A Movement to Preserve New Zealand's Non-partisan Bliss?

Increasing political partisanship and polarisation underpins many of the world's modern ills. We feel blissfully free of hyper-partisanship in New Zealand. But are we headed in that direction? And should we be acting to avoid it?

If, like me, you’ve spent most of 2020 doomscrolling, much of what you’ve soaked in will have been about Covid-19 in America, Brazil and the UK – the countries with the highest death tolls and most inept responses to the virus.

These, too, are countries experiencing all-time highs in partisan antipathy toward their elected leaders and governing parties.

All three countries, during states of historically high partisan polarisation, elected relatively extreme leaders. Leaders who set out primarily to serve their bases by winning specific battles, rather than to safely and competently govern their country and take care of all of its people.

America, most of all, is in the clutches of a kind of paralysing hyper-partisanship that’s simmered over the years into a state of total intractability.

“(Political partisanship) divisions represent one of the great political challenges of these times,” reported the Washington Post in October last year, “though there appears to be no immediate answer. Politics has become steadily more poisonous and the stakes with each election increase as fears of “the other side” having power course through the electorate. People talk longingly about restoring civility or returning to an earlier time. Little suggests that could happen soon.”

The 'us vs them’ of partisanship creates a public battleground on which a cohesive national response to a threat like Covid-19 is impossible. Even the most apolitical of things – a virus – has been politicised.

Compounding things, the supporters of the parties of Trump, Johnson and Bolsonaro are unwilling to criticise them or try to pull them into line, lest they hand a point to the other side - a fate worse than the deaths of thousands of their own people.

Thankfully, this is the kind of partisanship that doesn’t exist in New Zealand. In among some healthy debate along the way, we managed to avoid politicisation of the virus and unite to quickly rid our islands of Covid-19.

This ability to pull together to confront an existential challenge like a pandemic is one of the many benefits of being a relatively non-partisan country, where most of us don’t feel at war with those who vote a different way.

It’s a pretty good time to be a New Zealander.

And it’s made me think about how to keep it that way.

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It’s difficult not to conclude that the USA is in a state of (mostly) non-violent civil war. The inability to deal with the virus reflects historical gridlock in healthcare, gun ownership, climate change, education, racial inequality, economic inequality, and many other domains crucial to societal wellbeing. There is no effort to meet minds over these issues – rather to fight head to head to ensure, above all, that the other side loses.

This polarisation to ‘sides’, and the corresponding adamance to fight for those sides no matter what, has been growing steadily over the past two and a half decades. The Pew Research Center tracks partisanship by measuring how unfavourably Americans view the party that they don’t vote for. Those who viewed the other side ‘very unfavourably’ were in a small minority in 1994. They’re now the majority of both Democrats and Republicans.

These numbers show how fast things can change. How quickly, left unchecked, partisanship can grow dangerous.

Which got me thinking about whether this could ever happen in New Zealand. And whether, under the radar, it already is.

In January this year, researchers at the US’s National Bureau of Economic Research published an analysis of long-term trends in partisanship (or as they term it, ‘affective polarisation’) in nine OECD countries.

New Zealand was shown to be one of the four countries in which partisanship has increased over time. Although our trend is the least steep, this research supports the sense among many that our politics seems to be becoming a little more partisan.

Besides this research, I couldn’t find any numbers on partisanship in New Zealand. To date, we don’t seem to have had much of an interest in measuring or understanding it.

And so I decided to do some research of my own – to try to assess how partisan we are right now, and whether this polarisation is increasing.

Another of Pew Research’s ways of measuring partisanship in the USA is the following spectrum – where ‘strong’ supporters of each side are highly partisan in terms of having very closed-minded views of the opposing side:

So I surveyed a random sample of 500 New Zealanders, asking them questions that would help to recreate Pew’s chart for New Zealand voters.

To find ‘No lean’ voters I asked which side of the political spectrum (i.e. left or right) they’d usually voted for in the past and who they considered themselves a supporter of. 26% of respondents said they didn’t have a preference or past record of favouring one side.

