was awarded one or more supplemental seats by winning at least five percent of the party vote but no district seats, although this is possible.)
seat totals party vote p.c. p.c./120 seats* party-list seats final seat count
Labour 46 seats 50.01 65 19 65
National 23 seats 26 33 10 33
Green 1 seat 8 10 9 10
ACT 1 seat 8 10 9 10
Maori 1 seat 1 2 1 2
lesser parties 0 8 NA 0 0
Total 72 seats 100 120 48 120
*using party-list vote p.c. after deducting wasted votes (the percentage of votes that went for parties that did not receive either 5 p.c. of the party vote nor an electorate seat),
thus multiplying 120 by party vote p.c. multiplied by 1.0779 (and inserting appropriate decimal point.)
(For more intricate tabulation of this information, see
Wikipedia article "2020 Nz election"
Section "Party vote"
Table entitled "The Summary of the 17 October 2020 election for the House of Representatives" .)
Variance from party vote popularity
The 2020 election result was a pretty pure election result. Only one party took more seats than its party vote would have had it.
Labour should have won 61 seats, slightly more than half of the 120 in total, but instead it won 65.
This election result is seen to be proportional because:
- the party with a majority of the votes received a majority of the seats.
- all substantial groups are represented in due proportion to their popularity.
Waste of votes
7.79 percent of the party votes were wasted. These had been cast for parties that did not receive either 5 p.c. of the party vote nor an electorate seat.
Strategic voting
As well, there is the fact that Labour got 50.01 percent of the party vote but only 48 percent of the district vote. This may mean that many voters cast their party vote strategically, and may not have had Labour as their first preference in reality. Or does it?
(In Rhys Goldstein's analysis [http://rhysgoldstein.com/2018/02/03/bon-mmp-bad-mmp/], New Zealand's MMP is a bad MMP model, as it does not count the district vote as the party vote. Her criticism is based on the idea that under systems where voters cast two separate votes, and only the party vote counts for overall proportionality, people will engage in strategic voting to game the system.
Either
A. those who support the leading party will cast their party vote for a different party because their preferred party will not get any top-up seats, or
B. they will vote for a candidate they can live with whom they think can win in the local district (as under FPTP) and then cast their party vote for the party they truly support.
Neither of these cases explains why Labour received more party votes than district votes. Except if somehow voters mis-analysed the situation and thought B was in effect -- that Labour was not likely to win local districts but would benefit from top-up. It is known that some voters cast their district vote for non-Labour candidates then switched to Labour for the party vote. If Labour lost some party vote due to the A strategy, then the number of these B-strategy voters might be more numerous than first appears.
In Rhys's analysis, based on the statement of Professor Dunleavy, voters who split their vote give their party vote to a smaller party, not to a larger party. So did NZ Labour's larger party vote arise from a mis-perception or from some other un-identified form of strategic voting? I don't know.
Here's the differences:
Labour got 2 more party vote than district vote
National got 8 p.c. fewer party vote than district vote
Green got 2 more party vote than district vote
ACT got 5 more party vote than district vote
Maori got 1 p.c. fewer party vote than district vote
NZ First got 2 p.c. more party vote than district vote.
Other lesser parties 2 p.c. fewer party vote than district vote.
Perhaps many voters voted with principle for the non-Labour local candidate they preferred, irrespective of chance of winning, then gave their party vote to Labour believing it to be the best government for the country, irrespective of whether it would benefit from top-up.
If so, what a way to run a country based on principle and judgement. Crazy!
In any event, NZ voters received the government most of them voted for. Unlike the result in very many elections in Canada.
Such an example might be in Auckland Central where a Green candidate won the district (although with minority (35 percent) of the vote). But for the party vote, many who had cast their district vote for the Green candidate and for the National Party candidate switched to Labour. Perhaps the voters actually felt they were negotiating the make-up of the next government - not wanting to leave it in the hands of politicians to negotiate a coalition government. If they could not have a Green or a National government, then they were good with an outright Labour government.
In closing this point, I want to say that Rhys says that a MMP system where voters cast just one vote - the district vote - is a good MMP system because it means that all parties compete for district elections and all parties compete for top-up seats. Clear transparent competition between candidates and parties, clear voting by voters in line with actual sentiment, where voters do not engage in strategic voting (misrepresentation) is the way to go, and a one-vote MMP system does that.
Top-up seats for all
In New Zealand's 2020 election, every successful party received top-up seats. Perhaps this is due to the relatively large number of top-up seats - 40 percent of the total seats.
