The Impact of Electoral Reform on the Public Service: The New Zealand Case

October 1996 marked the beginning of a new era in New Zealand politics, with the advent of a system of proportional representation based on the German model. This article explores the impact of electoral reform on the public service. First, it summarises the extensive public sector reforms during the mid-to-late 1980s and considers the preparations undertaken by the public service for proportional representation. Second, it outlines the concerns and expectations about the likely consequences of the new electoral system on the bureaucracy. Third, against this background, the article examines the extent to which the public service has been affected by electoral reform. It is argued that despite some notable changes to the political environment within which officials operate, the overall impact of proportional representation on the public service to date has been modest. The analysis presented here is based on a series of interviews conducted during 1997 with ministers, senior public servants, ministerial advisers and parliamentary officials, along with a range of secondary sources.     

Verdict selection processes in insanity cases

Judicial instructions (traditional American Law Institute vs. Guilty But Mentally Ill [GBMI]) were manipulated within an insanity defense vignette portraying a highly psychotic defendant. Construals were highly predictive of verdicts in both instructional conditions. Instead of influencing case construals, the GBMI option seems to operate by increasing respondents' decisional thresholds for insanity and guilty verdicts, creating a collapsing effect such that few such verdicts are rendered. Between-instruction comparisons reveal that the construals of respondents who choose insane and guilty verdicts are considerably more homogeneous and extreme under the GBMI conditions. Results suggest that many respondents intend their GMBI verdicts to signify diminished blame and punishment, indicating that such verdicts entail cognitive compromises that reflect both the thresholdraising effects and also probable confusion about the jurisprudential meaning of a GBMI verdict.This article is an expanded version of a paper entitled Insanity case construals are not simply verdict justification effects, which was presented at the 99th annual convention of the American Psychological Association at San Francisco, August, 1991. We would like to thank Linda Roberts, Norman Finkel, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. Support for this research was provided in part by a grant from the Baldy Center on Law and Social Policy at the State University of New York at Buffalo.