Counterintuitive

It's a well established fact of New Zealand politics that support for MMP tends to coincide with age. Generally speaking, the younger one is the more likely one is to support MMP continuing. Older people tend to dislike MMP more, and favour a return to FPP. Obviously this only a general rule - I know many people my age or younger who strongly dislike MMP, and many people of my parent's generation who see MMP as a vast improvement. But overall the correlation seems pretty clear (although unfortunately I have no links at hand to demonstrate it). It should probably be pointed out that I feel the correlation is generational, not age related - MMP's supporters nowadays are not significantly more likely to begin supporting FPP as they get older.

I think this may be why the government is keen to hold a referendum on the electoral system in 2011 - the window of opportunity is slowly but surely closing for advocates of a return to FPP. Not so much because FPP supporters are dying off, but because every election introduces a new group of young voters whose support for MMP is often very strong.

I've never voted in a non-MMP election, so I suppose I am one of this younger group of committed MMP supporters. But it is possible to be even more hardened against FPP than I am - one of my students casually remarked to me that she found the idea that New Zealand had ever used a system like FPP shocking and unreal. This, in turn, shocked me - but I suppose it's only natural. Although I am too young to have ever participated in an FPP election, I remember my parents talking about them, I remember watching with interest the TV documentary outlining the various electoral systems that were being considered (I was 12 at the time - possibly already showing an abnormal interest in politics!). Generally, I remember the debate. For these people, the debate is something they have only really encountered in political science textbooks. Perhaps similarly, the 1996 election, unquestionably MMP's darkest hour, is outside their experience as well.

This is interesting to me because it seems to demonstrate that the traumas of the 80s and 90s are not as decisive in establishing support for MMP as simple lack of experience with an alternative. Most political scientists will tell you that between 1978 and 1993, despite the electorate routinely giving plurality support to a party or parties promising something other than economic conservatism, voters got the opposite, and that this deep distrust of policy-making elites was the main thing that drove people toward MMP. This is undoubtedly true, but it seems less clear that this trauma at the hands of the political classes remains decisive.

After all, National's non-wins of 1978 and 1981, Labour's volte-face to support supply side economics in 1984 and 1987, National's dogwhistling about returning to a pre-Rogernomics welfare state in 1990 and subsequent 33% 'win' in 1993 are even further outside the experience of my generation - let alone my student's generation - than the 1996 election. They are doubtless still burned relatively freshly into the memory of voters of ages 40+. And yet it's this group whose support for MMP is relatively weak.

This is a slightly depressing outlook for those who believe in an informed public, because it seems to imply that the strong advocacy for electoral change in the early 1990s was a relatively shallow phenomenon, and that now we have returned to a situation where, absent sustained and blatant refusal to seek an electoral mandate on the part of governing political parties, the electoral system people want is simply the electoral system they are familiar with. I support MMP, but as is so often the case with various cause celebre of the Left, I kind of wish the people standing shoulder-to-shoulder with me weren't doing so for such dumb reasons.