Campaigning and split-ticket voting in new electoral systems: the first MMP elections in New Zealand, Scotland and Wales

New electoral systems create learning problems for parties and electors: the parties have to learn how to focus their campaigns and the electors how best to use their votes. This was the case in three countries in the late 1990s where MMP was used for the first time rather than first-past-the-post: New Zealand in 1996 and Scotland and Wales in 1999. MMP involves each elector voting twice — for a candidate in a single-member constituency contest and for a party in a regional/national list contest. Survey and (in New Zealand) official data show that substantial proportions of the three electorates voted a split ticket — the candidate they supported was from a different party to that they voted for in the list contest. (Approximately one-in-five did this in Scotland and Wales and two-in-five in New Zealand.) We argue that split-ticket voting will be influenced by the amount of information received by electors regarding the candidates for the constituency seats. Using the amount of campaign expenditure by each candidate as a measure of the volume of information provided, we find strong supporting evidence for this responsive voter model in each of the three countries.     

Less Haste,More Speed: The Fit for the Future Reform Program in New South Wales Local Government

In August 2011 the New South Wales (NSW) Government established the Independent Local Government Review Panel to examine the options for improving the sustainability of the NSW local government sector. In October 2014 the NSW Government set out its response in its Fit for the Future reform program. This paper provides a critical assessment of the Fit for the Future program. We show that it contains errors, relies on unreliable data, and neglects important factors, which may be ascribed to the haste with which it has been constructed. This could have serious consequences given the potential impact the Fit for the Future program will have on NSW local government. We thus conclude that it would be prudent to address these matters before proceeding further with the program.     

Loess:: a nonparametric, graphical tool for depicting relationships between variables

Loess is a powerful but simple strategy for fitting smooth curves to empirical data. The term “loess” is an acronym for “local regression” and the entire procedure is a fairly direct generalization of traditional least-squares methods for data analysis. Loess is nonparametric in the sense that the fitting technique does not require an a priori specification of the relationship between the dependent and independent variables. Although it is used most frequently as a scatterplot smoother, loess can be generalized very easily to multivariate data; there are also inferential procedures for confidence intervals and other statistical tests. For all of these reasons, loess is a useful tool for data exploration and analysis in the social sciences. And, loess should be particularly helpful in the field of elections and voting behavior because theories often lead to expectations of nonlinear empirical relationships even though prior substantive considerations provide very little guidance about precise functional forms.