Do Electoral Rules Influence Small Parties’ Policy Strategies?

Assessing Green Party Attention to Localized Issues

Cory Belden

This paper asks whether electoral rules influence aspects of policy. Previous literature has argued

that electoral rules influence the extent in which legislators have incentives to appeal to localized

constituents through constituency service or the delivery of pork, implying that legislators might

also use their position in parliament to engage in policy work that addresses local policy problems.

I deviate from the literature on localism, however, and argue that the incentives to make localized

policy appeals and the location of these appeals are linked to where the legislator and party can

collect meaningful votes, or votes that contribute to their individual and collective seat share. To

test hypotheses, I leverage the list tier in mixed-member proportional systems (MMP), and compare

a sample of parliamentary questions and motions of Green parties members of parliament (MPs)

in the UK and Canada (both single-member district plurality systems) to those in New Zealand

(MMP). Preliminary findings counter the expectations of previous literature, in that Green party

MPs reference localized policy issues more often in New Zealand than in the UK. The second half

of the paper argues that the mechanisms underlying the use of local appeals are distinct in each

electoral system, which likely have implications for party growth and policy. [Please note that this

version of the paper does not include analysis on Canada.]

Prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the Political Studies Association, Brighton, United

Kingdom, March 22-23, 2016. (Early draft, please do not circulate.)

Author information: Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science at the University of Cali-

fornia, Davis (crbelden@ucdavis.edu)

Introduction

A question central to the study of comparative politics is whether electoral rules systematically

a↵ect what happens within political systems. A large chunk of these questions have focused on

whether and how electoral rules influence party dynamics in legislatures. We know, for example,

that electoral rules have a profound and predictable impact on the number of political parties ob-

taining seats within them (Amorim Neto and Cox 1997; Duverger 1951; Clark and Golder 2006;

Taagepera 2007). An important area that the comparative political science and political institu-

tional scholarship has not fully explored is the role of electoral rules in policy-making and policy

itself. Limited exploration is well justified, as intermediate and interceding variables along the

causal chain between electoral rules and policy abound.

This paper is an expedition into the electoral rules and policy territory. It asks whether

electoral rules shape an important characteristic of policy work: the extent that legislators address

local policy problems. The literature argues that single-member districts tend to encourage legis-

lators to cater to localized constituents because candidates are seated in the legislature only if they

gather enough votes to become the plurality winner within a district boundary (Carey and Shugart

1995; Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina 1994). Yet the empirical evidence that tests this argument is

mixed. One possible reason for mixed findings is that studies that compare legislative behavior

in systems with single-member districts to behavior in multi-member districts (MMD) introduce

substantial noise. Systems with multi-member districts vary on other electoral rules dimensions,

such as district magnitude and list type. These rules also influence the extent in which parties and

legislators have incentives to engage in entreprenerial or geographically-narrow activities.

I propose that a principal mechanism that underlies patterns of localism—and patterns of

localism in policy work—is permissiveness. Electoral systems in which any vote counts toward a

party’s national seat share are permissive. Conversely, systems where votes are ‘wasted’, irrelevant

to a party’s seat share when the candidate is not the plurality winner, are restrictive. The di↵erence

between these two system types is where a party and their legislators can collect meaningful votes,

or votes that contribute to their collective and individual seat share. I argue that by shifting the

location of meaningful votes, electoral rules influence the degree in which parties and legislators

value appealing to localized constituents. They also influence the incentives and constraints of

these collective and individual actors to appeal to particular locations and not others.

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To deal with the noise problem described in multi-member districts, I leverage the features

or mixed-member proportional (MMP) systems. MMP systems are permissive because the system

has a nationwide district list tier, allowing parties to collect meaningful votes from anywhere in the

country. Yet the system also has a nominal tier, where candidates are elected via single-member

district plurality rules. Comparing SMD plurality systems (restrictive) to MMP systems is thus

equivalent to a quasi-experiment with permissiveness as the treatment. To strengthen the research

design, I compare the policy work of seat-winning Green parties in Westminster-style parliamentary

regimes, which are known for having high levels of party discipline and unity. Green parties not

only have broad and nationally-oriented policy agendas that are similar across countries, but they

are also small parties short on resources and seeking maximum return on votes. The salience of

any electoral system e↵ect should be greatest on such parties.

