-> What sort of response level was recorded ?  NZ used to enjoy 90%  
-> voting levels before MMP,  but since then it has dropped to the  
-> 60's.   Our local body elections are just concluding across the  
-> country, and heading for a 40% kind of participation... 
  
Elections, especially provincial ones, never produce a very high 
turnout here. 60% would be regarded as good. Yesterday's election got 
53%, and nobody is complaining. 
  
->  DW> And the MMP proposal has been defeated by a wide margin. 
 
-> Oh boy - if you resided next door,  I'd send over a magnum of best  
-> NZ bubbly - Kiwis know exactly how lucky you are !! 
 
-> Miles. 
  
I'm not so sure. Maybe the political climate is different here. Parties 
have always (at least in recent decades) been the driving forces in 
politics. Almost all votes in Parliament are ones in which each member 
has to toe his party's line. When one party gets an absolute majority 
of seats, as happened yesterday, it can do pretty much what it likes, 
even though only a minority of the population voted for it (42% 
yesterday). Only when another election is approaching does the 
government have to take much notice of public opinion. 
  
Occasionally, we get "minority government" situations, where no party 
has an overall majority. Actually, that situation exists in the Federal 
Parliament right now. So, to get anything done, the parties have to 
co-operate, making compromises that take differing viewpoints into 
consideration. Usually, that turns out to be a good thing. Minority 
governments tend to be a bit unstable, but they govern better than 
majority ones. 
  
But the "first past the post" system has the effect of giving parties 
numbers of seats that greatly exaggerate the numbers of votes. The four 
parties here got 42, 32, 17, and 8 percent of the votes yesterday. 
(Independents and tiny parties picked up a percent or two.) But the 
leading party (the Liberals) got about two-thirds of all the seats. 
  
There's an empirical rule called the Cube Rule that predicts pretty 
well how many seats the parties get. The numbers of seats are 
proportional to the *cubes* of the numbers of votes. If you calculate 
the numbers of seats this rule predicts with the voting numbers above, 
they are pretty accurate. 
  
But is this good democracy? Wouldn't it be better to have something 
that makes the numbers of seats directly proportional to the numbers of 
votes. Here, this would almost always produce a minority government, 
but that's okay with me and most other people. 
  
Oh well... The point is academic now, and probably for the foreseeable 
future. 
  
                              dow 
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