How unrepresentative is your council?
If you’ve ever been to a meeting of your local councillors, you may have noticed they share certain characteristics.
It is almost certain that most of them were male, most of them were white, and most of them were aged between 50 and 70 (and many would have been a combination of the three).
It’ll surprise no one that institutions based on being free during the daytime and getting to decide how resources are allocated attracts some demographics more than others. It’s also no secret that local government, much like government as a whole, has long had a representation problem.
But with a local government election on the way, it pays to ask the question: just how unrepresentative are our councils? Probably more than you realised.
An analysis of nearly 900 elected members, who together represent district, regional and city councils, show they collectively bear little resemblance to the people they represent.
Of the 77* local authorities in New Zealand, not one of them demographically reflects their community, and none even come close.
Eleven of the 12 elected members of the Western Bay of Plenty District Council are men and they are predominantly older.
If this was your first glimpse of the district, you might come away with the impression it was almost exclusively home to men over the age of 60 who likely identify as New Zealand European.
It’s not, of course. The district’s residents are mostly women; 17 per cent of its residents identify as Ma¯ ori, more than the general population; the median age is 46, higher than the national average but younger than every one of the district’s elected councillors which include as many people named John as people not yet eligible for the pension.
The Western Bay of Plenty District is not an outlier by any means. There are many ways to adjudicate the issue of representation, but let’s start with age.
The median New Zealander, as of 2019, is about 38 years old. This means roughly half of New Zealanders are younger than 38, and roughly half are older than 38 (and some, of course, are 38).
Taking into account the quarter of the population who can’t stand for council because they’re younger than 18, this would mean, all things being equal, about 215 councillors should be aged between 18 and 38.
Is this the case? Well, no. Elected members don’t have to publicly declare how old they are, so there is no official data to draw upon, but it’s pretty easy to figure out how many fit that description since there are so few of them.
As of 2019, the number of councillors nationwide who are either 37 years old or younger is approximately 32, nearly seven times fewer than would be expected given their share of the population.
To get a sense of how low this is, the number of elected members named John is about 33, as is the number of councillors named Michael.
This means if you picked an elected councillor at random, they would be twice as likely to be named John or Michael than to have been born at any point since
1981.
The number of young elected members has been lower in the past. Based on periodic elected member surveys (which, as a note of caution, includes community board members, who tend to be younger), the proportion of elected members under the age of 40 was just 2.2 per cent in 2001 (compared with 6 per cent now).
The current proportion, however, is the same as it was in
1998, and slightly lower than in
2010. If it’s getting better, it’s doing so very slowly.
So which age group is taking up the council seats? Unsurprisingly, they are overwhelmingly occupied by people aged between 51 and 70.
In the absence of specific age data, post-election surveys are the best source for figuring out how old councillors are.
After the 2016 election, the proportion of surveyed elected members older than 51 was around
83 per cent, despite that age group making up less than one-third of the overall population.
The elected members of this age group are predominantly men; women members tend to be younger, with about 65 per cent of female members older than 51.
Only one age cohort is fairly represented in local government, and that’s people older than 71; they comprise about 8 per cent of elected members, roughly the same as their share of the overall population.
What can we take from this? The average councillor was born closer to the end of World War I than to today. Every council fails on the age measure, but some fail harder than others.
Most councils – 50 in total – don’t have any elected members younger than 38, and most of the remainder have one.
The best performer, proportionally, is Selwyn District Council, with 20 per cent of councillors younger than 38 (including its mayor, Sam Broughton, the only council leader younger than 38).
The age disparity is slightly less pronounced among city councils.
Of the 124 regional councillors, just four are aged under 38. They are outnumbered by councillors named David (8) or Michael (5), and equal to the number of councillors named John (4).
The same goes for district councillors, proportionally, where members younger than 38 are outnumbered 30 to one.
Gender representation is slightly better than age, but not by much. Nationally, women comprise 51 per cent of the population, but they remain a minority among elected members, at around 32 per cent. The figure is lower for regional councils, however, where for every woman councillor there are three men.
If councils were representative of the population at large, nearly 40 councils would have women majorities.
The actual number is three: Kaipara, Whangarei, and Waipa, each of which has a one-woman majority. Another four councils are evenly split, leaving the remaining 91 per cent of councils as majority male (this analysis neglects any members who may identify as gender non-conforming or nonbinary, as this data is not available).
At the other end of the spectrum is West Coast Regional Council, the only council with no women. Six other councils each include one woman.
The paucity of women generally doesn’t tell the whole story. Not only are there fewer women, but women are less likely to hold leadership positions, and are less
likely to have served multiple terms on the council.
Only two councils have a woman as both leader and deputy leader (Whangarei and Hastings), compared with 39 that have men in both positions. Not one regional council is led by a woman, and only two city councils are run by women (Nelson and Christchurch).
Women lead only 13 councils (17 per cent), a bias particularly prevalent in the South Island, which has three female leaders across 27 councils (11 per cent).
The other significant element of representation is ethnicity. Data on this is harder to come by, again leaving the post-candidate surveys as the best source.
According to those, people who identify as New Zealand European are significantly over-represented, while people who identify as Ma¯ ori, Pasifika, and/or Asian are underrepresented.
So what brings about this disparity?
Well, there’s one fairly obvious clue when you look at who votes.
Unsurprisingly, those most likely to vote in a local government election are middle-aged people who identify as New Zealand European.
But it’s not necessarily the case that older people vote exclusively for older candidates, or that Pa¯ keha¯ vote exclusively for Pa¯ keha¯ candidates.
For one thing, the proportion of voters younger than 38 is significantly higher than the proportion of elected members younger than 38. This might mean that young candidates get little to no support from anyone older than 38, and thus are unable to command a plurality of votes; but it seems more likely that there are simply fewer candidates in that age cohort to vote for.
There is international evidence, however, that voters in low-information elections – as local body elections tend to be – can be susceptible to ‘‘in-group bias’’, a psychological phenomenon in which the person shows an unconscious favouritism to those similar to themselves.
Addressing these imbalances could take considerable time. It took 30 years to increase the overall proportion of women in local government positions from 25 per cent to 38 per cent, and 20 years to increase Ma¯ ori representation from 5 per cent to 10 per cent.
But with the rapidly warming climate, low housing affordability, and gender and racial inequality emerging as key issues for young people, political momentum may be with the young.
Already this year, an unprecedented number of young candidates have put their names forward. The unofficial count, at the end of July, was more than 60 candidates younger than 40 across all representative bodies (including community boards and district health boards).
To close the age gap, young people need to take more than 180 council seats, nearly six times the number of seats they currently occupy. That shift would take much, much longer than a single election.
* The analysis does not include the Chatham Islands District Council, for which data was too difficult to obtain.