Labour received 64 percent of the district seats, a larger percentage than its proportion of the party votes, but still received top-up seats, although a smaller relative amount than the other four parties received.
The National Party and Maori party would have gotten more top-up if their district vote had held strong for the party vote, but as it did not, they did not get as many top-up seats as they might have. These then went to Labour.
Distortions
At the district level, there were two types of distortion -
Labour got 64 percent of the seats, with 48 percent of the district vote.
National got 32 percent of the seats, with 34 percent of the district vote
Green got 1 percent of the seats with 8 percent of the district vote
ACT got 1 percent of the seats with 3.5 percent of the district vote
Maori got 1 percent of the seats with 3.5 percent of the district vote
But these distortions were addressed through the supplemental seats.
Minority election of Members
How many district reps were elected with only a minority of the vote in their districts?
The Wikipedia table "Electorate result of the 2020 N.Z. general election" does not tell us. in fact it hides this by using the term "majority [of the wining candidate]" at the head of one column when it really means the winning candidate's lead over the second-place candidate.
(If there are only two candidates, the majority vote taken by the winning candidate may be almost the same as the lead of one candidate over the other. Certainly the winning candidate will take a majority of the votes. But where there are more than two candidates, such as in Christchurch electorates or in Invercargill, the winner may not take a majority of the votes at all. Under FPTP, it is common for a candidate to be elected despite not getting a majority of the votes at all.)
In Invercargill, for example, the Wikipedia gives the winner's majority as 224, but the she actually did not have a majority at all - Penny Simmonds actually received less than 45 percent of the vote. (I am not picking on her - I just happened to go to her district election result.)
It seems that this happened in many districts, just as it happens all too often in all FPTP elections. But usually elsewhere, unlike in NZ, there are no supplemental members to offset the distortions.
37 of the district winners apparently won with less than a majority of the vote in the district. (source: online - Spinoff "A better visual breakdown of the 2020 election results")
STV might have addressed minority victory of members
Unfortunately, STV or other multi-member district system such as SNTV was not used to allow more proportionality in the district elections.
Here's an example of how multi-member districts could have been used:
In the 2019–20 electoral boundary review, all five electorates in the Otago and Southland regions had to be adjusted as they exceeded the 5 percent population quota. Some electorates were over and some were under the quota, but taken together they were almost exactly on quota. (Wikipedia- "Dunedin (N.Z. electorate)")
So to avoid the job that was done - re-drawing the boundaries and renaming two districts - the five districts, which together were on quota anyway, could have been put together.
thus
Number of votes
Labour National Green ACT NZ First elected
Dunedin 24140 8169 6916 1308 Labour
Taieri 25263 12865 2207 1291 1309 Labour
Sthld ? +5645 ? ? ? National
Invercargill 17,705 17,929 1137 0 735 National
Waitaki ? +3281 ? ? ? National
although partial numbers here, approximate totals were:
66,000 45,000 10200 2600 2000
Five-district system produced this seat count:
SEATS --- three National; two Labour
Multi-member district (PR system) might have produced this result:
SEATS --- three Labour; two National.
And having multi-member districts would have saved the work of re-drawing the maps and moving towns from one district to another to achieve the 5-percent population quota for district size, which was done as part of the 2019-2020 electoral commission work. (How that 5 percent quota works with 72 districts, I have no idea.)
With a larger seat count, perhaps a Green might have squeezed out a victory. Proportionally he or she was added later, but perhaps no one Green living in the Otago-Southland area was elected off the party list. STV or other Single Voting system would have ensured that all substantial groups in each part of the country would have direct representation.
Thanks for reading.
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Other recent exciting development from that corner of the world
new law passed that will allow cities and municipalities to bring in STV or Maori wards, both geared to providing representation for groups usually ignored within cities. We need that kind of progress here in Canada as well.
If STV comes into use in city elections and proves itself as it is bound to do, perhaps in future NZ elections Parliament elections, some of the district (electorate) elections will be conducted through STV. If so, NZ may be said to be using a STV-MMP system.
Why would NZ cities adopt STV?
Here is core of the matter:
the N.Z. law affirms the right of
“fair and effective representation for individuals and communities”.
In the body of the act, effective representation is defined in terms of “effective representation of communities of interest”.
Under STV's multiple-seat districts, voters form themselves into "constituencies of unanimous sentiment," they are not forced to try to conform to some geographical arrangement such as Canadian voters have to do under our single-member district system.
Canadians would benefit by having “fair and effective representation for individuals and communities”.
Canadian would benefit by having STV, or STV-MMP!
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