New Zealand Politics in Action: The 1960 General Election

Te Ao Hou, June 1963, Page 51

New Zealand Politics in Action: The 1960 General Election by R. M. Chapman, W. K. Jackson, and A. V. Mitchell Oxford University Press, 43/6 This is a detailed and scholarly examination of the last general election in New Zealand. It analyses very closely all the available official documentation on the subject, and also considers the results of a number of special surveys arranged by the authors who are all university lecturers. They were fortunate in that in New Zealand, unlike most other countries, election results are published in polling-booth units which cover only a small area. This means that it is possible to find out very exactly in what ways different sorts of people vote. The results of this inquiry are fascinating to say the least. The book demolishes, with quiet, lucid precision, a number of very widely accepted ideas. For instance, it demonstrates that the so-called ‘floating vote’ (the people who are regarded as being likely to keep changing their minds politically from one election to the next) is not nearly as important a factor as has been thought. Changes in the social composition of an electorate—areas ‘going downhill’ or becoming ‘better class’, families moving from the centre of a city to the suburbs, and so on—usually prove to be responsible for the changing political allegiance of that electorate. Discoveries such as this have far-reaching practical implications, and are also of great interest to everyone who is curious as to the reasons why people behave as they do. I have the space here to mention only one other of this book's interesting conclusions. In the chapter devoted to the Maori electorates, the authors have to account for the reasons why the Maori vote for Labour was much lower in 1960 than it previously had been, and why this drop was mostly due to a large increase in the number of Maoris who did not cast a vote. The author of this chapter considers the possibility that the severe budget of 1958 may have been responsible for this change but decides that the change was too great to have been caused by this alone. After considering other possible reasons, he writes as follows: ‘The conclusion is, I think, inevitable, that the Labour Government's handling of the Maori tour controversy earned it the deep disapproval of Maoris all over New Zealand and in this conflict of loyalties—loyalty to Labour and disapproval of its attitude in this test case—they acted as others act when torn two ways politically, they ceased voting in large numbers.’ M.R.W.