Category: history

The Labour Party had a rocky ride leading up to the 2017 Election, with the resignation of then-leader Andrew Little forcing a rethink of their entire electoral campaign. Despite that, their vote increased to 36.89% after the special votes were all counted, up from a dismal 25.13% in 2014. A previous article has already covered who those new voters were – this one looks at the overall group of Labour voters as a whole.

Labour voters are much poorer than the average New Zealander. The correlation between voting Labour in 2017 and median personal income was -0.52, about the same as in 2014, and shows the degree to which Labour is in favour of greater resource distribution (or at least the degree to which it gets support from those in favour of such).

There were significant positive correlations between being in any income band below $15K and voting Labour in 2017. This signifies a large change among those in the $10-15K income band – being in this band had a correlation of 0.21 with voting Labour in 2014, and had increased to 0.35 by 2017. Also, being in the $30-35K income band had a correlation of 0.15 with voting Labour in 2014, increasing to 0.27 by 2017.

Being in any of the income bands above $60K was significantly negatively correlated with voting Labour in 2017. This tells us that the idea of redistributing wealth through taxation doesn’t appeal much to the sort of people who have the most wealth.

There are a number of reasons for this connection between voting Labour and relative poverty.

One of the most obvious reasons is that Labour voters are much younger. There is a very strong negative correlation of -0.75 between voting Labour in 2017 and median age. Although part of the reason for this is that children are included in the median age statistics and that parents of young children prefer to vote Labour, most of the reason is simply because young people are poorer.

Because we already know there is a significant correlation between age and wealth we can tell that much of the reason why Labour voters are younger and poorer is simply because they have had less time to build a career or gain job expertise and this lack of seniority results in lower wages and salaries, which results in relatively stronger sentiments in favour of wealth distribution.

Labour voters are also much less educated. The correlation between having no NZQA qualifications and voting Labour was 0.34 in 2014 and 0.38 in 2017. The correlations between having no NZQA qualifications and voting New Zealand First were 0.79 in 2014 and 0.67 in 2017, so this suggests that a large number of the working class shifted from New Zealand First to Labour in the three years before the 2017 Election.

The university educated are mildly unwilling to vote Labour. The correlations with voting Labour in 2017 and having a university degree were -0.24 for a Bachelor’s, -0.22 for an Honours, -0.19 for a Master’s, and -0.17 for a doctorate. These aren’t strong – only the first of them is even statistically significant – but they’re less strongly negative than in 2014.

This mild unwillingness is probably down to two contrasting factors. Most university educated people are young because tertiary education became liberalised in recent decades and available to many more people, but on the other hand university educated people earn a lot more money than their non-educated peers, and this improved social position inclines them away from policies of resource distribution.

A third factor explaining the correlation between poverty and voting Labour is that Labour voters are much more likely to be on a non-pension benefit. The correlations between voting Labour in 2017 and being on a benefit were 0.41 for the student allowance, 0.58 for the invalid’s benefit and 0.73 for the unemployment benefit. Related to this is the fact that being a solo parent had a correlation of 0.79 with voting Labour in 2017.

In 2017, the Labour vote correlated strongly with the votes for other parties who also have a high level of Maori support. Here the correlations with voting Labour were 0.61 for the Maori Party, 0.56 for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party and 0.41 for MANA.

Also in 2017, the Labour vote had strong negative correlations with the vote of parties full of old, white men who don’t want to redistribute resources. Most obviously was with National (-0.94) but significant negative correlations also existed with ACT (-0.62), United Future (-0.43) and the Conservatives (-0.31).

The Greens and The Opportunities Party were close to neutral in this regard. The correlation between voting Labour in 2017 and voting Greens that year was 0.11, whereas with voting TOP it was perfectly uncorrelated at 0.00.

The biggest change from 2014 was with the correlation between voting Labour and voting New Zealand First, which was 0.11 in 2014 but had become negative by 2017, at -0.15. The reason for this is mostly because of the large number of Maori voters who left New Zealand First after they said they wanted to abolish the Maori seats, and this can be seen by the change in correlations between being Maori and voting New Zealand First (down to 0.38 in 2017 from 0.66 in 2014) and between being Maori and voting Labour (up to 0.58 in 2017 from 0.42 in 2014).

