New Zealand has virtually everything we associate with a functioning democracy: free elections, universal suffrage, MMP, parliamentary debate, select committees, public submissions and even the ability of citizens to force a referendum. Yet a landmark peer-reviewed study of American policymaking raises an uncomfortable question for New Zealand. Having all the machinery of democracy does not necessarily mean ordinary citizens determine what that machinery ultimately produces.
In 2014, Princeton University's Martin Gilens and Northwestern University's Benjamin I. Page published Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens in the peer-reviewed journal Perspectives on Politics. Rather than asking people whether they believed government listened to them, the researchers attempted to measure political influence by examining 1,779 policy issues and comparing what ordinary Americans wanted, what affluent Americans wanted, what organised interest groups wanted, and what the United States Government subsequently did.
The significance of their findings extends well beyond the United States because they challenge one of the assumptions at the heart of modern representative democracy. Citizens may possess the vote, political parties may compete for office, legislatures may debate laws and governments may continue to change peacefully through elections, yet none of those things by themselves establish whose preferences actually determine public policy.
Gilens and Page found substantial support for what they termed Economic Elite Domination and Biased Pluralism, but little support for the conventional theory of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy — the proposition that government policy broadly reflects the preferences of ordinary citizens. When they statistically separated the preferences of average citizens from those of affluent Americans and organised interest groups, the independent influence attributed to ordinary citizens fell to what the researchers described as a near-zero level. Economic elites and organised interests, by contrast, retained substantial independent effects on government policy.
That does not mean ordinary Americans never got what they wanted. Frequently they did. The problem identified by Gilens and Page was that average citizens and affluent citizens often wanted the same thing, creating the appearance that government was responding to the majority. Once the researchers examined situations where their preferences diverged, the apparent power of ordinary citizens largely disappeared. They described this uncomfortable phenomenon as "democracy by coincidence."
The numbers are remarkable. When only a narrow majority of ordinary Americans supported changing government policy, that change occurred approximately 30 percent of the time. Even when an extraordinary 80 percent of Americans favoured a policy change, the likelihood of it occurring rose to only about 43 percent. When the preferences of economic elites and interest groups were held constant, increasing public support from a small minority to a large majority made surprisingly little difference to the likelihood of policy adoption. Increasing support among affluent Americans or organised interest groups, however, substantially increased the probability that government policy would change.
This is where an American political study becomes relevant to New Zealand. The Gilens–Page paper does not establish that New Zealand is controlled by corporations, nor would it be responsible to claim that it does. It does, however, provide us with a testable proposition: do the preferences of ordinary New Zealanders independently influence government policy, particularly when those preferences conflict with powerful organised interests?
New Zealand Has the Machinery of Democracy
New Zealanders can reasonably point to a robust democratic framework. We elect our representatives under MMP, governments can be removed at elections, opposition parties scrutinise ministers, citizens can contact MPs, organise politically, protest, petition Parliament and make submissions on proposed legislation. Bills normally pass through several parliamentary stages, and select committees provide an opportunity for members of the public, businesses, professional bodies, lobby groups and other organisations to present evidence and recommend changes.
There is, however, an important structural difference between New Zealand and the United States. New Zealand has no upper house. The Legislative Council was abolished in 1951, leaving Parliament with a single House of Representatives. New Zealand also does not have one supreme written constitutional document equivalent to the United States Constitution, and Parliament remains the country's supreme law-making institution.
This gives the parliamentary process enormous importance. A government that possesses sufficient support in the House can ultimately pass legislation through the First Reading, select committee, Second Reading, Committee of the Whole House and Third Reading before Royal Assent. The select committee stage is therefore one of the principal opportunities ordinary citizens have to directly engage with proposed legislation before it becomes law.
Anyone can submit, and that is an important democratic right. But the existence of equal access to a process does not necessarily establish equality of influence within that process. An individual New Zealander might spend several evenings researching and preparing a submission because proposed legislation affects their family, livelihood or community. A major corporation or industry organisation can potentially approach the same process with lawyers, economists, public-relations professionals, technical specialists, government-relations staff and professional lobbyists, supported by substantial financial resources.
Both have technically been heard. The more important question is whether both have been heard equally.
Gilens and Page identified precisely this problem in the United States. Organised groups lobby public officials, provide policymakers with information and research, contribute to political campaigns and participate throughout the policy-development process. The American interest-group environment they studied was also disproportionately populated by corporations, businesses and professional organisations.
When the researchers separated mass-based organisations from business-oriented interest groups, they found that both exercised measurable influence, but the coefficient for business groups was nearly twice as large. Their explanation was important: it was not necessarily that an individual corporation automatically possessed twice the political power of an individual citizen organisation. Rather, business groups were considerably more numerous and active across the policy issues examined and collectively exerted greater influence.
Their overall conclusion was difficult to reconcile with the conventional picture of democracy. Business organisations were more numerous, spent considerably more money and, collectively, "tend to get their way."
What Happens When the Public and Powerful Interests Disagree?
