John Leslie and Elizabeth McLeay: MMP’s one-seat threshold creates paradox

Comparison of the contemporary political situations in New Zealand and Germany is inevitable. Not only did the two countries hold their 2005 elections a day apart, they produced a similar result. In both, centre-left and centre-right parties of about equal size share Parliament with several smaller parties.

Many observers attribute this result to the "Mixed Member Proportional" system, or MMP, the electoral system which Germany and New Zealand - and only a handful of other countries - share.

Although the similarities are striking, there are important differences in the operation of MMP and the nature of the small parties.

Indeed, the situation in New Zealand reflects the present in Germany less than it resembles the early days of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), before it made significant changes in its electoral laws in the mid-1950s.

The FRG held its first parliamentary, or Bundestag, election in 1949 under rules very different from those now in force. In 1949, a party winning 5 per cent or more of the vote in any of the 10 West German states received parliamentary representation.

Additionally, a party received full parliamentary representation according to its results on the proportional "party" ballot, if one of its candidates won a directly contested electorate seats.

As a consequence, the 1949 Bundestag consisted of representatives from more than 10 "parties", several of which focused on prominent personalities with strong local support in a home district.

Two legislative changes in the 1950s increased barriers to entry into Parliament and, eventually, eliminated these "personalised" parties.

A 1953 reform required parties to win 5 per cent, not in a single state but throughout the FRG, to enter the Bundestag. And in 1956, the Parliament increased from one to three the number of direct electorates a party was required to win in order to receive parliamentary representation equal to its share of the party vote.

These changes reduced the number of parties represented in the Bundestag to six after the 1953 election, and four after the 1957 election.

In the 1961 election, the West German party system stabilised around the centre-right Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), and the smaller, liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP).

These were the only parties represented in the Bundestag until the Greens' entrance in 1983 and the emergence of the PDS/Linke after reunification.

German developments in the 1950s provide an interesting parallel to contemporary New Zealand. In the 1950s, the FRG's combination of a single direct electorate threshold with proportional representation permitted prominent personalities with strong support in a particular region to exert disproportionate influence.

New Zealand's minor parties since MMP demonstrate a similar logic. New Zealand First was built around its founder, Winston Peters, formerly National. Under MMP the party had the safety net of Peters' Tauranga seat until its loss to National this year.

Since 1996 United Future has depended on the retention of Ohariu-Belmont by Peter Dunne, formerly Labour. NewLabour, which became part of the Alliance, was founded by Jim Anderton, also formerly Labour. After its split from the Alliance the Progressives survived in 2002 by virtue of Anderton's Sydenham seat.

The Act and the Green parties have different histories because they were not founded around leaders who had originally won their seats before MMP.

However, Act's Richard Prebble won Wellington Central in 1996 but lost it the following election. In 2005 Act successfully reinstated its one-seat safety net with the new leader, Rodney Hide, gaining Epsom.

The Greens tried to play a similar game after they left the Alliance. Jeanette Fitzsimons successfully contested Coromandel in 1999, only to lose it in 2002.

So New Zealand has gone through similar experiences as did Germany.

The problems of the one-seat threshold were not so obvious in the 1996 election, when all the parliamentary parties either won more than 5 per cent nationwide or won insufficient votes overall to take more than one MP into Parliament.

But in 1999, because Peters won Tauranga, he gained four more seats despite failing to reach the 5 per cent threshold. In 2002, Anderton's Progressives won an extra seat on the back of Sydenham.

And this year United Future won two extra seats on the basis of Dunne's Ohariu-Belmont win, while Act brought in one more MP because Hide won Epsom.

Imagine the outcry if either the Greens or New Zealand First had just failed to surmount the 5 per cent threshold this year - thus winning no seats - while United Future with 2.7 per cent of the nationwide vote and Act with its 1.4 per cent had MPs sitting in Parliament alongside their electorate-winning leaders.

Parties that depend for their continued existence on prominent leaders who win their own electorates do not necessarily have to build broad programmes to attract public support. Those leaders have an unusual degree of power over their parliamentary colleagues, and their existence can fragment Parliament and make it difficult for workable governing coalitions to be developed.

These lessons do not suggest MMP is unstable and should be abandoned, but they indicate the unintended, even paradoxical, results of combining proportionality with a one-seat threshold.

* John Leslie and Elizabeth McLeay teach political science and international relations at Victoria University in Wellington.