To test hypotheses on the extent that parties engage in local appeals and the location of

these appeals, I analyze the written and oral parliamentary questions as well as motions from a

period of two years preceding the most recent election in Canada (restrictive), the United Kingdom

(restrictive), and New Zealand (permissive). I also use electoral data to test hypotheses on what

motivates which locations are the recipients of policy attention, and whether the motivation is

di↵erent across system types. Contrary to most literature on the electoral e↵ects on localism,

preliminary findings show that not only do all parties mention geographically-specific locations in

their policy appeals, but that Green Party MPs in the New Zealand parliament use local appeals

more frequently than the Green Party MP in the UK. Preliminary findings also show that where

legislators and parties collect meaningful votes is associated with the locations these actors address

in their policy activities.

This research makes several contributions. It contributes to the institutional literature by

furthering our understanding of whether electoral rules influence the degree in which parties and

their MPs pay attention to narrow, geographically-defined constituencies, and looks at a source of

localism—policy work—that has not yet received much attention in comparative politics scholar-

ship. Moreover, the paper advances conceptual clarity on the meaning of and reasons motivating

“localism”, a nuanced term used throughout the comparative politics literature, by parsing out and

testing the mechanism underlying the e↵ects of electoral rules on party and MP behavior. Finally,

the paper analyzes the activities of small parties, a novel contribution as previous studies have

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focused primarily on the extent of localism in the activities of bigger and mainstream parties.

The paper is organized as follows. First, I present the previous literature on localism and

electoral rules, and discuss expectations on the relationship between electoral rules and localism

via the permissiveness concept. I then justify case selection, and test the first empirical question

(whether small parties and their MPs tend to engage in higher frequency of localized policy work

than those in permissive systems). After presenting preliminary results, I unpack the second em-

pirical question (whether the motivation that shapes the geographic location of appeals are distinct

in the two system types) and the methods for testing it. I conclude with the preliminary findings

from the data that has been collected so far.

Previous Literature on Localism and and the Permissiveness Concept

The literature on whether electoral rules systematically influence the degree to which parties and

legislators appeal to localized constituents is extensive. Scholars of comparative politics suggest

that parties and MPs tend to cater to localized constituents in institutional conditions that heighten

the presence of the ‘personal vote’, or votes that are cast based on the qualities or performance

of a candidate rather than partisan a�liation (Shugart and Carey 1995; Carey 2007). Electoral

rules such as single-member districts create incentives for candidates to highlight their personal

qualities and engage in district-specific activities because voters cast votes for a person instead of

or in addition to a party. These incentives are weaker if not entirely missing in systems that have

high district magnitudes, which severs the relationship between a single legislator and his voters,

and in systems where constituents vote for a party and have no control over candidate selection.

Evidence on whether electoral rules influence the degree in which legislators engage in such

locally-specific activities is mixed. Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita (2006) build a formal model

of particularism, which predicts that single-member districts (among other elements) increase the

incentives of legislators to engage in constituency service. Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina (1994) find

that although legislators in the US provide more constituency service that legislators in Britain due

to party discipline in the latter, constituency service is important in both countries, speculating

that single-member districts play a role. Heitshusen, Young, and Woods (2005), Welch and Studlar

(1990), Jewell (1982) also find that legislators in multi-member districts service constituents less

frequently than legislators in single-member districts.

