What this country really needs is a good strong leader who isn’t afraid to bend the rules. It’s time we reintroduced the death penalty. Homosexual relationships are always wrong.
These statements may sound like the opinions you’d find in the comments section of some far-right blog. However, during the past 30 years, these views have split the country down the middle or attracted a net level of support according to the New Zealand Election Study, a public opinion survey that’s been conducted following every election since 1990.
Every three years, around 2000 people have been surveyed as part of the study, answering hundreds of questions documenting the country’s views on everything from climate change to capital punishment.
It now provides one of the richest sources of information on what we really think and how our thinking has changed, acting as a barometer of our democracy. So is our representative democracy really representative?
It’s not easy to know what a nation thinks, especially one that tends to be as reserved and conflict averse as New Zealand.
We tend only to be forthcoming about delicate topics such as politics with people who are likely to agree with us, says Jack Vowles, a political science professor at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. When we sense someone may have a radically different view, it’s usually easier to stick to the weather.
“We prefer those around us to be people that we can get on with,” Vowles explains. “And so we might tend to want to agree with them, perhaps just simply to keep the peace.”
This can create the illusion that most people have similar views and values to our own.
There are other clues – what we see on television, read in magazines, scroll past on social media. But it’s always hard to determine what’s just a vocal minority, or (god forbid) media bias.
To really understand the political views of the country, better data is needed. It was this void that Vowles was trying to fill as he began his academic career in the early 1980s.
Back then, many countries had already developed representative surveys conducted after each election. They aimed to provide snapshots of what the population thinks, to determine whether this aligns with the politicians elected to represent them.
“If you believe in the idea of a democracy as requiring governments to be responsive to public opinion, then you want to evaluate the performance of the government against it,” Vowles says. “It’s very useful intelligence for anybody that’s interested in politics.
I think it’s very dangerous when public opinion and government policy get completely out of sync.”
In New Zealand, these surveys had been sporadically conducted and on a small scale – nothing that could act as an accurate democratic benchmark. Vowles and a few colleagues tried to make one themselves.
It took a decade before Vowles – who had moved to the University of Waikato from Auckland in 1988 – and his former University of Auckland colleague, politics lecturer Peter Aimer, were able to secure funding for the first New Zealand Election Study (NZES) survey. Students were paid to help stuff the thousands of postal surveys into envelopes.
Later, they’d call around the country at a time when everyone had a landline, trying to encourage people to answer the more than 250 questions to edge up the response rate.
“We had quite a cottage industry going in Waikato,” Vowles recalls.
By 1993, the team grew to five, with staff from academic institutions around the country joining, as more funding flowed in. It was again buoyed in 1996 as interest ramped up in light of the first MMP election. The NZES team now numbered seven, including two recent PhD graduates hired from the United States, and Māori political scientist Ann Sullivan.
Funding slid again from 2002 but support from the Electoral Commission kept the research going. Today, the mechanics of the survey are contracted out. The NZES team has remained at seven staff, predominantly based at Victoria. Peter Aimer retired in the late 1990s and died last year. Vowles still leads the study, splitting his time between that and lecturing part-time in courses on public opinion and democracy.
Right time, right place
It’s hard to think of a more pertinent time than 1990 to have launched the NZES. The country had been rocked by successive Labour governments that had wrought some of the most significant changes in the country’s history.
Over six years, swathes of the economy had been pried off the state teat and given to the invisible hand of the market. As a result, New Zealand went from being one of the most regulated and controlled economies in the developed world, to one of the least regulated.
GST was brought in to pay for cuts to corporate and income tax rates – the top tax rate halved to 33% over Labour’s two terms. Agricultural subsidies were dropped, tariffs were cut and state services were corporatised. Importantly, virtually none of these policies featured on the campaign trail.
The 1990 election subsequently produced what was then the biggest landslide in New Zealand since the 1930s. Labour’s representation in Parliament nearly halved in an apparent mass rejection of the neoliberal reforms it imposed on the public with little mandate.
The election survey told a slightly different story. Opinion on Labour’s economic policies was actually split – 40% were in favour of the economic direction and 42% against.
Even among voters for the newly formed Green Party, 46% supported Labour’s economic direction, while 30% of New Labour Party voters – founded by former Labour MP Jim Anderton in direct opposition to Rogernomics – also favoured it.
A net majority backed free market reforms more generally – 42% wanted markets to be “left alone” compared with a quarter wanting more government intervention. There was also a strong majority (72%) in support of the government’s spending cuts (just 13% opposed them).