The relevant question for New Zealand isn't whether corporations should be permitted to make submissions or speak to ministers. Of course they should. Businesses employ New Zealanders, invest capital, pay taxes and possess legitimate interests that governments need to understand when developing policy. Nor should the views of a majority automatically determine every government decision; representative government sometimes requires decisions that are unpopular, technically complex or necessary for the longer-term national interest.
The democratic test becomes meaningful when those interests diverge. If a substantial majority of ordinary New Zealanders favour one policy while major organised economic interests favour another, whose preference is more likely to become law? If thousands of individuals make select committee submissions opposing legislation while a much smaller number of well-resourced organisations support it, does the number of submissions matter, or does the institutional influence behind them matter more?
Those questions should be capable of empirical answers. Yet our political debate tends to measure democracy through elections, voter turnout and opportunities for consultation rather than examining the relationship between public preference and final policy outcomes.
That distinction is at the heart of Gilens and Page's work. The question is not simply whether citizens are allowed to speak. It is whether what they say independently changes what government does.
What Happens Before the Public Gets to Submit?
There is another problem with regarding the select committee process as the primary measure of public influence. By the time a Bill reaches a select committee, much of the policy-development process has already occurred. Ministers and officials may have spent months or years considering the issue. Government departments have developed proposals, regulatory impacts may have been assessed, stakeholders consulted, industry organisations engaged, Cabinet papers prepared and legislation drafted.
For many ordinary New Zealanders, the first serious opportunity to influence legislation may therefore occur after the basic policy direction has already been established.
This leads to a deeper form of political influence discussed by Gilens and Page. Political power is not limited to winning or losing a vote on a proposal already before government. There is also the power to influence which proposals reach the political agenda in the first place — and which never receive serious consideration. The researchers acknowledged that policy can be shaped through this "second face" of power long before a formal legislative decision is taken.
That suggests any serious New Zealand examination cannot stop at counting select committee submissions. We would need to examine who met ministers and officials before legislation was drafted, which organisations were formally consulted, who provided research and technical advice, what political donations were made where relevant, and whether individuals moved between government, lobbying, regulatory and corporate positions.
The critical question becomes not merely who wins when Parliament votes, but who helped determine what Parliament was asked to vote on.
The Referendum Paradox
Citizen-initiated referendums provide perhaps the clearest illustration of the limits placed on direct public power in New Zealand. Citizens can initiate a nationwide referendum, but the threshold is deliberately demanding. After navigating the formal process, organisers must obtain signatures from at least 10 percent of registered electors within 12 months before the referendum can proceed.
Consider what that means in practical terms. A citizen campaign must organise nationally, mobilise volunteers, communicate its argument and collect hundreds of thousands of valid signatures merely to place a question before the electorate. If it succeeds, taxpayers fund a nationwide vote and potentially millions of New Zealanders participate.
The result, however, is non-binding.
No matter how difficult the process of obtaining the referendum was, how high the turnout becomes or how overwhelming the final majority may be, Parliament is not legally required to implement the result. A citizens-initiated referendum is ultimately an expression of public opinion that elected representatives are entitled to reject.
There are defensible reasons for this. New Zealand is a representative rather than direct democracy, and complex public policy cannot always be reduced to binary questions. Parliament also has responsibilities toward constitutional principles, minority rights, fiscal consequences and information that may not be captured in a referendum campaign.
Yet the imbalance remains striking. The public must clear an extraordinarily high barrier to formally demonstrate its collective preference, while the political system retains the right to disregard that preference once expressed.
That does not make the system undemocratic. But it does raise the same question posed by the American evidence: where does ultimate political influence actually reside?
We Should Be Able to Measure This
Rather than assuming New Zealand suffers from the same democratic imbalance identified in the United States, we should test it.
Take a substantial sample of major New Zealand policy decisions across successive governments and political parties. Establish reliable measures of public preference before each decision. Identify the positions taken by major corporations, industry organisations, unions, NGOs and organised citizen groups. Examine ministerial access, select committee submissions, political donations where relevant, regulatory impact statements and consultation documents. Then compare those preferences with the final policy adopted by government.
The methodology would need to be rigorous. Selecting only controversial examples where government ignored public opposition would simply prove that such cases exist, not that there is a systemic imbalance. The real value of the Gilens–Page approach was examining a large number of policy decisions and asking whose preferences statistically predicted the outcome.
Perhaps such research would demonstrate that New Zealand's system performs considerably better than America's. MMP may distribute political influence more widely. Smaller parties may provide additional avenues for citizens to influence government. Select committees may materially alter legislation more frequently than critics assume. New Zealand's comparatively small political system may make MPs more accessible to ordinary citizens.
But perhaps it would reveal something else.
We currently don't know, because simply possessing democratic institutions is not the same thing as measuring who exercises influence through them.
What Is Actually in It for the Voter?
