Maori seats in Auckland

I'd previously worried that adding Maori seats for Auckland could well wind up reducing Maori influence on Council by effectively giving all other councilors no reason to worry about Maori issues - they'd have no Maori constituents.

Of course, exact results would depend greatly on what the population distribution looked like and whether Auckland went for single or multi-member districts. So I assigned my Public Choice class to weigh things up as an assignment: assuming that the objective is to maximize Maori influence on council decisions, are separate seats a good idea?

Best argument I've seen for separate seats:

Having the option to enroll on a city-level Maori roll would allow Maori in wards where Maori population would otherwise be too small to be considered to have their votes weighed separately; in that case, the median city councilor can be made more pro-Maori. So lots of wards shift from 5% Maori to zero percent as those folks flip to the Maori roll, while folks in wards that are above 10% don't. The median councilor could then well have a higher proportion of Maori in his district than would be the case otherwise. This requires then that folks only (or massively disproportionately) choose the Maori roll if they're in low-Maori wards: that way, one of those wards disappears and the median shifts to the next higher Maori proportion district rather than the other way. Of course, it's pretty unrealistic to expect that level of strategic voting.

Best arguments I've seen thus far against separate seats:

• Maori and non-Maori political preferences are not so polarized as to mean that Maori voters in districts would be written off by candidates seeking a majority


• Having multi-member districts could increase the chances of Maori being elected without having the need for separate seats
  
  • Caveat here: some folks found the nice old Bernie Grofman paper showing that multimember districts in US local elections reduced rather than increased black electoral prospects. Indeed, "at large" elections were worst for black representation.
  
  So this really requires some kind of STV implementation in a multimember district to work. The Royal Commission report seemed to view multimember districts as unambiguously good for minority representation; the US evidence suggests otherwise.

Best argument I've been able to come up with for separate seats (which none of the students gave, but one came close):

Maori wards would be designated based on electoral enrollment numbers; actual influence within any ward depends on voter turnout. And Maori turnout is much much lower than the population average: The number of votes cast in the Maori electorates in national elections is roughly 58% of the number cast in general electorates. Consequently, even if my earlier worries were well founded, there could still be strong argument for separate seats (given my initial "assuming" that the goal is to design a system that maximizes Maori influence) because each Maori voter who turns out is given weight proportionate to the number who have enrolled on the Maori roll: each vote effectively counts as 1.73 votes as compared to that voter's influence in a general electorate.

While lots of students found US evidence on the effect of majority-minority districts, perhaps because I pointed them to some of it, none of them found the rather nice paper by former Kiwi Jeff Karp that argues that combined seats seem to do best for minority interests. He there shows that while minority groups tend to be disengaged from the political process, this dissatisfaction is minimized in systems where parties are encouraged to compete for votes across diverse groups (like first past the post elections with single member districts, or the less proportionate forms of PR).

On balance, I don't think separate seats would do much to improve substantial representation of Maori interests in Auckland and could work to harm substantive representation in order to ensure some descriptive representation.

So which matters more: having a couple of councilors who look like you and care passionately about your interests, or having equilibrium policy be a bit closer to what you'd want? I tend to go for the latter, but the former is certainly more expressively appealing.

Auckland Maori seats: good idea? [updated]

The main stumbling block currently to Auckland's merger into a mega-city isn't worries about the loss of Tiebout competition - which seems to be only of concern to me, see here and here, though NotPC also agrees and I may have convinced Matt Nolan (see comments, oops) Rauparaha that this is worth worrying about.

Rather, the biggest concern seems to be whether city council will have a standard set of wards or whether it will follow the system used for national elections in having overlapping districts: one set for those voters who want to elect to be on the Maori roll, and another set of general electorates for those who don't.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's anywhere else in the world that uses this kind of system.

Does having these kinds of overlapping districts help Maori? I suspect not much under proportional representation except inasmuch as they help to facilitate overhang: many voters in the Maori electorates tick the Maori Party as their district Member of Parliament but give their Party vote to Labour. The Maori Party then wins more seats than those to which it is entitled by its list vote and Parliament is made bigger. In a PR system, this means that the Maori Party has a seat or two more than it otherwise would and so has a bit more clout as a minor party.

Auckland's council, though, as best I understand it, isn't planning to go PR. What are the effects of this kind of system when you have only ward-based representatives?

Imagine that there are two groups, A and B. Everyone that self-identifies as group A, 10% of the population, is 90% likely to vote for Party 1 and 10% likely to vote for Party 2; everyone in group B, 90% of the population, is 47% likely to vote for Party 1 and 53% likely to vote for Party 2. Suppose every district has 100 voters and groups A and B are evenly split across all districts. In that case, every district has 9 A-group and 42 B-group voters for Party 1, 1 A-group and 48 B-group voters for Party 2, and Party 1 wins all districts. Now, suppose that you instead create special A-group electorates that comprise 10% of the seats. Now, Party 1 wins all A-group electorates but Party 2 wins all other seats. You've made sure that Group A is represented, but at the cost of vastly reducing their influence.

Indeed, this has been found to be one of the effects in the US of judicial mandates for majority-minority districts. Heck, even Wikipedia knows it:

Gerrymandering may be advocated to improve representation within the legislature among otherwise underrepresented minority groups by packing them into a single district. This can be controversial, as it may lead to those groups' remaining marginalized in the government as they become confined to a single district. Candidates outside that district no longer need to represent them to win election.

As an example, much of the redistricting conducted in the United States in the early 1990s involved the intentional creation of additional "majority-minority" districts where racial minorities such as African Americans were packed into the majority. This "maximization policy" drew support by both the Republican Party (who had limited support among African Americans and could concentrate their power elsewhere) and by minority representatives elected as Democrats from these constituencies, who then had safe seats.

Enough of Wikipedia; turn to Google Scholar. Cameron, Epstein and O'Halloran, 1996, find that there is a very real tradeoff between advancing the number of minority representatives and advancing the issues that minority voters care about. Shotts, 2001, finds that a majority-minority mandate has no effect where Republicans control redistricting (because they already would have packed minority voters into a small number of districts, by my read) but reduces Democratic seats where Democrats control the redistricting and where the majority-minority mandate requires supermajorities; in this latter case, it can cause the Democrats to lose control of the state legislature.

I can see why the Maori Party would support this kind of move: it guarantees them a couple of seats (yes, yes, city council elections aren't party-based, you get the idea though). But it may well also guarantee that no other city councilor has to care at all about Maori issues because they won't have any Maori constituents. But that's too conspiratorially-minded. Most likely, nobody involved in the process has bothered to check the empirical literature, just like nobody involved in the process has bothered to worry about Tiebout.

Careful what you wish for, folks. The Law of Unintended Consequences is a stern one.