The survey found what riled the public, however, was the speed and extent of the economic upheaval – 64.5% said the speed of change was too fast and 56% said they’d gone too far.
This was by design. Then finance minister Roger Douglas later said it was his strategy to move fast, before those who oppose change had time to mobilise.
There was also significant opposition to Labour’s leftward step on many social issues. Almost 60% believed homosexual law reform had gone too far (homosexual relations between consenting men aged 16 and above had been decriminalised in 1986).
The public is more socially conservative than the governments that have represented them.
Almost three-quarters also opposed the government’s moves to introduce Treaty of Waitangi principles into some legislation, while 54% believed land compensation for Māori had gone too far (in 1984 the Waitangi Tribunal had been empowered to hear grievances dating back to 1840).
Labour’s decision to make union membership compulsory again was opposed by 80%.
Overall, however, it had also damaged the country’s trust in New Zealand’s political establishment. Just 13% rated Labour as trustworthy (56% rated the party untrustworthy), a low not surpassed since. National fared little better with 18% trusting the party versus 27% who didn’t.
Most people (80%) believed “ordinary people” had too little power, while 70% believed “big business” had too much power.
National’s term in government did little to restore public trust. It took the economic reforms even further. The following year, then finance minister Ruth Richardson delivered her so-called Mother of all Budgets, cutting spending on the welfare state and introducing user-pays elements to healthcare and education.
At the next election, trust in National hit a historic low of 15% with 62% rating them untrustworthy – while trust in Labour edged up one point to 14%.
Are we doing any better now?
Rich pickings
After 35 years and 12 elections, the study has produced a timeline of New Zealand’s political opinions through wars, pandemics, recessions and a new democratic system. Given analysing the results of the survey requires specialist software (and it’s grown to cover more than 500 questions), its findings do not always make the news unless a reporter is able to go deep into the data.
Henry Cooke, who was chief political reporter at Stuff for two years and now publishes a Substack newsletter on New Zealand politics from his base in London, has been studying the survey and drawing on it for his analysis since 2017.
“I find it incredibly rich and much, much more rewarding than traditional polling, which gives you just a narrow window,” Cooke says.
“The NZES gives you this massive landscape of different indicators that you can also track over time, going back even before MMP. So you get this incredible history about New Zealand political thought and how voters actually think about things.”
The neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s have become embedded, if not extended, while policies on social issues have generally become more liberal. Along the way, however, a chunk of the public has been left behind.
While opinions have fluctuated, Vowles says the surveys have shown the public is more socially conservative than the governments that have represented them and more left-leaning on economic issues.
For example, if homosexual law reform had been decided by a referendum, then it may have taken until 2008 before same-sex relationships were legalised.
In 1993, a slightly different question was asked – whether “homosexual relationships are always wrong”. The response was split, with 35% agreeing (20% “strongly”) and 36% disagreeing (12% “strongly”). More than a quarter sat on the fence, responding “don’t know” or “neither”.
It wasn’t until 2008, when the question was last included in the survey, that a slender outright majority (51.5%) disagreed with the statement. Twenty-two per cent still believed same-sex relationships were “always wrong”.
Crime & punishment
Support for the death penalty has also been consistently strong – a policy long absent from the campaign trail. A question on support for capital punishment has been asked almost every election since 1993.
At that time, almost half (49%) disagreed with the statement “the death penalty is never an appropriate sentence,” with 19% agreeing.
Between 2002 and 2008, an outright majority supported the death penalty for some murders, peaking at 60% support in 2008. The 2002 survey also recorded 37% support for flogging as a punishment for serious sex offenders, although 46% opposed this. Support for capital punishment has declined since, but it’s still a close-run thing. In 2020, the last publicly available data, 40% supported the reintroduction of the death penalty, 45% opposed.
In general, there’s also been overwhelming support for stiffer sentences for criminals, and the majority has opposed increasing immigration.
Vowles believes the fact these views have often failed to make it into policy reflects that our politicians of all stripes – and public servants – tend to be from a specific demographic.
“It’s very much biased towards the professional managerial class,” Vowles says. “Most politicians have university degrees. The majority of the population doesn’t. And there’s a distance therefore between what politicians and those involved in public policy think, and the majority of the population.”
On the other hand, the survey has revealed consistently strong support for more spending on public services – particularly health, education and, to a lesser extent, the environment – and opposition to privatisation.
Confoundingly, support for tax cuts is also consistently high, although when respondents have been asked to trade off between the two, the majority favoured more spending on health and education.
