Coalition leadership is hard. Luxon’s ‘nuclear option’ of electoral reform is not the answer

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is promising voters a referendum on their electoral system if his government is reelected. According to The Conversation, Luxon has grown frustrated by the challenges of managing a multi-party coalition and sees electoral reform as the solution. But politics professor Richard Shaw argues that's the wrong target. The real issue, he says, isn't the voting system itself, but the political management required to hold a coalition together. New Zealand switched to its current mixed-member proportional system in nineteen ninety-three because the old first-past-the-post system produced governments that won a majority of parliamentary seats with just a minority of votes. Going back to that system won't address what Luxon actually needs to fix: managing the tensions inherent in leading a multi-party coalition.

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