Who Will Stop MMP Reform?

To continue the analysis I started in my previous post on the apparent unpopularity of MMP in NZ and its possible demise I ask: Who will try and stop a move back to First-Past-the-Post electoral procedures? Let’s take a purely utilitarian approach to this question.

In Parliament, the opposition must surely be opposed to a government which seems to seek to change the electoral ‘rules of the game’ to its advantage. And I believe the Labour party will oppose a move away from MMP, ostensibly for the reason I mentioned previously: Labour has traditionally had more allies with which to form coalitions under MMP, and can thus consider the current system to be to its advantage.

Because the matter will be decided by a public referendum, one could assume that Labour supporters and supporters of all small parties would vote against a move away from MMP and as a bloc form a majority. National did not win a clear majority in the last election after all.

However as the last post showed, not only National supporters are advocating a change back to First-Past-The-Post. Why? And without a Labour-Small Party bloc who will support MMP?

I suggest that National’s success in wooing the Maori Party and United Future has changed some Labour supporters’ view of the ‘rules of the game’ of MMP in that they no longer see themselves as a priviliged player under MMP compared to National. If National can also form coalitions with three or more smaller parties, what are the benefits to Labour from MMP (over and above those for National, it goes without saying)?

There are none. Labour supporters are therefore put in a position the same as National supporters were up to now: they have no reason to support proportional representation when they could govern alone under First-Past-the-Post (except ideational reasons which I may look at later). By this reasoning, if voters vote according to their parties’ interests at the referenda only small party supporters will support PR and MMP should be shown the door.

How to explain politicians’ continued support of MMP? They are hedging their bets, maintaining their popularity in the eyes of smaller parties, who they will have to work with until 2014 at least, and perhaps beyond if the referenda fail.

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New Poll Shows NZers Unhappy with MMP

There is a very interesting poll on the NZ Herald website today which shows most New Zealanders would like to change their electoral system away from MMP. 49% said they would vote against MMP at a referendum, 36% said they would vote for it and 15% said they didn’t know which way they would go. There is to be a referendum on whether to keep MMP at the next general election.

To compare these figures to the results of the election a year or so ago: Then only 14% of voters voted for a small party – that is not for National or Labour (but excluding those who did not make it into Parliament). So MMP obviously has support outside its core demographic of voters who do not subscribe to the two main parties.

However, a larger proportion of respondents are against MMP than voted for National at the last election: 49% versus 45%. I find this a little surprising, as my first instinct on MMP reform was that it was just a case of the victors being able to change the rules of the game to ensure their continued electoral success: National has always had a lesser number of willing coalition partners than Labour and thus would prefer a return to FPP. (Yes, I maintained this belief despite John Key’s sincere utterings that most NZers want to stick with MMP – which have been proved to be wrong).

But this result seems to indicate something a little deeper than that: It is not just National, but also Labour, supporters wanting to get rid of proportional representation. The flip-side of the 14% of people voting for smaller parties are the 79% of people voting for either Labour or National, as shown below.



As this graph makes visually clear, if supporters of the two main parties decide that they no longer want proportional representation, and would rather govern alone without coalition partners, they will always be able to push this through.

This is, of course, a simple case of majority rules and exactly what MMP was brought in to prevent. Should the change to MMP therefore be regarded as an anomaly; a short period where the majority were so disillusioned with politics that they were prepared to allow minorities a more significant say, which has now passed?

Of course we will have to see what the results of the actual referenda are, but this initial poll result would suggest that supporters of both main parties are a little more cold-blooded in their attitudes towards minorities than one might have expected.

Coalitions in Germany and NZ

Three weeks after the Bundestag election in Germany and the discussions between CDU, CSU and FDP continue. It is still not clear what the exact policy directions of the new coalition government will be, or who will occupy which ministerial/government posts.

I see an interesting difference in the coalition bargaining between the parties and what has gone on in NZ after MMP elections since 1996.

The German parties are driving hard bargains. Both the CSU and FDP are sticking to their guns and placing demands on Merkel’s CDU that they make concessions so the smaller parties honour their pre-election commitments. There have been several examples of this as the discussions have gone on, for the FDP most notably in measures protecting personal privacy.

But as predicted, the big one sticking point is tax cuts: both smaller parties want them, the CDU knows they can’t really afford them. Merkel doesn’t want to be seen as fiscally irresponsible and run large deficits just to finance tax cuts (and the CSU will not allow this anyway). The result is a sort of Mexican stand-off. This has been going on for weeks. It has finally been decided that there will be tax cuts, the question is how big they will be.

