Abstract:
Political party organisations respond to the challenges of their environments. Different organisational structures have different capabilities and capacities and, therefore, some organisations are better suited to some environments. What happened to party organisations when New Zealand changed from a first-past-the-post to a mixed member proportional electoral system? Did all parties have the same capacities to meet the challenges raised by this new environment? This paper addresses these questions by examining the organisational responses of the New Zealand National Party to the introduction of the mixed member proportional electoral system after 1993. The National Party was constructed to operate in a first-past-the-post electoral system and it did so successfully, winning twelve of the nineteen elections it contested. In response to the challenges of the first-past-the-post environment, National decentralised both candidate selection and campaign structure. National's decentralised organisation proved to be a liability for National under the new mixed member proportional environment however. Mixed member proportional demanded the construction of a nationwide list and a coherent campaign for the nationwide party vote. With its existing organisational structure, National was unable to meet either of these demands and suffered the electoral repercussions of that failure. After four consecutive elections in which National lost vote share, the National Party centralised its organisation in 2003. This paper analyses the centralisation of the National Party's organisation and the reasons for it by examining the Party's efforts to reform candidate selection and management of campaigns. The two organisational structures which National used for selecting candidates and managing campaigns under mixed member proportional produced different results. The candidate pools for 1996, 1999 and 2002 failed to provide nationwide appeal and produced incentive for electorate candidates to ignore the party vote element. Further, the campaign structure for these three elections allowed electorate committees significant control and the ability to undermine the nationwide party vote campaign. In the 2005 election, however, candidate selection and campaign management showed significant changes. The candidate selection process provided incentives for electorate candidates to seek both electorate and party votes, although it arguably still failed to produce a nationally appealing party list. The management of the campaign was also significantly different. It demonstrated the benefit of central campaign control in a mixed member proportional electoral system. The 2003 centralisation gave National elites significant control and allowed National to almost double its 2002 result in the 2005 election. This thesis demonstrates that a mixed member proportional electoral system gave National strong incentives to centralise its party organisation.
