J. Vowles, P. Aimer, S. Banducci, J. Karp, R. Miller, eds. - Voters' Veto
Jonathan Boston, Stephen Church, Stephen Levine, Elizabeth McLeay and Nigel S. Roberts, eds.
New Zealand Votes: The General Election of 2002,
Victoria University Press (Wellington), 2003,
$49.95, 424 pp., illus., ISBN 0 86473 468 9 (paper).
Jack Vowles, Peter Aimer, Susan Banducci, Jeffrey Karp and Raymond Miller, eds.
Voters’ Veto; The 2002 Election in New Zealand and the Consolidation of Minority Government
Auckland University Press (Auckland), 2004
xii + 265 pp., ISBN 1 86940 309 6 (paper).
The 2002 general election was New Zealand’s third experience of MMP, and political scientists wonder whether the system has yet ‘settled down’. The result suggests that the old Labour-versus-National dichotomy continues, even within coalitionist guise ─ despite Labour spin-scares of a Green breakthrough. The background to the poll raised unresolved issues: Labour’s Alliance partner disintegrated but its party-list MHRs did not resign from parliament. The prime minister’s early election call seems to confirm that the governor-general has little say over dissolutions. Turn-out fell: in percentage terms, for every eight citizens who participated in the brave new MMP dawn of 1996, only seven bothered to vote six years later. The campaign did not go entirely the way Labour had hoped, and Helen Clark’s called one interviewer as ‘a sanctimonious little creep’. But voters seem to have known what they were doing. Labour won the party vote in 65 of the 69 electorates, including twenty which fell to rivals in local contests. New Zealanders wanted Labour to lead the next government, but not to control it. One surprise was the performance of United Future, a merger of two small socially conservative parties. Although not part of the new government, its eight members promised it general support.
Both volumes under the review are the fifth in their series. New Zealand Votes is the product of the Victoria election series, Voters’ Veto of the New Zealand Election Study. New Zealand Votes retains some echoes of the early Nuffield election surveys in Britain, organising 28 contributions into five sections: Overview, Party Perspectives, Candidates, Media Coverage and Results. Many of the thirty contributors were activists themselves: it was pleasant to see an echo from the Norman Kirk era in Margaret Hayward’s account of flying the red flag (or, at any rate, running for Labour) in Rangitikei, while Eamon Daly’s experience (as Labour’s list candidate number 53) of campaigning in a wheelchair makes the point that it is not only the winners who help to shape politics. Of course, political actors do not necessarily know what is going on around them. ‘It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what we did that was so right for this election (p. 132)’, writes the United Future campaign organiser. New Zealand Votes continues the Victoria series’ splendid idea of including a colour section of party posters, and adds a CD of nineteen clips from advertisements and interviews. (There is also an erratum slip for one of the tables.)
If the presentation of New Zealand Votes implies that democracy is fun, Voters’ Veto is serious both in appearance and content. The twelve chapters deal with shifts in support since 1999, the outcome of the election, the impact of campaigning, the role of television, strategic voting, candidate motivation, voter mobilisation and public opinion. Concluding chapters investigate voter attitudes to coalition government, seek to place New Zealand democracy in an international comparative context and examine the role of leadership and trust in the system. Both volumes have appendices, with Voters’ Veto giving extensive information about the New Zealand Election Survey. New Zealand Votes, on the other hand, supplies notes on contributors, whereas it only incidentally emerges that one chapter in Voters’ Veto is the work of three specialists from Canada. Two comments are applicable to both volumes. They would benefit from a list of tables and diagrams: the analysis in Voters’ Veto is particularly dependent upon such apparatus. And it is puzzling that so many as five editors are required for each volume. Why have more than an executive team of two? One running head in Voters’ Veto renders ‘election’ with two Cs: is this a case of too many cooks?
[British Review of New Zealand Studies]