Electoral system of New Zealand Totally Explained

Everything about Electoral System Of New Zealand totally explained

In 1993 New Zealand adopted mixed member proportional as its electoral system for the House of Representatives after many years of first-past-the-post.
The term of the Parliament is set at three years from its first sitting. This means that elections must be held within around three years, two months after the previous election (for instance the 2002 election was held on 27 July, the latest date the 2005 election could be held on was 24 September). Elections have historically been held in November or December, but snap elections in 1984 and 2002 caused some of the following elections to be held earlier.

MMP in New Zealand

]
   The New Zealand electoral system is a two-tiered system. The lower tier determines the local representative. The upper, over-riding tier determines the proportionality of the House.
   New Zealand voters have two votes. The main vote is the party vote. This vote determines the proportionality of the House, the upper tier of the electoral system. The other vote is the electorate vote for the lower tier. This determines the local representative within the House, and usually doesn't change the proportionality of the House. The electorate vote works as a plurality system, whereby whichever candidate gets the highest electorate vote in each electorate receives the seat. Since the two votes don't need to be for the same party, voters can punish or reward local candidates. In the 2005 election 20% of local representatives elected were of a party other than the party which got the largest party vote in that electorate.
   Parties that receive 5% of the party vote are entitled to a share of the nominally 120 seats in the House of Representatives. So are parties that win one or more electorate seats; a rule which applied to four parties in 2005 that fell below the 5% threshold, although only two of the four obtained list seats also. The seats are allocated using the Sainte-Laguë method. If an independent candidate is elected, then the number of seats to be allocated falls to 119 (or 118 if two are elected, and so forth).
   Parties then fill their seats. Seats are allocated firstly to electorate MPs. Then parties fulfil their remaining quota from their party list. If a party has more electorate MPs than proportional seats, then it receives an overhang. If the party doesn't have enough people on its list to fulfil its quota, then there's an underhang.

Electoral boundaries

The number of electorate MPs is calculated in three steps. The less populated of New Zealand's two principal islands, the South Island, has a fixed quota of 16 seats. The number of seats for the North Island and the number of special reserved seats for Māori are then calculated in proportion to these. (The Māori seats have their own special electoral roll; people of Māori descent may opt to enrol either on this roll or on the general roll, and the number of Māori seats is determined with reference to the number of adult Māori who opt for the Māori roll.)
The number of electorates is recalculated, and the boundaries of each redrawn so as to make them approximately equal in population within a tolerance of plus or minus 5%, after each quinquennial census. After the 2001 census, there were 7 Māori electorates and 62 general electorates, or 69 electorates in total. There were therefore normally 51 list MPs. By a quirk of timing, the 2005 election was the first election since 1990 at which the electorates were not redrawn since the previous election. A census was held on 7 March 2006 and new electorate boundaries released on 25 September 2007, creating an additional electorate in the North Island. For the elections expected in 2008 and 2011 there will be 63 general electorates, 7 Māori electorates and 50 list seats.

Representation statistics

The Gallagher Index measures how disproportionate an election is.

Election	Disproportionality
1946-1993 FPP average	11.10%
1996	4.36%
1999	3.01%
2002	2.53%
2005	1.14%

(source: Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts, The Baubles of Office: The New Zealand General Election of 2005 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2007), pp.33-4 (ISBN 978-0-86473-539-3)

Further Information

Get more info on 'Electoral System Of New Zealand'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://electoral_system_of_new_zealand.totallyexplained.com">Electoral system of New Zealand Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.