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Some literature has found no systematic e↵ects of electoral rules on legislators’ use of local

tactics. Martin (2011) discovers that while Irish parliamentarians use locally-specific tactics in

parliamentary activities, there is variation in how much an individual legislator engages in such

activities. Lazardeux (2005) finds no support for the electoral connection in France and Rasch

(2009) finds support for it in Norway. Morgenstern and Swindle (2005) take a unique approach to

identifying underlying mechanisms between electoral systems and localized behavior in that they

distinguish between the ‘personal’ and ‘local’ vote and test hypotheses on the latter. Studying

23 countries, the authors find limited support for the local vote and propose several possible ex-

planations, including that party and institutional constraints counteract incentives created by the

electoral system.

As suggested in the introduction, one potential explanation for contradictory results is that

multi-member districts introduce noise into analysis, and that a chief mechanism spurring dif-

ferences in the extent of localism between electoral systems is whether the system is permissive.

Permissive systems make all votes for a party meaningful, or seat-relevant, because the rules stipu-

late that any vote for a party counts toward the party’s seat share. Meaningful votes in restrictive

systems, on the other hand, are only those within the district(s) where the party and its legislators

have won seats. This new conceptualization leads to two possible but divergent expectations on

the e↵ects of electoral systems on localized policy work. The first follows the previous literature:

legislators tend to engage in localized policy work more frequently in restrictive systems than in

permissive ones because legislators in the former have more localized constituencies (i.e., their dis-

tricts). The second expectation counters the previous literature. Assuming that making localized

appeals is an e↵ective vote earning strategy, it could also be the case that legislators in permissive

systems engage in more localized policy work than legislators in restrictive ones. Because parties

in the latter can collect meaningful votes from a larger geographic area, they should have a higher

frequency of using local appeals.

Case Selection

The following section first justifies testing expectations by analyzing the policy work and electoral

patterns of small parties, and Green parties in particular. The second section describes the utility

of testing hypotheses by comparing policy work in two SMD plurality systems (restrictive) to one

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MMP case (permissive).

I. Why Test Green Parties?

I argue that the e↵ects of restrictive versus permissive rules should be clearest in the activities of

small parties because their margin of victory is almost always narrow, increasing the importance

of maximizing return on votes. Small parties seeking representation in parliament are severely

disadvantaged in restrictive systems, where one seat is allocated to the party with the most votes

in each district. The mechanical e↵ect, where votes of all losing parties do not count toward the

parties’ seat share and are e↵ectively wasted, causes the psychological e↵ect, which occurs when

constituents abandon sincere preferences for smaller parties and vote for one of the two largest

parties in their district (Amorim Neto and Cox 1997; Duverger 1951; Clark and Golder 2006;

Taagepera and Shugart 1989). As a result, small parties have a real chance of winning a seat only

if they have gathered enough votes to be strong contenders in the district election. Small political

parties in permissive systems, however, do not face such hurdles because parties are assigned seats

according to the number of votes they collect instead of to the number of plurality winners. Voters

are therefore relatively more inclined to maintain sincere preferences for small parties no matter

the likelihood of gathering the most votes in the district.1 These systematic di↵erences in potential

to gain representation should have a meaningful impact on how small parties strategize to obtain

votes, including through policy work.

Beyond being small parties, analyzing Green parties to assess the relationship between

electoral rules and localism has several merits. The most basic justification for using Green parties

to test hypotheses is that they are small but established seat-winning parties that exist in a diverse

set of electoral systems.2 The bulk of the literature on Green parties was written in the 1990s and

early 2000s and focuses on the emergent process of European Greens and their road to national

electoral success. Although the Ecology Party in the UK was the only Green party in Europe that

1I assume that voters are not thinking ahead to the coalition bargaining stage.

2Using seat-winning parties is important because winning seats indicates that parties use strategies that work

despite understood constraints of the electoral system, and because I can only analyze the legislative activities of

parties that win seats.

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competed at a national level until the 1980s, 12 Green parties across Europe had parliamentary

representation by the 1990s (Muller-Rommel and Poguntke 2002). Greens outside of Europe,

including in New Zealand and Canada, have had similar electoral histories. The Values Party in

New Zealand, established in the early 1970s, is considered the world’s first nationally competitive

Green party. Although it never gained seats in the legislature, its o↵spring party—the current Green

Party—obtained legislative representation in the 1990s after New Zealand reformed its electoral

rules. The Green Party of Canada, like many European Green parties, was founded in the early

1980s with an anti-nuclear policy agenda. It collected a limited number of votes until the late

2000s, however, when it won its first seat in the legislature.