Despite union membership collapsing in New Zealand after National made unionism voluntary in 1991, support for unions has been strong and steady.
Since 1990, a majority has believed unions are “necessary to protect workers”. In 2020, 70% of respondents agreed with that statement, even though only 16% of the workforce was unionised, down from almost 50% in 1990.
The inequality equation
The survey has revealed some other seemingly contradictory trends. For instance, while economic inequality rose in the late 1980s and early 90s, public concern about it – and belief the government had a responsibility to narrow the gap between rich and poor – declined.
In 1990, 47% thought the government should tax “rich people” more and distribute the income to “ordinary people” while 24% were in favour of further reducing taxes on the wealthy.
By 2005, the last time these questions were asked, backing for tax cuts for the well-off was up to 36%, while greater redistribution was favoured by only 29%.
Subsequent surveys, however, have found a strong majority believe the difference in incomes in New Zealand is too large and that the government should take steps to reduce this.
Even so, efforts to reduce income inequality have been muted, even under left-leaning parties.
Vowles believes left-wing parties in particular tend to be nervous about implementing policies that may draw the ire of the business community, which has the resources to launch strong campaigns against them.
“It makes it very difficult for them to articulate those views without fear that, while they might get a little bit more support for ideas of wealth and income redistribution, that would be balanced by far more resistance from the sources you’d expect that to come from. So they’re just scared to go down that path. Although on some issues there’s actually quite a lot of support. A number of business commentators supported a capital gains tax, for example. So Labour’s recent failure to press for that is pretty gutless in my opinion.”
Politicians lead
But do these disjunctures represent flaws in our democracy? While regulations on lobbying and political donations could be tightened, Vowles says it’s unrealistic to expect politicians to represent the majority view of the public on all issues.
“We can’t run a democracy by perpetual referendum,” he says. “That would be quite unstable and problematic, to say the least.”
While typically people view democracy as involving politicians who follow public opinion, Vowles says it’s often the other way around – politicians often lead and public opinion follows.
“Opinions are shifted very much by the government in power,” he says. “And if things go wrong, I don’t tend to blame public opinion or voters, I tend to blame the politicians. Because they’re the ones who steer people in directions that are not necessarily in their best interests.
“But it requires politicians who are not fixated on their own personal interests and have some sense that they are working for the public, not just in the short term but in the long term as well. And I think our politicians in those respects are a mixed bag. There are some genuinely responsible ones who do think about the long term and the interests of society in general, but obviously there are a lot who don’t.
So we need representative democracy, but we need politicians who know how to lead and know when to follow.
A significant proportion of the public also want strong – if not outright authoritarian – leaders, too.
Since 1993, the survey has asked whether participants agree that “a few strong leaders could make this country better than all the laws and talk”. This has shown a net level of support in every survey, peaking in 2011, when 60% were in favour and 22% opposed. But support has steadily declined since.
More recently, a question asked respondents whether they believed “having a strong leader in government is good for New Zealand, even if the leader bends the rules to get things done”. Support for this has been nearly evenly split, with 42.7% in favour of this and 43.1% opposed in 2020.
However, democracy also has strong support among the public, and since MMP was introduced in 1996, a healthy majority has been satisfied with the way democracy works in New Zealand.
But, Vowles says there are signs of increasing dissatisfaction. “There’s a certain amount of concern and unhappiness now. Not quite to the degree we had in the early 1990s but we’re certainly heading back in that direction.”
Unfortunately, survey results for one of the most volatile elections in New Zealand’s history – in 2023 – haven’t yet been released to the public.
The 2020 election featured the greatest electoral swing the country’s ever seen. The 2023 election had the second biggest, and there are other signs of a large shift in the public’s views – nationally and internationally – following the peak of the pandemic.
Exactly what happened in 2023 will be the topic of a future book, drawing on the election result. The survey’s results will be publicly available in the near future.
Victoria University of Wellington politics lecturer Tom Jamieson has been analysing the 2023 survey and says the swing in public opinion wasn’t nearly as pronounced as the election result suggests.
“We’ve found political polarisation has actually declined over the last decade,” Jamieson says.
As for future swings in public opinion on these issues, we may never know about them; the survey itself may become a victim of changing values. The next one may be downsized or abandoned altogether due to a lack of funding.
Vowles says: “I have doubts we’ll be able to continue and I‘m getting quite long in the tooth. I‘d quite like to hand it over to other people. There are enough people among my colleagues to keep it going, but it’s getting the money for them to do it on a sustainable basis that’s the real problem.”