Campaign Expenditure Effects on Electoral Results in the New Zealand Local Government Sector
Political scientists around the world have long had an interest in understanding campaign finance as it pertains to influencing voters in democratically held elections. In New Zealand, campaign finance has received some attention at the level of central government (where only 120 seats in our parliament are contested), but it has received no attention for local government elections where there are many hundreds of mayoral and councillor positions contested every three years in council elections throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. A review of literature was undertaken which grounds the work in the substantial overseas research into campaign finance effects as observed and reported in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Oceania.
This study collected data from 1970 electoral candidates in the 2022 New Zealand local government elections. Some demographic and political data has been reported including gender of candidates, the presence of Māori wards, the presence of partisan groupings endorsing candidates and summaries of the different council types (city, district, regional) and positions contested (mayor and councillor). A split of marketing collateral used in the 2022 elections is also reported and is broken down into traditional media, collateral such as brochures and hoardings, social media, events and other stimuli used.
The second and more substantive aspect of the thesis involves the use of quantitative statistical methods to look for possible relationships between campaign donations, campaign expenditure, incumbency and electoral results achieved in the elections. The data was collected from all councils in New Zealand except one giving a robust basis for an analysis free from sampling error. It was possible because of the legal requirement for all candidates to file a donation and expenses return within 6 weeks of the poll result being declared.
Results show that campaign donations are a minor part of the New Zealand local government electoral landscape, only 12% of candidates received any external donations towards their election campaign. The study showed there to be a robust relationship between campaign expenditure and both vote share and being elected, a phenomenon in keeping with many different jurisdictions reported in campaign finance literature around the world. On the much-studied topic of incumbency, local government candidates on average enjoy a significant advantage although some outliers and “against the trend” observations were present in the data.
This study helps round out our understanding of local government democracy issues which have historically been focussed on participatory aspects such as gender, ethnicity and age. Having a good understanding of campaign finance issues will help regulators make decisions about the need (or lack of it) to further adjust rules about how much money candidates can solicit for campaigning via way of donations, and also the limits they face in terms of campaign expenditure to get themselves elected.
