Voting behavior in New Zealand

In the 2008 general election in New Zealand, voters decided not to renew their confidence in Helen Clark's Labour-led government, and to give his chance to National's John Key as Prime Minister of the country. How can we explain this alternation? What could have helped Labor policy done to win a fourth consecutive term in office? Has it not addressed the issues that voters deemed important the way they expected or hoped? Much literature has been produced in order to explain why voters vote the way they do. Important issues are at stake in this debate, for its outcome might be the questioning of the voters' autonomy of choice, which is a pillar of democracy. If wining an election is about rightly ticking the boxes of voters' expectations, why do the various political parties not have very similar manifestos and strategies? The fact is that explaining the voters' choice is no easy matter, and many different thesis have been put forward that are often contradictory— or complementary ? In this paper, I shall examine the various theories that try to explain why citizens vote the way they do: I shall analyze the rational/socio-economic thesis (1), investigate the issue of values (2), and explore other factors— personal voting, attachment to a party, and Maori / Pakeha cleavage— that have also been submitted as part of the explanation (3). At the end of this essay, I shall verify what empirical evidence establishes in explaining voting behavior in New Zealand (4).

[...] We shall here test wether the socio-economic, the cultural and the racial factors can help explain voting behaviour in New Zealand. We shall identify two contrasting groups for each of these three cleavages : according to the income for the class cleavage, to the attending of a church so as to distinguish people on a conservative/liberal scale, and to belonging to the Māori or Pākehā group : we shall examine what difference they imply in the ratings of both National and Labour. [...]

[...] Yet with the decline of manual working, the rise of the middle class and the increased liberalisation / individualisation of the economy and society, class voting has since then decreased, at least in its most narrow meaning based on occupation (Bean 1988). However, it could be argued that class voting still exists but in a different form : having taken these changes into account, Labour has broadened its political appeal to englobe middle-class voters that are not its traditional basis (Bean 1988), the neoliberal revolution operated in 1984–90 being the most spectacular example of this trend. [...]