Using seat-winning Green parties to test hypotheses provides a way of holding important

variables constant. Not only do Green parties have similar electoral histories across most coun-

tries and continents, they have remained relatively small parties in all countries. No Green party

has ever gathered more than 15 percent of the national vote share. Most Green parties have not

participated in government either. Examining other small parties would not provide such consis-

tency. Although their specific policy emphases vary, Green parties also have a common foundation

in environmental and social justice goals and a common ethos of internal democratic processes

(Burchell 2002; Richardson and Rootes 1995). Studying small seat-winning parties without a com-

mon substantive foundation makes it more di�cult to isolate the e↵ects of electoral rules on policy

dimensions because most of these parties have very distinct goals and ideologies.

The ideological positioning and cleavage structure of Green parties do not closely map onto a

particular geography, which also helps isolate the influence of electoral rules on attention to localized

policy work. Inglehart (1990) describes Green parties as parties of the post-1945 war generation:

their early supporters were post-materialists and partners in broad social movements, emphasizing

the quality of life, sustainability, and anti-industrialization. Because they challenged the philo-

sophical, programmatic and electoral ‘political orthodoxies’ of the 1970s and 1980s (Richardson

and Rootes 1995), they added a new dimension to an old cleavage structure (Burchell 2002). This

new dimension was and remains less clearly defined as on the left or right side of the ideological

spectrum. The policy areas that Green parties emphasize, including the protecting the environ-

ment and ecological systems, unilateral disarmament, non-violence, anti-nuclear, social justice,

gender, the developing world, and anti-consumerism (Burchell 2002; Frankland 1995; Richardson

6

and Rootes 1995, Poguntke 1989), can appeal to constituents with a wider variety of ideologies than

can the policies of most other parties. Green party supporters have similar demographic profiles

across countries: they tend to be young, educated, and have high incomes (Garner 2011; Frankland

1995, Richardson and Rootes 1995; Burklin 1987, Vowles 2002; Lambert and Jansen 2007). These

features are important because they imply that Green party constituents are less likely to have

geographically-specific interests that would increase the frequency of localized policy work, which

might be the case for parties with geographic cleavages, such as ethnic parties.

I. System and Country Cases

To avoid bringing noise into the analysis, I test hypotheses by comparing the policy work of Green

parties in SMD plurality systems to the policy work of Green parties in a mixed-member propor-

tional (MMP) system. MMP systems have two tiers. Constituents cast a vote for a candidate in a

nominal tier with single-member districts, and for a party in the list tier with nationwide propor-

tional representation. Thus the only di↵erence between the two systems is permissiveness; Green

parties in the MMP systems can collect meaningful votes form anywhere in the country despite

the presence of SMD plurality rules, making the comparison equivalent to a quasi-experiment. By

having single-member district boundaries, MMP systems also make it possible to make inferences

on why the policy issues of only certain locations are addressed and why these patterns vary across

systems types. It is worth noting that testing hypotheses across Westminster-style parliamentary

systems is also advantageous because it holds important procedural and norms constant. Analyzing

the extent of localism in such systems is also the strictest test because legislative activities tend to

follow party leadership.

I test expectations on the e↵ects of electoral rules on localized policy work by analyzing

the Green parties’ policy activities in the UK and Canada (SMD plurality rules) and New Zealand

(MMP). The Green parties in these three countries have similar ideologies (left of center), have won

seats in election-years fairly close to one another, and with the exception of the 2015 election in the

UK, have collected a relatively similar number of votes (less than 1 million).3 The main challenge

3Trying to hold size constant is a little tricky because it could be defined in several di↵erent ways. If defined by

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to testing hypotheses is seat share. Because SMD plurality systems make it extremely di�cult for

small parties to obtain any seats at all, Green parties in these systems have yet to obtain more than

one seat. While this e↵ect creates obstacles to testing expectations, I argue and will demonstrate

that insights can still be gained by comparing patterns of policy work from the single MP in the

two SMD plurality systems to that of the MPs in the MMP system.

