New Zealand Scrapped First-Past-the-Post in One Referendum
In 1993, New Zealanders voted to replace their electoral system — and the parties that ran the vote lost power under the new rules.
In November 1993, 54% of New Zealand voters chose to abandon first-past-the-post — the system under which a party could win a parliamentary majority with barely half the vote — in favor of Mixed Member Proportional representation, the system used in Germany.
The immediate trigger was the 1990 election. The National Party won 97 of 99 parliamentary seats on 48% of the vote. Labour, with 35% of the vote, won only two seats. The mismatch was stark enough to generate a Royal Commission recommendation in 1986, and the 1993 referendum — legally binding — carried it out.
MMP works in two tiers. Voters cast two ballots: one for a local electorate MP (like FPTP), and one for a party. Parties receive additional seats from a closed list to bring their total parliamentary representation in line with their party-vote share. The threshold for list seats is 5% of the party vote, or winning at least one electorate seat.
The 1996 election under MMP produced New Zealand's first coalition government — National and New Zealand First — after negotiations that lasted nine weeks. Neither major party held a majority alone again for over a decade.
The parties that had championed the referendum, calculating that reform would neutralize the opposition, found themselves navigating coalition arithmetic they had not anticipated. The system they replaced was simpler. It was also consistently producing governments that represented significantly less than majority opinion.
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