Country Profile:

Upcoming Elections

  • Parliamentary
    2011
  • Referendum
    2011
New Zealand

Description of government structure:

  • Chief of State: Queen ELIZABETH II *
  • Head of Government: Prime Minister Helen CLARK
  • Assembly: New Zealand has a unicameral House of Representatives with 121 seats.

* The Queen is represented by Governor General Anand SATYANAND (since 23 August 2006).

Description of electoral system:

  • The Queen is inherited N/A.
  • In the House of Representatives, 70 members are elected by plurality vote in single-member constituencies to serve 3-year terms and 50 members are elected through a party-list proportional representation system to serve 3-year terms.***

*** The electoral system is MMP. The voter has two votes: one for a party, one for the respective single-member constituency. Seven constituencies are reserved to the Maori people. Once constituency seats are filled, PR list seats are allocated to each party until its overall seat share is proportional to its share of party votes. Parties must clear a national threshold of 5 percent or win at least one constituency seat in order to qualify for seats in the ordinal tier. If a party wins more seats in the nominal tier than it would have been entitled to based on its share of ordinal tier votes, it keeps these seats, known as "overhang."

Population:

  • Population: 4,213,418 (July 2009 est.)

Future elections

  • Parliamentary - 2011
  • Referendum - 2011

Past elections

Last Updated on 02/04/2010