"To find a New Zealand election with lower official turnout than 2011" writes Professor Jack Vowles, "one must go back to 1887, well before when women attained voting rights."
An almost-'A-' doesn't sound too bad and in international terms we're still close to top of the class. The United Kingdom (65% scraping a 'B') and Canada (61%, 'B-' and wishing it hadn't shared it's crib sheet with the UK) would be envious. Meanwhile, the United States is the second-year sixth of this pack, scraping a 'C+' (58%). Uncle Sam isn't resentful at all, because this is the best result since 1968 and, hey, it's better than standing in the corner.
But it has been a long fall. As recently as 1984 New Zealand turnout peaked at 93.7%, an 'A+' whatever University you attend. Clearly, there is an issue.
I shall leave it to my colleagues in political science to dust off their psephological hats (psephology is the study of polls and voting). Thanks to their work, we know that the roughly-a-million non-voters were disproportionately non-pakeha, younger, and poorer.
Now for some political psychology.
From my own work, I can tell you that a vote for the right has roots in a strong preference for convention and tradition (the attraction of the tried and true) rather than the quest for novelty. A vote for the left is strongly motivated by seeing the world as organised in an egalitarian fashion, rather than hierarchically from top to bottom. But that only tells us something about why the people who vote, choose who to vote for. Understanding why people don't vote is a little trickier.
Think on this—in order to know why someone doesn't vote I'd need to know that they didn't vote. And while the Electoral Commission knows, they're not going to tell me. That’s to say, there is a record of who has voted but, unlike the electoral roll which is publicly available, records of voting are by necessity confidential. Instead, you'd need to ask an awful lot of people to get a representative group of voters and non-voters...
At times like this I'm very happy to be a small part of something that does exactly this—the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS), a longitudinal study of New Zealanders' attitudes and feelings on various social and political issues and the brain child of fellow Victoria University graduate, Chris Sibley. And it's big—thousands and thousands big.
Graduate student (and cog in the NZAVS machine) Lara Greaves, lays some of the 'blame' at the feet of our fence-sitters. Roughly a third of us fall into this category, marked by a general ambivalence towards political parties in general. That's okay, because you're allowed to feel underwhelmed by your options but, unfortunately, that ambivalence translates into behaviour. Fence-sitters are more likely to be "female, younger, non-NZ European and ideologically centrist", as well as less affluent than all but their Labour-voting cousins. Not too dissimilar from the profile of the 2011 non-voter. More importantly, analysing the proportion of fence-sitters by electorate you find that this is a reliable predictor of electorate turnout—the more fence-sitters, the lower the turnout.
The solution? Potential interventions include changing the age of electoral eligibility or introducing compulsory voting, among others. But if ambivalence is a major issue (and this work suggests it might be) another option is to work to give that third of our population something to care about politically, and to make it worth their while to vote. In the first instance, the ball is in your court political parties.