To find ‘Lean’ voters, I asked people if they found it easy to imagine themselves voting for the other side in future. Those who had a preference, but could easily imagine themselves voting against that in future, are our ‘Lean’ cohort.

Those who did find it hard to imagine voting the other way in future went into the ‘Not strong’ camp.

And finally, those ‘Strong’ partisan voters were those who held a very unfavourable view of the opposite side and a strong belief that the opposite end of the political spectrum was fundamentally wrong and dangerous for the country.

What our chart shows is that, compared to the US, we have many more ‘No Lean’ voters and many fewer ‘Strong’ partisans.

This is good.

But I also asked how their feelings had changed over time. Whether their concern about the danger of people on the other side of the political spectrum had decreased, stayed the same, or increased in the past decade.

The majority of both sides said they felt more concerned about the other side than they did ten years ago. 55% of left-leaning voters and 68% of right-leaning voters.

This is not so good – suggesting that we are moving toward more of a belief that the other side is flawed, wrong… and dangerous.

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Of course, there’s nothing wrong with disagreeing with the policies or points of view of any political group. It’s our duty, in a democracy, to pick a side to vote for on election day. And if you make that same pick every election of your life, that’s absolutely fine too.

But what defines partisan polarisation is different to an objective, negative assessment of a party’s policy.

It’s the belief that those on the other side are fundamentally bad and wrong, and that anything they come up with will also be fundamentally bad and wrong. Leading to the active dismissal of anything that they say or do, no matter what it is.

I wanted to understand the nature of the criticism of each side, and so I asked all Lean, Not Strong and Strong voters to pick three words to describe the other side of the political spectrum. I gave them a list of 26 words to choose from. Some were explicitly positive, like ‘honest’, ‘hard-working’ and ‘kind’. Some were explicitly negative, like ‘selfish’, ‘dangerous’ or ‘power-hungry’. And some were more nuanced, like ‘well-meaning’, ‘short-sighted’ or ‘cynical’.

The top 3 responses were telling.

National and other right-leaning voters describe Labour and other left-leaning politicians and supporters as ‘unrealistic, misguided and naïve’.

Labour and other left-leaning voters describe National and other right-leaning politicians and supporters as ‘power-hungry, money-hungry and dishonest’.

The reality, of course, is that some people on the left are unrealistic, misguided or naïve. Some others are power-hungry, money-hungry and dishonest. Same goes for the right. Same goes for any group of people that you care to assemble.

Largely though, people on either side are caring, hard-working, intelligent, honest and responsible. Politicians, no matter what their affiliations, have dedicated their lives to making our country a better place. They take on enormous personal responsibility, work ridiculous hours, and suffer extraordinary public and media abuse, all to be paid far less than they would be if they saved themselves the hassle and went to work for a corporate.

The belief that all people on the other side are bad is obviously inaccurate. But it exists. And it has implications.

A big one is the pitting of voters against one another. Last year I had dinner with a friend in San Francisco. She’s a doyen of the Silicon Valley tech scene. And she’s a Republican. She told me that I was one of very few people that she’d told in recent years that she was a Republican. In the Valley, it’s much more common to be Democratic – and she knew that if it got out that she wasn’t, she would lose significant business, and would be abandoned by many of her friends.

This politicisation of business and friendships is underpinned by the conviction that those on the other side of the spectrum don’t just have different beliefs, but that these beliefs prove that they are bad people, with pernicious intent, and mere association with them is a dereliction of duty to your side.

This, I believe, is what is at the heart of dangerous partisanship. The kind of political polarisation that I feel uneasy about seeping in to New Zealand.

That’s what’s happened in America, in droves. And what the numbers tell me is that it’s possible that we might, at some point in the future, succumb to it here in New Zealand.

“People talk longingly about restoring civility or returning to an earlier time,” said the Washington Post, of America.

For New Zealand, that earlier time is now.

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I've written this piece to see whether I’m alone in my concern about this issue. How do you feel about this? Do you think we should be doing something to try to prevent partisan polarisation in New Zealand? Do we need a (not-for-profit and non-partisan) organisation that takes on responsibility for educating the public and preserving an environment in which we can remain a non-partisan society?

I would love to hear what you think. Please do comment or contact me privately.