This is where the argument ultimately returns to the voter. Every three years New Zealanders are presented with competing political parties promising tax cuts, benefits, subsidies, infrastructure, improved public services or relief from whatever pressures are dominating the electoral cycle. Inevitably, some of those promises amount to parties offering different ways of distributing the public's own money back to them. The voter chooses between those competing packages and, collectively, determines how many seats each party receives.
But the government that emerges is not necessarily the government — or policy programme — any voter actually voted for.
Under MMP, election night can merely begin another negotiation. Unless one party commands a majority, coalition and confidence arrangements must be forged between political parties, sometimes involving policies that were not central to the election campaign and compromises that no electorate has directly endorsed. Policies can be traded, abandoned, modified or introduced as parties assemble the numbers required to govern. The public sees the eventual coalition agreements, but the negotiations, concessions, competing demands and calculations that produced them largely occur beyond public view.
There is nothing constitutionally improper about this. Coalition bargaining is an inherent feature of proportional representation and can force parties representing different sections of society to compromise. But it does create a democratic paradox. The voter chooses a party on the basis of the programme placed before them, while the programme ultimately implemented by government may only be constructed after the votes have been counted.
Once governing power has been assembled, the imbalance examined throughout this article becomes more important. New policy begins moving through a system in which government controls much of the legislative agenda, Cabinet and officials have already undertaken substantial policy development before most citizens become involved, and the select committee may be the first meaningful opportunity for the wider public to respond. There, the individual citizen enters the same arena as corporations, industry organisations, unions, NGOs, professional associations and specialist lobbyists with vastly different levels of money, expertise, organisation and access.
The public can submit, but submission is not decision. Parliament can listen without agreeing. Thousands of submissions do not constitute a vote that binds MPs, and even the extraordinary effort required to force a citizens-initiated referendum produces a result Parliament is legally entitled to disregard.
None of this establishes that New Zealand is secretly governed by corporations, nor does the Gilens–Page research prove that the American pattern exists here. That remains precisely what needs to be tested. But the structure gives New Zealanders good reason to ask whether our democratic system measures participation more effectively than it guarantees influence.
Because democracy should ultimately involve something more substantial than choosing which collection of political promises we prefer every three years.
If the voter cannot know what the final governing programme will be until coalition negotiations are completed; if significant policy can subsequently emerge that was never directly endorsed at an election; if organised interests possess greater resources and access while that policy is developed; if public submissions can be overwhelmingly opposed without binding Parliament; and if even a successful citizens-initiated referendum cannot compel the Government to act, then the legitimate question becomes: where, between election day and the creation of law, does the sovereignty of the citizen actually reside?
Bread and Circuses?
The Roman expression "bread and circuses" has survived for nearly two thousand years because it describes an enduring political temptation: satisfy enough of the population's immediate material wants and keep public attention fixed on spectacle while consequential decisions are made elsewhere.
Modern New Zealand is obviously not ancient Rome. Elections, civil liberties, political competition, freedom of expression and the rule of law are substantive democratic protections, not theatrical ones. But the old warning becomes relevant if democratic participation gradually becomes concentrated around the spectacle of elections — the campaigns, personalities, promises, polling, debates, advertising and election-night drama — while the less visible process of determining actual public policy increasingly takes place after the voter has played their part.
Perhaps that is the deeper challenge presented by Gilens and Page. Their research did not discover a country without elections. America retained Congress, the Senate, political parties, voting, lobbying, public advocacy and the familiar machinery of constitutional democracy. What the researchers found was that having elections and having equal political influence were not necessarily the same thing. Once the preferences of economic elites and organised interests were accounted for, ordinary citizens appeared to have little or no independent influence over policy.
Their conclusion was stark. When the preferences of ordinary Americans diverged from those of economic elites and organised interests, ordinary citizens generally lost. "The majority does not rule," they wrote. Yet elections continued, legislators continued debating, citizens continued voting and governments continued changing. The democratic machinery remained in place.
New Zealand should have enough confidence in its own democracy to subject it to the same test. Not simply how many people voted, how many submissions Parliament received or how many consultations government conducted, but when ordinary New Zealanders and powerful organised interests want different outcomes, who actually gets what they wanted?
That is ultimately what is in it for the voter. Political parties can promise benefits, governments can redistribute money and election campaigns can offer an extraordinary spectacle every three years. But the fundamental democratic dividend is not what government gives citizens.
It is the influence citizens retain over government.
If that influence largely ends once the ballot has been counted, while the policies that follow are negotiated, developed and influenced elsewhere, then perhaps New Zealanders need to ask whether we are exercising democratic power — or merely periodically choosing who gets to exercise it for us.
For New Zealand, that leaves one question worth answering with evidence rather than assumption:
We vote. We submit. We petition. But who really governs New Zealand?
Independent reporting. Original context. Credited sources.
Sources
Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page — Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 12, No. 3, September 2014, pp. 564–581.
New Zealand Parliament — Our System of Government
New Zealand Parliament — Parliamentary Practice in New Zealand: Referendums
New Zealand Parliament — Members' Guide to Select Committees
Electoral Commission — What is a Referendum?