It is somewhat useful analysis of competition between regional deputies and single-member-district deputies. But his anecdotal evidence and quotes are far more useful than his statistics.

I also find it annoying that he didn’t use Bavaria, with its open lists, as one of his German states. The results would have been much more interesting. Presumably Bavarian regional deputies behave even more like local deputies.

But his stats fail to distinguish between genuine “dual candidates” and token ones. In Germany, CDU and SPD deputies regularly swap roles from list member to local member, as the parties’ fortunes ebb and flow. List members are always acting as shadow local members, with constituency offices, sometimes listed on the legislature website as the member for that district “elected on the list” along with the other member “directly elected.”

But the Green and FDP members have no hope of winning the local seat, and being fewer, they must serve up to ten local districts each. Naturally their behaviour is different from local deputies. They follow the norms of the political culture by having constituency offices, like the New Zealand Green Party MPs and the Scottish Green Party MPs who didn’t even bother to run locally, but it’s a more token effort than those whose political life is likely to depend on it.

Lundberg explains all this. But first he purports to analyze his useless stats which lump all “additional members” of large and small parties together. Why bother?

As for the blog shutting down comments, I have no idea why this happens. I am not happy about it, as the efforts some of you are making here to revive or add to a previous topic are very much one of the things that makes this blog work. But so is keeping things classified by topic as much as possible.

The closing of comments on older posts is not a setting I ever changed. It did it itself, strangely enough.

I can manually re-open some (one by one), and will do so for one or two NZ plantings.

Under MMP, the SthIs gets 16 seats (this presumably covers various small-population other islands, some of which are in a different timezone), this then sets the target size of NthIs and Maori seats as well.

The SthIs seat count is driven by the physical size of the district that one MP has to cover. Part of the post-election agreement between the National and Maori Parties was that the larger districts (all but one of the Maori seats and IIRC 2-3 of the general ones) would get funding for an additional office to serve constituents.

Recent news item on proposals to give NZ’s North Island and South Island official names (probably in Maori). Apparently someone did some research and discovered the two islands have no official names that are enshrined in legislation.

Which mildly surprises me because I read, two decades ago, that NZ’s then (pre-MMP, SM-FPTP) electoral law fixed the size of the House by laying down that the South Island was guaranteed 25 seats – no more, no fewer – than the North Island got 1 seat for every quotient equal to 1/25 of the South Island’s population.

Wasn’t something similar used, or proposed, for the Canadian House of Commons – permanently allocating 75 MPs to Quebec and then using the average as the quotient for the Rest Of Canada?

I don’t have a big problem with areas with high voter turnout getting a second representive. It strengthens the relationship between representives and voters, and voters in other areas can “fix” their underrepresentation by voting in higher numbers the next time, and not always voting as a bloc for one party.

One other thing I would suggest for MMP would be to ban re-election via party list. You could lose or not win a consitutency race and still get elected via list the first time you run. If you want to stay in the legislature, you better find a constituency. Pace Vasi’s objection to “best loser”, voters could now kick representives they don’t like out of Parliament since defeated incumbents won’t bounce back in via the list. In fact, this would go some way to fixing the problem of politicians rejected in the constituencies appearing on the lists.

I realize I used “overhang” incorrectly, or there is a more common use of the turn. I was referring to the fact that under MMP there isn’t a direct relationship between votes and list seats, looking at the list in isolation. The party’s total representation will reflect the number of votes it receives. But for list candidates only, their election depends not only on the total votes gained by their party, but also on the fairly random factor of whether their party wins a large number of constituencies given its overall vote total. Should the list candidates in MMP be steering large parties to greater geographic concentration, since they benefit from the party piling up votes in its strongholds that can’t be use to gain more seats? Should list candidates for smaller parties push their parties towards greater dispersal of the vote? I don’t like the fact that you can’t directly vote for a MMP party list except maybe by voting for the list and making sure you vote for another party in the consitutency race.