Do Restrictive Systems Tend to Increase Local Appeals?

In the following section, I describe how I test whether MPs of small parties in restrictive systems

engage in localized policy work more frequently than MPs of small parties in permissive systems,

and then discuss preliminary results.

I. Parliamentary Activities as Policy Work

Members of parliament engage is several forms of policy work, including sponsoring and co-

sponsoring bills and proposing amendments. The party-centric governing style in Westminster-

style systems means that it is unlikely that MPs will use these activities to explicitly cater to local

constituencies. I check and confirm this assumption by reviewing a sample of legislation proposed

by Green Party MPs in each country, including the first statements made when the bill was intro-

duced. Roll-call votes have a similar problem because members almost always vote in unison in

these systems (Depauw and Martin 2009). More problematically, these are small parties, making

deviation from party leadership even more unlikely if not impossible in cases where the small party

has only one seat.

MPs do have opportunities to signal to local constituencies in their policy work, however,

through written and oral parliamentary questions (the latter of which occur during debates) as

well as through motions. Martin (2011) argues that parliamentary questions provide a unique and

direct way to assess whether members are appealing to local constituents as a ‘vote earning’ strategy

the number of votes, the UK Green Party is by far the largest because the party’s vote share grew four fold in the

2015 election. If defined by the number of parliamentary seats, on the other hand, the New Zealand Green Party

takes the cake; the party has 14 seats. Whether size plays an intervening role in the extent that a party uses localized

policy work to obtain votes is/will be discussed further in the results section.

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because they “discern the true preferences and interests of individual members” (Martin 2011). The

party leadership has less control over parliamentary questions, even ones posed on the floor during

debate (Judge 1974). Russo and Wiberg (2010) suggest that questions are a powerful means to

send signals and information to constituents, media, and other parties, and Salmond (2010) finds

that media tend to pay more attention of questioning than to other legislative activities. I therefore

measure ‘policy work’ using data sourced from written and oral parliamentary questions as well

as motions that each Green Party MP sponsored from a two year period preceding each countries’

most recent election (2013-2015 in Canada and the UK, and 2012-2014 in New Zealand).

Assessing whether an MP uses questions and motions to appeal to locally-specific con-

stituents involves coding these activities according to a set of straightforward criteria. I follow

Martin (2011), with some slight deviations. The coding procedure is as follows. If the member

mentions a geographic constituency or a location, including an event, person, business, or organiza-

tion that can be linked to an electoral district or subset of electoral districts, the statement is coded

as local. The proportion of these locally-specific activities from the total activities is the dependent

variable I use to answer the first empirical question. Since individual MPs may engage in more

localized policy work than others, especially if they represent constituents or sit on committees

that o↵er more localistic service delivery, I also look at the distribution of local activities for each

member across the party where possible.

II. Preliminary Results

I have collected all policy work data and coding for the UK. Caroline Lucas, who contended in

and won Brighton Pavilion in 2010 and then again in 2015, is the UK Green Party’s only MP.

Of her 506 parliamentary questions and motions between May 7, 2013 - May 7, 2015, 15 percent

(76/506) mention a localized constituency. Collecting and analyzing the data for New Zealand is a

more intensive task because the party has 14 members in Parliament during the period of analysis,

September 20, 2012 - September 20, 2014. I am in the process of analyzing the written questions

data for all MPs and determine whether motions data exist and collect it if so. I have collected

and coded the oral questions data for 12 of the 14 MPs. The two MPs that remain are Turei and

Norman, the party’s co-leaders at the time. For now, I provide analytics on the oral questions of

the 12 members I have coded. Of these 214 oral questions, 9 percent (61/214) refer to a localized

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constituency. Although I have not performed tests of significance, the proportion of questions that

appeal to a geographically-specific constituency are higher in New Zealand than in the UK. This

preliminary finding is counter to the previous literature, and supports the second expectation that

parties in permissive systems can and do use local appeals as a vote earning strategy.

