Investment Banker To Become New Zealand's Prime Minister

While much of the world is vilifying investment bankers for their role in the financial meltdown, New Zealand has elected one as the head of government. The impact of the NZ election is perhaps not as exciting as that of the recent American one, but political junkies should keep an eye on the Kiwis for one particular reason: their electoral system.

After a lengthy PR campaign, New Zealand introduced a Mixed Member proportionality (MMP) system in 1996. In a nutshell, each voter is allowed two votes: one for the local candidate, and one for the party. The party vote determines what percentage of the seats in parliament they get, with a minimum 5% cutoff. Seats are filled by those elected in local ridings* - if there are not enough local reps to fill up those seats, the extras are filled from a list of candidates provided by the party in advance. If there are too many local reps, extra seats can be added to the parliament.

This is, certainly, a more complicated system than first-past-the-post (FPP) and straight-up proportional representation (PR) - Elections New Zealand has admitted that the idea of adding and subtracting seats is not ideal, and have recommended that other countries avoid it. Moreover, MMP tends to weaken parties, which makes the more powerful parties less than thrilled about adopting it. Those two reasons - complexity and vested interests - were probably enough to scuttle a recent attempt to adopt a variation of MMP in my regional parliament.

Nevertheless, MMP has some aspects that are appealing. First, unlike with FPP, you are not stuck with voting for your local candidate only. Many people get frustrated by FPP because, if you vote for a local candidate that does not win, your vote is effectively "wasted" - this can create cynicism and lead to low voter turnout if there's a strong incumbent. Also, unlike pure PR, you still have the chance to choose your local candidate directly - this is the person who represents your regional interests at the national level and is therefore a very important element of democracy. Finally, there are those who would like to see the balance tipped away from the big parties to allow for more electoral competition from a wider range of smaller parties. MMP provides that.

No single electoral system will have it all, and no single electoral system fits every society**, but New Zealand's MMP provides an interesting case study in trying to combine the pros and cons of two systems into one.

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*There's an additional complication of Maori-specific electoral districts, but that's a particular NZ flavour of MMP that is not required elsewhere.

**I was about to suggest that small, coalition-led governments work best in smaller countries, but woops! there's Belgium's "196 days without a government" transition to prove me wrong. Maybe cultural homogeneity is equally important.

(Photo: National Geographic)