Neill Atkinson. Adventures in Democracy: A History of the Vote in New Zealand. University of Otago Press, in association with the Electoral Commission, Dunedin, 2003. 311 pp. $39.95. ISBN 1-877276-58-8.
Reviewed by Jack Vowles.
This book was initiated by the Electoral Commission to mark the 150th anniversary of New Zealand's first parliamentary elections in 1853. As the President of the Electoral Commission, the Hon. A. A. T. Ellis, puts it in the foreword, the rationale for the book was that 'we have to know where we have come from in order to know where we are going'. The author commissioned for the task, Neill Atkinson, an historian in the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, has written two previous books, one on the government superannuation fund and the other on New Zealand seafarers.
Atkinson notes in his introduction that New Zealand historians have moved away from political history into social – and I would add, cultural – history, leaving the field to political scientists. But with the exception of political biographies such as those of Gustafson on Savage and Muldoon, political scientists have mostly concentrated on contemporary politics. The period before the 1960s has been neglected, and consequently there have been little or no recent and fresh historical insights into the first century of New Zealand politics, and no outstanding new overall interpretations of New Zealand political history.
As the author acknowledges, covering 150 years of political history in 70,000 words over one year was a challenging task. But Atkinson has met the challenge well. The book should more than satisfy those who commissioned it. In its readability and copious use of photographs and illustrations it is very friendly to a general audience. And it addresses some questions that specialists had not yet fully explored.
From a specialist perspective, some of the results of Atkinson's analysis of the archives of the Chief Electoral Office, Electoral Department, Internal Affairs, Justice, and Legislative Departments are very valuable. For example, he has partly answered a question often asked by specialists internationally who are interested in fitting New Zealand into the comparative history of electoral administration. The more effort government institutions put into getting people on the rolls, the more accurate they will be, but not enough information has been published from which to assess this effort over time. Atkinson reports that pre-election enumeration – a door to door canvass – began in 1905. This practice has been continued almost up to the present elsewhere, in Canada for example. For reasons of cost it ceased in New Zealand with the establishment of compulsory enrolment for Europeans in 1924. The government then relied on compulsory enrolment, which seems to have been effective at first but is much less so today. It would have been useful to know – if information could have been found – how well compulsory enrolment was enforced in its early days. Despite Jack Nagel's pathbreaking article in Political Science in 1988, the related question of the comprehensiveness of New Zealand's electoral rolls has been relatively neglected, and Atkinson provides only fragmentary data on this matter.
The value of Atkinson's discussion of this aspect of turnout is also much reduced by his use of official turnout statistics rather than vote (valid or total) on a base of the age-eligible population. Because the comprehensiveness of the roll varies from election to election, it is not a reliable base in which to estimate turnout. Age-eligible population estimates imputed from census data are the internationally accepted standard (see, for example, the publications of International IDEA, the most reputable source of data on elections internationally). Nagel estimated these back to 1928, but Atkinson does not use or cite this work.
As a source of information the book is therefore uneven. Much of it tells well-known stories embedded in a narrative account of New Zealand party politics and the doings of politicians – conventional history already well-covered by the earlier generation of political historians. Following old paths can be justified. They provide the context within which otherwise dry details of electoral administration can be given meaning. However, there is no new or fresh approach, nor any original insight into New Zealand political history. The book assumes that New Zealand is a 'distinctive democracy', but there is little evidence from elsewhere to demonstrate this effectively, save for brief reference to the comparative models of democracy developed by Arend Lijphart.
Other than this, little effort has been made to draw on the theoretical insights that might have come from political science. Atkinson follows his secondary sources into the academic journals in history, but does not delve deeply into those in political science. He concludes that New Zealand's democratic innovations have been shaped not just by pragmatism and personalities (the conventional interpretation of most pre-1960s political historians), but also by principles. 'Bringing principles back in' to New Zealand history is a cause that many others have been promoting since the 1960s. Atkinson also draws attention to the roles played by the generations of New Zealand bureaucrats responsible for devising legal and constitutional reforms – but perhaps does not make quite enough of this. If New Zealand is relatively distinctive is its handling of 'the vote', it is in respect to the very high integrity of the electoral process. For various reasons, New Zealand elections are among the freest and fairest in the world. We may owe this partly to our politicians, but perhaps most of all to the professionalism of our public servants. This might have been a proposition to explore further in a history of the vote in New Zealand.
Professor Jack Vowles is head of the Political Studies Department at the University of Auckland. He also leads the New Zealand Election Study and has published widely on New Zealand elections and politics.
[See also a review of the related web exhibition for this book.]