Exploring Drivers of Localism

This section attempts to explain why Green parties in both restrictive and permissive electoral

systems make local policy appeals. I argue that the e↵ects of electoral rules on localistic behavior

is evident in the di↵erences between geographic patterns of appeals across systems. In other words,

while parties and their MPs might engage in policy work that benefits a narrow constituencies in

both restrictive and permissive systems, the motivation underlying this localistic behavior is dis-

tinct between the two and that the location of the appeal—as well as the policy issue addressed and

the characteristics of the MPs—helps to clarify the di↵erences in these motivations. I first present

the hypotheses, then the methods, and finally some preliminary results.

I. Building Hypotheses

Identifying the underlying mechanism that defines the link between electoral systems and a strategy

to appeal to geographically-narrow constituencies is just as important as testing whether there are

systematic di↵erences in how much localism parties use in distinct systems. Whether the appeal

to local constituents is the strategy of the MP, the party, and/or driven by personalization or

professionalization are just some of the questions on localism that have been overlooked and remain

open for debate.

One possible explanation for attention to local issues comes from previous literature as al-

ready described, and concerns a legislator’s individual electoral connection to a geographic area.

In restrictive systems, legislators have incentives to use a personal/local vote strategy, appealing

to constituents within the districts in which they contend for election. The literature on the per-

sonal vote strategy argues that because the party determines the election prospects of a particular

candidate, the incentives to have a personal/local vote strategy is less if not entirely absent in

permissive systems where MPs enter the legislature via lists. However, MPs in permissive systems

may still have an electoral connection to a geographic area. Where MPs are born, where they live,

and where they participate in local politics could enhance their electoral connection, or a personal

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relationship to constituents, in a particular location. For example, if my favorite elementary school

teacher was up on a party list in a permissive system, I might vote for her party in order to get

her seated (assuming she was ranked high enough on the list). These electoral connections may

explain why MPs make local appeals in permissive systems.

Although the argument is theoretically sound, there may be an alternative explanation for

why parties in permissive systems engage in localistic behavior. This explanation is preoccupied

with permissiveness, and the di↵erent incentives and constraints that parties and MPs share and/or

diverge on. MPs’ incentives to act on the behalf of their district constituents are often framed

as being at odds with the party’s collective agenda (Carey 2007). A center-left MP elected in

a conservative rural district, for example, might voice her discomfort with her party’s progressive

legislative agenda on climate change in order to please her district constituents. Yet not all activities

that appeal to localized constituents are at odds with the party’s agenda, and in fact, these activities

may actually serve the party. A legislator engaging in constituency service or praising a local policy

initiative on the national parliamentary stage may increase her re-election prospects, which increases

the likelihood of the party’s seat retention. Small parties in particular might benefit from engaging

in localized policy work if it helps them maximize votes that contribute to seat share.

Since meaningful votes are gathered from any location in permissive systems, and assuming

that the party cannot respond to every local policy problem, the most likely areas for small parties

to make local appeals are areas where the party already collects a lot of its votes. Constituents

in these locations would more familiar with the party and their performance, have higher prob-

ability of being influenced by party supporters, and are more likely to fit the demographic and

policy-orientation of current partisans. Although parties in restrictive systems may have the same

incentives, the party is constrained from making local appeals to anywhere in the country—even

areas where the party collects higher proportions of its votes relative to other areas. The restric-

tive structure that links the MP to her district depresses her incentives and credibility in dealing

with localized policy concerns in distant locations. Another way of framing the mechanism that

characterizes di↵erences between systems is that it is not the electorally-derived incentives of the

MP that drives localistic behavior, but rather the electorally-derived constraints. In sum, I expect

MPs of small parties in permissive systems to tend to engage in localized policy work where the

party collects many votes; conversely, MPs of small parties in restrictive systems tend to address

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local policy problems only where the MP has an electoral connection.