The important point here compared to NZ is that the coalition bargaining is very detailed, and very contested. I am not an expert on NZ’s coalition agreements, but NZ moved away from both these aspects after the first experience with coalition government in 1996.

Then, Winston Peters and NZ First undertook to draw up a coalition agreement which set out most important policy directions in writing. Peters drove such a hard bargain that he was seen to be holding the country to ransom, and the discussions took so long that the country was without an effective government for two months. NZ First ended up going with National, which was the opposite of what they had alluded to pre-election. The coalition didn’t last very long, and neither did NZ First’s (or MMP’s) popularity.

Since this negative experience with detailed, drawn-out coalition bargains NZ has moved to a more flexible approach based on agreements on confidence and supply (settling other issues on a more ad-hoc basis), which would seem to be more in keeping with the country’s Westminster/common law tradition. Helen Clark’s Labour did this with the Greens in 1999/2002 and with NZ First/United Future in 2005. John Key has a similar confidence and supply agreement with ACT, United Future & Maori Party.

The Germans, however, seem happy to persist with longer, more contested coalition bargaining phases in which major policy issues are hashed out in detail after the election. This is more in line with the German tradition of constitutional consensual government, and the German civil law.

Key’s ‘Labour Lite’ and Why Parties Move to the Middle

Remember back to before NZ’s November General Election and the scrutiny of National’s leader and future Prime Minister John Key? He was labeled as ‘Labour-lite’ and centrist; his party was careful not to wage war on some of Helen Clark’s more popular policies; the differences between the two main parties were small, negligible even.

And for those who follow US politics – you must have been struck by the partisan divide in both society and politics between the Democrats and Republicans. It is, in the words of a columnist, ‘The 50/50 Nation‘. Heck, the two camps even have their own separate news channels!

Over in Germany, people ask themselves: What is the SPD doing in opposition? (oops, sorry, the election isn’t for 2 weeks. I meant, Grand Coalition.) They could form a government with the Greens and the Left Party tomorrow!

Discussion of all these issues, and some others which I have speculated upon here previously, can be informed by a powerful, but simple, political science model (originating in economics) called the Median Voter Theorem.

Briefly, the theorem is a model of majority decision making which states that the median voter’s preferred policy will beat any alternative in a vote; in a stronger form it also says that the median voter will almost always get his/her most preferred policy. The rationale behind it is too much for this blog and is explained briefly and clearly here, but the consequences are far-reaching.

If we apply the model to the Left-Right spectrum above, we can come to the following conclusions:

1) if voters cast their vote for the candidate closest to their ideal policy, then the candidate who stands nearest to the median voter will win. In this case, this would be candidate A, who is closest to point M.

2) if the candidates are free to choose their policies, they will choose positions which will place them closest to the median voter’s at M; so candidates A and B will move in the directions of the arrows towards the middle of the graph and the median voter’s preferences will be fulfilled.

The theory puts the median voter in the lucky position of always getting what they want, but it also has other consequences – many more than will be expanded on here, but to go back to the examples above:

Key vs. Clark in NZ: parties will choose policies which are moderate and middle of the road; no wonder that they look so similar.

Democrats vs. Republicans in the US: if parties continue to act as above for many years they could create blocs, each accounting for approximately half of the population (see the column from Mickey Kraus).

The SPD and the Left Party in Germany: parties will be very careful not to take extreme positions which could alienate voters closer to the median.

So there you have it. A brief but hopefully not-too-incomplete rundown of the Median Voter Theorem in five minutes. A simple, powerful analytical tool for analyzing party politics.

Political Parties and Electoral Success

I return to the comparison of which parties are represented in the German and New Zealand houses of parliament and seek to draw some conclusions about what influences party representation in Parliament. Drawing on my previous posts, and bearing in mind that this is just a blog and not an academic paper, I put forward three possible factors influencing party success in elections:

1. Electoral System. A very important factor in a party’s success is the rules under which it is playing the political game. Just ask the Greens, who were never represented in the House before the introduction of MMP but have been ever since.

2. Socio-Economic Factors. According to a typical left-right spectrum, this should be the key influence on party formation and influence, with socio-economic groups organising themselves politically in order to represent their interests in parliament. Perhaps the deciding factor behind the lack of a powerful extreme left party in NZ.

3. Political Culture. This is a very difficult concept in political science: Trying to define political culture has been described as being like ‘nailing a pudding to a wall’. However it is a concept which has lasting influence and appeal. It used to be referred to as ‘socialisation’ – the way that people were initiated into the way politics is done in their society. Phenomena like distrust of  ‘Kingmaker’ parties in NZ, caused by negative previous experience with them, can only be put down to something like political culture.