Woman were significantly more likely to favour the Labour Party in 2017. The correlation between being female and voting Labour in 2017 was 0.33, slightly stronger than in 2014. As mentioned in the section about National, the reasons for this can be surmised from evolutionary psychology.

In summary, the sort of person who would vote Labour is someone in favour of greater resource distribution, which means someone with less resources than average, which means young people, the less educated, Maoris, Pacific Islanders and women.

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This article is an excerpt from the 2nd Edition of Understanding New Zealand, which Dan McGlashan and VJM Publishing will have ready for sale at the end of October 2017. This will contain statistics calculated according to the official final vote counts and will be freshly updated with data from the 2017 General Election.

The National Party went from being able to govern with a handful of suppliant support partners after the 2014 General Election to needing the support of Winston Peters after 2017. As Peters has expressed a will to change, this is a much weaker position (and reflects falling to 44.45% support in 2017 from 47.04% in 2014). This article looks at who voted for them this year.

Fundamentally, National is the major conservative party and therefore they want most things to change as little as possible. Their voters are mostly made up of the sort of people who already occupy a reasonably high social position and who want to maintain this by not reducing inequality or redistributing resources.

This would explain why the correlation between voting National and median personal income is so high: at 0.53 in 2014 and 0.49 in 2017. National voters are considerably wealthier than the average Kiwi, and they are wealthier than the voters of any other party except for ACT (the correlation between voting ACT in 2017 and median personal income was 0.61).

Unsurprisingly, then, there is a very strong correlation of 0.63 between living in a freehold house and voting National.

National continues to get support from voters in the wealthier income bands, although these correlations became slightly weaker in 2017. All of the income bands from $60K or above had positive correlations with voting for National in 2017, but there were all marginally weaker than the same correlations in 2014 (from 0.24 to 0.21 for $60-70K; 0.36 to 0.32 for $70-100K; 0.34 to 0.30 for $100-150K; 0.35 to 0.30 for $150K+).

Related to this, one of the strongest correlations with voting for National in 2017 was with being self-employed with employees – this was 0.72. This is strong enough to suggest that anyone self-employed with employees who found themselves voting for a party other than National would have few fellows.

By 2017, the average National voter was fairly likely to be born overseas. The correlation between being born overseas and voting National in 2017 was 0.38, up from 0.33 in 2014. That probably reflects the degree to which National has been chasing specifically Asian voters who might be tempted to vote conservative on account of high wealth and/or low solidarity, and to which Pacific Islander voters switched to them because of religious sentiments around abortion etc.

Maoris, for their part, predictably abstained from the National Party. The correlation between being Maori and voting National in 2014 was -0.75 and in 2017 it was -0.74. Correlations of these strengths can be guessed at from the fact that National scores less than 10% in some Maori electorates.

This tells us that the vast bulk of the change in native-born support for the National Party was from native-born Kiwis of European descent. Indeed, the correlation between being a Kiwi of European descent and voting National fell from 0.60 in 2014 to 0.52 in 2017 – still pretty strong, but not as strikingly so.

From this we can determine that the reduction in support for National among Kiwis of European descent, from very strong to moderately strong, was partially balanced by an increase in pro-National sentiment among Pacific Islanders and Asians. So it follows that the correlation between voting National in 2017 compared to 2014 became more positive for Asians – increasing from 0.09 to 0.16 – and that the correlation between voting National in 2017 compared to 2014 became less negative for Pacific Islanders – weakening from -0.46 to -0.39.

It’s important here to take care not to mislead. The National Party voting bloc might have slightly fewer white people and slightly more Islanders than last time, but the National Party is still very much a pro-European party, and Pacific Islanders still mostly prefer Labour.

At least part of the reason for the increase in Pacific Islander support for National was religious sentiments inclining them towards conservative positions on ever-more present issues like gay marriage and cannabis law reform. We can see that the correlations between voting National and being either a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness – two religions with a high proportion of Pacific Islander followers – became less negative towards National: from -0.63 in 2014 to -0.57 in 2017 in the case of Mormons, and from -0.53 in 2014 to -0.49 in 2017 in the case of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The correlation between voting National and median age fell from 2014 to 2017, from 0.81 to 0.78. This was particularly noticeable in the 50+ age brackets and for being on the pension – the correlations between being in any of these categories and voting National fell from 2014 to 2017.