I. Tests

To test the electoral connection mechanism, I code any localized policy activity according to whether

the MP has an electoral connection to the location she references. The most obvious electoral

connection is whether the location exists within the district in which the MP contends for elec-

tion. MMP is useful here again because Green party candidates compete in the nominal tier even

though the party obtains votes through the list. As mentioned, however, competing for election

in the nominal tier is not the only possible electoral connection in an MMP system since voters

have the opportunity to influence the number of seats the party gets through the nationwide tier.

Constituents may develop a personal relationship to a candidate. Thus, I count local activity as

reflecting the electoral connection if the MP either contends for election, was born in, or resides

in the district. The dependent variable used to test the expectation is the proportion of localized

policy activities that have the electoral connection in each country.

I use electoral data from the election preceding and following the policy work analyzed to

assess the permissiveness explanation. Examining electoral data of both the preceding and sub-

sequent elections is important because the party may strategize according to prior or anticipated

party support. To test the expectation that permissiveness is a key driver of localistic behavior,

I check whether the locations of the policy work referenced correspond with the ten districts that

have the highest concentration of Green Party votes in either of the two elections in each country.

I. Preliminary Results and Brief Discussion

I am finding initial support for the proposition that MPs in restrictive systems appeal to areas where

they have an electoral connection (their district) in more often than those in permissive systems,

but with some variation. In the UK, 80 percent of Lucas’s localized policy work has an electoral

connection. Of the local appeals that MPs make in New Zealand, less than one third concern issues

in locations where the MP has an electoral connection. An important feature of these appeals,

however, are their geographic scope. In some cases, the location reference is broad; the MP does

not refer to the district or precise location, but rather a city, county, or region. “Brighton and

Hove” and “Sussex” are two common examples in the statements made by Lucas, the first of which

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is the city and the second the region in which Brighton Pavilion—her electoral district—is situated.

Addressing the local concerns or broader regions might be serving two strategic party purposes: 1)

responding and appealing to constituents within her district (to retain the seat), and 2) responding

and appealing to constituents in neighboring districts (to gain additional seats). Green Party

members also sit on the city’s local council in Brighton; thus, the policy work concerning regional

or city issues might be an illustration of the flow of communication between party members of local

and national government. Strategy aside, the local e↵ort may also be more pragmatic. Several

of these local appeals concern the Sussex County Hospital, for example, which serves the greater

Sussex region. Despite some localized appeals having a broader focus, the electoral connection

seems to be systematically distinct between the restrictive and permissive systems. Not once does

an MP in New Zealand state the words “my constituency”, but Lucas uses this phrase or refers to

her district specifically in 25 of her 76 statements (32 percent) that reference a local issue.

Before discussing what might be going on when MPs make references to localized issues

that span electoral districts, it is worth noting that there may be a competing or complementary

individual-level explanation with the potential presence of the electoral connection in New Zealand.

Of the geographically-specific appeals that had a clear electoral connection to an MP, half of

them concerned issues that were relevant to the select committee of the MP and almost all were

related to the thematic role of the spokesperson position the MP held. Moreover, it is with higher

frequency that MPs reference a location in which they have no electoral connection but that the issue

referenced is tied to their specialization (spokesperson or committee). For example, New Zealand

Green Party MP Catherine Delahunty asks the Minister of Education “Does she think that she has

a better idea about what is best for the children of Phillipstown School than their principal, Tony

Simpson, has?”; Phillipstown School is located in Christchurch. Although Delahunty competed for

election and lives in Coromandel and was born in Wellington, she is the spokesperson and sits on

the select committee for education. Compare this relationship to the activities of Caroline Lucas

in the UK: over 80 percent (61/76 questions) of her local references do not correspond to issues

she might deal with on the Environmental Audit Committee, a position she has held since she

entered the legislature. Many of her localized activities concern health, housing, and transport—all

of which sound like issues particular to a region and perhaps raised at local government levels.

