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David Denemark, "Electoral
Change, Inertia and Campaigns in New Zealand: The First
Modern FPP Campaign in 1987 and the First MMP Campaign in
1996,"Party Politics, 9 (September 2003),
601-618.
First Paragraph:
Election campaigns -- their strategies, techniques and
technologies -- are the product of the electoral systems
within which they are waged (Katz, 1980). Because electoral
rules determine the fundamental logic for translating votes
into seats, they significantly affect the competitive
calculus employed by parties and candidates to secure those
votes, creating powerful incentives to adopt and utilize
those techniques best-suited for maximizing the vote within
a given set of electoral rules. Despite these imperatives,
however, campaign tacticians and entrepreneurs are regularly
constrained by the available financial and human resources,
as well as by the inertia, uncertainty and distrust of
change felt by those whose electoral fortunes may
nonetheless hang in the balance --conflicting impetuses that
are perhaps most evident in times of watershed electoral
developments.
Figures and
Tables:
None.
Last Paragraph:
These two patterns of campaign change in New Zealand afford
important lessons about the competing incentives that
crystallize at times of political transition. They serve as
reminders that parties -- though they aspire to
organizational and strategic unity -- are not unitary
actors, responding as one to the imperatives of adaptation.
Rather, their differential responses to uncertainty point to
the difficulties of political learning and adjustment, as
political actors gauge the relative benefits and costs of
change.
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