And as for which factor is most important: As you can see from the brief examples above, they all seem to be important – in different ways and at different times.

German and New Zealand Political Parties Compared

So now we know that NZ and Germany have a similar electoral system and which parties are represented in the German parliament compared to in NZ. What strikes us or is puzzling when we look at both parliaments from a comparative perspective?

1. There is no FDP-equivalent ‘Kingmaker Party’ in the New Zealand House of Representatives.

This is by far the most puzzling aspect of the NZ Parliament from a comparative perspective. As noted in a previous post, the FDP has successfully positioned itself as a centrist kingmaker party which has policies compatible with those of both major parties. As such, it has in the past formed coalitions with both SPD and CDU/CSU and been in government for longer than either of them, or any other party in the German Bundestag.

Why is there no such party in NZ? It looks, after all, to be a successful and appealing franchise. For answers, look to Winston Peters and NZ First. The first MMP election and its drawn-out coalition building phase had the public seeing a ‘Kingmaker’ as ‘holding the country to ransom’ or ‘the tail wagging the dog’, perhaps damning the concept of a centrist kingmaker party for some time.

2. New Zealand has no extreme Left Party.

The German Left Party can be seen as something of a historic relic; a leftover from Communist East Germany. However, it is now also represented in several West German state parliaments and therefore has a broader appeal than might otherwise be assumed.

But New Zealand politics have no equivalent, and there seems to be no call for an equivalent to the Left Party. To speculate on why: The lack of a strong organised labour movement; Lack of industry and therefore large concentrations of workers in single areas.

3. The NZ Maori Party.

Germany has no parties openly organised along racial lines; the only possible exception being those aligned with the neo-nazi movement. None of these is represented in the Bundestag, although unfortunately some are in state parliaments.

The Bundestag and some state parliaments (Landtage) do allow for special dispensation for minorities – they do not have to clear the five-percent-threshold but only win the proportion of votes equivalent to one seat. However, there are no seats reserved in the Bundestag or Landtagen for minorities.

4. NZ First/United Future/Progressive Parties.

The German electoral system has, like NZ’s, a five-percent-threshold which parties must clear to be represented in Parliament. However it does not have the direct mandate rule which gives parties their proportion of seats in the House if they directly win one electorate seat, even if this proportion is less than five percent.

This rules out parties such as those named above, whose popularity depend so much on one person, which do not clear the five percent threshold, and without a direct mandate in an electoral seat would not be represented in Parliament.

German Political Parties

Having established the basic similarities between the NZ and German electoral systems, we now have to ask: How do they function day-to-day in each country? The best place to start here is with the parties – what they stand for and how they are represented in the Bundestag give us a good indication of how politics in Germany works under a proportional representation system.

CDU/CSU (NZ Equivalent: National): The Christian Democratic Union was formed after WWII with the goal of a ‘Christian Socialism’, which has now changed into that of a ‘Social Market Economy’ (we see that in this point the two main parties agree). However the CDU is more conservative than the SPD, and also more market-oriented. One should not underestimate the Christian element of the party (it is in the party’s constitution), although it is open also to non-Catholics. The CSU is the CDU’s sister party in the state of Bavaria, which cooperates with the CDU in the Bundestag.

SPD (NZ Equivalent: Labour): The German Social Democratic Party is the oldest party represented in the German parliament and committed to its own version of Democratic Socialism, which means: Freedom, Equity and Solidarity. In practice, this means what the Germans call the Social Market Economy, including a comprehensive welfare state and redistribution of wealth. The SPD historically has high membership and close ties to organised labour unions, although this is no longer necessarily the case.

The Free Democratic Party/FDP (NZ Equivalent: None): Often known as ‘The Liberals’, the FDP has successfully positioned itself in the middle of the political spectrum in Germany, and so has been in Government longer than any other German party – albeit as junior coalition partner. As a liberal party, the FDP is for the rights and responsibilities of the individual and free market economic policies.

Green Party/ Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (NZ Equivalent: Green Party): The Green Party is, quite obviously, a party with a focus on enviromental issues. Its core philosophy is that of sustainable development, however its policies spread into areas such as health, social policy (where they are leftist/liberal) and foreign policy (where they are more pacifist than other parties).

Left Party/Die Linke (NZ Equivalent: None): The so-called Left Party is the direct successor of the ruling party in the former socialist German Democratic Republic (East Germany), which after 1989 was renamed PDS and has gone on to merge with other leftist parties and contest elections in Germany on the state and federal level. As an extreme left party, it pursues ‘democratic socialism’ and that Capitalism be ‘overcome’.