The references made to multiple locations (i.e., spans electoral districts) has implications

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for the permissiveness explanation. Before discussing these implications, I first present two visual

aids which capture the e↵ects of electoral rules on a small party’s ability to collect votes. The first

aid is the kernel density plot of the proportion of Green Party votes in each electoral district in

the two elections preceding and succeeding the policy work analyzed in each country (see Figures

1-2 in Appendix). The Green Party votes in the UK are clearly concentrated in a single district

in 2010, but are more spread out in 2015. Quite possibly in part because of their presence in

the legislature, the party quadrupled their votes in the 2015 election. Although this decreases the

concentration of votes in the district where the Greens have their seat (Brighton Pavilion), it is

evident that a large share of these additional votes were collected in a handful of districts. Many

districts account for a very small share of Green Party votes. These di↵erences are presented in

the second visual aid, Tables 1-2 in the Appendix, which lists the number of votes in the top ten

districts with the greatest concentration of Green Party votes. In New Zealand, on the other hand,

votes across electoral districts are more spread out and look similar in the 2011 and 2014 elections.

The top ten districts with the greatest concentration of votes are listed in Table 3-4. To test the

permissiveness explanation, I check whether the local appeals of Green Party MPs correspond to

these ten districts.

As aforementioned, Caroline Lucas references local policy problems that span multiple elec-

toral districts. Yet all of these instances are centered around Brighton Pavilion. This means that

while she addresses problems in districts that make it into the top ten—Brighton Hove and Brighton

Kemptown, for example—she never address issues in Norwich South or Bristol West. These are two

districts with large shares of Green Party votes, but are not geographically proximate to Brighton

Pavilion. In New Zealand, however, almost 60 percent of local appeals are made to locations or

regions that are nested within the top ten electoral districts in either the 2011 or 2014 elections.

Even though most of the party’s nominal tier votes are collected in Wellington Central (equivalent

to Brighton Pavilion), under 20 percent of local appeals are made to that district or the Welling-

ton region broadly. This, of course, is in stark contrast to the UK case where Brighton Pavilion

and the Brighton region account for the overwhelming majority of local appeals. These findings

indicate preliminary support for the notion that the New Zealand Green Party’s local appeals are

not random, but are potentially part of a strategy to maximize votes in a permissive system.

14

Appendix

Figure 1: UK

Figure 2: NZ

15

Table 1: Top 10 Districts with High Green Party Vote Concentration (UK 2010)

District Votes

Brighton Pavilion 16,238

Norwich South 7,095

Cambridge 9404

Lewisham Deptford 7,400

Hove 7,281

Bury St Edmunds 7,013

Witney 6,999

Brighton Kemptown 6,749

Hackney North 5,932

Bristol West 5,890

Table 2: Top 10 Districts with High Green Party Vote Concentration (UK 2015)

District Votes

Brighton Pavilion 22,871

Bristol West 17,227

Isle of Wright 9,404

Buckingham 7,400

Hackney North 7,281

Holborn St Pacras 7,013

She�eld Cental 6,999

Norwich South 6,749

Lewisham Deptford 5,932

Oxford East 5,890

16

Table 3: Top 10 Districts with High Green Party Vote Concentration (NZ 2011)

District Votes

Rongotai 8,920

Wellingotn Central 10,903

Dunedin North 7,010

Auckland Central 7,797

Port Hills 6,522

Ilam 4,586

Coromandel 3,929

Nelson 5,660

Mt. Albert 5,660

Waitaki 4,587

Table 4: Top 10 Districts with High Green Party Vote Concentration (NZ 2014)

District Votes

Wellington Central 11,545

Rongotai 10,176

Dunedin North 8,035

Mt. Albert 8,005

Port Hills 6,812

Auckland Central 6,242

Ohoriu 5,623

Christchurch Central 5,419

Nelson 5,381

Hutt South 4,966

17

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