Our politicians are selected

To start with, control of who runs for Parliament still rests with parties and their members. And the election process itself is prescribed by law and run by the Electoral Commission in a transparent way, with oversight from parties and detailed reporting.

Some people claim our politicians are “selected not elected.” The implication is that sinister forces control who forms our government, through various kinds of shady manipulation.

• All our parties select their candidates with input from their members
• And those parties are themselves democratic structures that run themselves
• If election outcomes were predetermined, a lot of people would have to be in on it but somehow not spill the beans

This post was hard to write, mostly because people who think New Zealand’s democracy is a sham don’t usually have a clear account of how they think it works. It’s pretty vibes-based. So what follows is partly just a refresher on how it all works.

We have started seeing the phrase “selected not elected” doing the rounds. It needs a lot of unpacking. It’s a thought-terminating cliché, a phrase designed to shut down critical thinking before it can get started. Like “all government is corrupt” or “elections are rigged” it’s meant to discourage and disengage, not to explain. An interesting aspect of the phrase “selected not elected” is it doesn’t actually say who does the selecting, leaving it open to the listener to insert their favourite villain.

Different people offer different answers. For some people it’s billionaires. Or a foreign power. Or maybe old favourites, The Jews. Explanations are generally contradictory, but they try to appeal to a sense that our election results ought to be better or at least somehow markedly different than they are. Why aren’t the right people winning? Maybe this is why. (Again, who the Right-People-Who-Would-Be-In-Charge-If-Things-Were-Fair are differs from one account to another).

Whoever they are, if they want to get their own stooges in, they have a lot of work to do. To understand that work, we need to look at how a person makes it into Parliament and then government.

What is MMP, and how does it work?

New Zealand uses the “Mixed member proportional” system to elect its Parliament. There’s a pretty good explanation of how it works on Parliament’s website:

• Under MMP, 120 MPs are elected to Parliament — 72 are elected by just the voters in individual electorates around the country and 48 are from political party lists (elected by all voters in New Zealand).  It is a proportional system, which means that the proportion of votes a political party gets reflects the number of seats it has in Parliament.
• Each voter gets two votes
• The first vote is for the political party the voter chooses. This is called the party vote and is the most important because the total number of party votes for each party largely determines the total number of seats each political party is entitled to in Parliament.
• The second vote is to choose the MP the voter wants to represent the local electorate they live in. This is called the electorate vote. The electorate vote uses the first-past-the-post system in that the candidate who gets one more vote than any other candidate wins.
• A political party that wins at least one electorate seat, or five percent of the party vote, gets a share of the seats in Parliament. This share is about the same as its share of the party vote.
• The total number of seats a party can have is first determined by the party vote. Then, the number of electorate seats the party has won are subtracted from this total.
• Finally, candidates are elected to Parliament from each party’s list so that the number of list seats, plus the number of electorate seats, equals the total number of seats each party is entitled to.
  

How are candidates selected, and governments formed?

Different parties have different rules for the selection process, which you can check in their party constitutions. But most parties, and all New Zealand’s mainstream parties, have a process that involves some combination of members voting and elected party officials selecting the candidate. All registered party rules can be found here.

You don’t even need to be affiliated with a party to be a candidate for an electorate. You can run as an independent if you want, and some people do.

So once Parliament is elected, the next bit is forming a government out of the elected MPs. Generally parties negotiate with each other to try to put together a coalition that will have a majority of votes. But occasionally (like our last election in 2020) a party will have a majority in its own right.

The prime minister will be the party leader who can convince the governor-general that their party, or a coalition of parties they have put together, can win a confidence vote in Parliament. Party leaders again are chosen through processes in their parties, generally some combination of member votes and MP caucus votes. Party constitutions specify how parties choose candidates, leaders and lists, and can be found here.

To recap the important bits here: anyone can be a candidate, in their own right, or through being chosen by their party. Party leaders are chosen by their parties. Getting into government – being part of the majority bloc, a cabinet minister, or even prime minister – all hinges on winning within your party (if like most candidates you’re not an independent) and then winning the most votes from the public. There are many people involved at every level. (See our earlier pieces on how elections are run to get a sense of it).

Back to the Conspiracy

One thing to note about “selection” stories is that they’re somehow always right. The conspiracy explains everything that has happened so far. And no matter what the result of the next election, it’s what “they” wanted. Maybe every candidate and party is corrupt? That would imply a lot of people are in on the conspiracy, yet not one of them is talking. Especially odd since it’s pretty easy to join a party, go to conferences, and participate as a member.

Despite all that, there is a grain of truth lurking in here. Some people do see little difference between parties, or believe that the range of political views that is represented in Parliament is narrow. There’s also a legitimate debate about media coverage of politics and politicians: is it biased? Does it focus too much on personalities and not enough on policies? Is political advertising and election spending too regulated, or not regulated enough? Political scientists have good explanations about how parties appeal to the voting public and why their views might converge in pursuit of “median voters” Likewise media theorists can explain at length about the feedback loops between media responding to and creating their audiences, the constraints that journalists work under and how editorial choices get made. As with all complicated explanations for complicated problems, it might be simpler to go for the conspiracy theory that explains everything: it’s them. 

But it’s pretty clear how people get to run and how they are (or are not) elected: old-fashioned politics at the low level of party organisations, and on the big stage of general election campaigns and Parliament. 

• ACT party constitution
• Greens party constitution
• Labour constitution
• National constitution
• Te Pati Maori constitution

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