However, this correlation between age and voting conservative is one of the strongest and most significant in this entire study. Simply getting older is more likely than almost anything else to make a New Zealander become conservative.

Curiously, people with university degrees were less likely to vote National this time around. Although anyone holding a university degree was more likely than not to vote National (ceteris paribus), the correlations between voting National fell for all of them from 2014 to 2017: from 0.25 to 0.22 for a Bachelor’s, from 0.22 to 0.16 for an Honours, from 0.20 to 0.16 for a Master’s and from 0.20 to 0.13 for a doctorate.

The National Party lost a little of its mild South Island bias as well. The correlation between living on the South Island and voting National in 2017 was not significant, at 0.08 (down from 0.13 in 2014). This small change is probably because a lot of the white middle-class grandparents cohort, who are numerous on the South Island, switched away from National to be replaced by Pacific Islanders who live on the North Island.

Managers were the occupation that preferred National more than any other. The correlation between voting for National in 2017 and being a manager was 0.52.

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This article is an excerpt from the 2nd Edition of Understanding New Zealand, which Dan McGlashan and VJM Publishing will have ready for sale at the end of October 2017. This will contain statistics calculated according to the official final vote counts and will be freshly updated with data from the 2017 General Election.

When the Maori Party made the decision to support a conservative Fifth National Government, many commentators believed that it would be the death of the party. Indeed, the Maori Party was destroyed at the 2017 General Election, when voters appeared to decide that supporting a conservative government had lowered Maori standards of living. This article looks at who stuck by them and who didn’t from 2014.

Let’s get the most obvious out of the way – there was an extremely strong correlation between voting Maori Party and being Maori. In 2014 this was 0.91, and by 2017 it was slightly weaker, at 0.89. This puts a figure on what we already knew – that the vast bulk of Maori Party voters are Maoris.

In this, and in most other regards, Maori Party voters were very similar to who they were in 2014.

One notable difference is that the Maori Party this year got a fair bit more support from Pacific Islanders. The correlation between being a Pacific Islander and voting Maori Party in 2017 had increased to 0.08 from 0.01 in 2014.

Of course, Pacific Islanders will very seldom be on the Maori Roll and therefore this increased support from them would not have helped the Maori Party win an electorate seat. Indeed, it could even be argued that broadening the Maori Party tent to include Pacific Islanders was one of the main causes of it losing so much support to the Labour Party in 2017.

Considering that the Maori Party won almost as many votes in 2017 (30,580) as it did in 2014 (31,849), it might be that the attempt to broaden their appeal to other ethnic groups, while partially successful, cost them just enough Maori support to mean that they did not win any Maori seats.

This suggestion is backed up by the observation that Maori Party voters were slightly less likely to be New Zealand born in 2017 when compared to 2014. The correlation between the two was 0.62 in 2014 and 0.58 in 2017. Furthermore, the correlation between voting for them and being born in the Pacific Islands became less negative, from -0.19 in 2014 to -0.12 in 2017.

If this is true then it speaks to the string of strategic errors that the Maori Party made. If they gambled their electoral future on public belief in some kind of pan-Polynesian sentiment, they lost everything.

This loss of support to Labour can be seen in microcosm in the education and training industry. The correlation between working in this industry and voting Maori Party fell from 0.38 to 0.34, while it rose in the case of Labour, from -0.01 to 0.15. This means that a person in this industry in 2017 was only slightly more likely to vote Maori Party they were to vote Labour, compared to much more likely in 2014.

It can also be seen with the occupation of community and personal services workers. The correlation between having this occupation and voting Maori Party was 0.64 in 2014, but 0.59 in 2017, whereas the correlations with voting Labour went in the opposite direction – from 0.20 in 2014 to 0.39 in 2017.

So it would seem that a reasonable number of Maori voters in people-focused jobs switched to the Labour Party, and that this was partially compensated for by an increase in Pacific Islander voters.

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This article is an excerpt from the 2nd Edition of Understanding New Zealand, which Dan McGlashan and VJM Publishing will have ready for sale at the end of October 2017. This will contain statistics calculated according to the official final vote counts and will be freshly updated with data from the 2017 General Election.