Simply the Best?

Qualifying for Parliament

Give me a lifetime of promises and a world of dreams
Speak a language of love like you know what it means
Mmm, and it can’t be wrong
Take my heart and make it strong, baby

You’re simply the best
Better than all the rest
Better than anyone
Anyone I’ve ever met

“The Best” Mike Chapman and Holly Knight. First recorded by Bonnie Tyler. Made famous by Tina Turner

The reports on the news that Paul Henry was going to be a candidate for the ACT party, presumably on the Party List caused me to reflect upon the qualifications that he might have to be a Member of Parliament.

The starting point for that reflection must, I think, be the well-known statement of Edmund Burke in his Speech to the Electors of Bristol, delivered on 3 November 1774. Burke argued that a representative owes his constituents his hard work, his attention and his respect, but not blind obedience to their instructions. The most quoted passage runs: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Burke rejected the notion that Members should act as mere delegates carrying “authoritative instructions” or “mandates” from their voters. Parliament, in his view, was not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, each advocating for a locality, but a deliberative assembly of one nation with one interest – that of the whole. Once elected, the member from Bristol was not merely a member for Bristol but a Member of Parliament serving the general good. The speech established the enduring contrast in democratic theory between the trustee model, in which representatives exercise independent judgment on behalf of their constituents, and the delegate model, in which they simply carry out their constituents’ expressed wishes.

The distinction matters because much of the business of Parliament is lawmaking, and one might expect those engaged in it to bring some qualification to the role. If the MP is merely a delegate transmitting the wishes of others, little is required beyond honesty and diligence. But if the MP owes his constituents his judgment, the quality of that judgment becomes central, and we must ask what forms and informs it. The theorists have answered in different ways.

Burke himself was deeply sceptical of abstract or theoretical qualifications. For him the essential quality was prudence – practical wisdom cultivated through experience of affairs, knowledge of history and immersion in the actual circumstances of society. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) he attacked the French revolutionaries precisely for legislating from abstract principle – “the rights of man” – without experiential knowledge of how societies actually function. His ideal legislator understood commerce, law and the latent wisdom embedded in inherited institutions. These qualities, Burke thought, were supplied by a natural aristocracy – men formed by education, leisure for reflection, habits of command and a standing that made them attentive to honour and reputation – although he insisted that it be open to talent. He was, after all, an Irish outsider of modest origins himself.

The most radical proposal for an educated and specialist legislature comes from Plato’s Republic. Ruling, for Plato, is a craft – a technē – like medicine or navigation, and so rulers should be those with genuine knowledge: philosophical knowledge of the Good, acquired through decades of rigorous training in mathematics and dialectic. On this view an MP would need something approaching certified expertise. Almost no modern theorist accepts the position in full, but it survives in diluted forms – in arguments that legislators drafting complex financial or scientific regulation need technical competence, and in the modern “epistocracy” of Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy (2016), which contends that political power should be apportioned according to demonstrated political knowledge.

Aristotle pushes back in a way that is highly relevant to Parliament. In the Politics he conceded that the many, though individually inferior, may collectively judge better than the few experts – his “wisdom of the multitude” – and famously observed that the guest, not the cook, is the better judge of the feast, and the wearer, not the shoemaker, of the shoe. Lawmaking bodies, on this account, need not consist of experts but of people who experience the effects of the law and possess sound practical judgment – phronēsis. Aristotle’s legislator needs good character, life experience and deliberative capacity rather than specialised training.

John Stuart Mill offers perhaps the most directly applicable answer in Considerations on Representative Government (1861). He drew a crucial distinction: a representative assembly is fit to control and to deliberate, but the actual drafting of legislation is skilled work requiring “minds trained to the task”. He therefore proposed a professional Commission of Legislation to draft Bills, leaving Parliament to debate, accept, reject and hold the government to account. On Mill’s view the necessary qualifications of the MP are general intelligence, breadth of knowledge and independence of mind – not technical drafting skill – because Parliament’s true function is to be the nation’s “Committee of Grievances and its Congress of Opinions”. Mill valued education highly, going so far as to propose plural votes for the educated, and insisted that representatives be superior in cultivation to the average elector – echoing Burke’s point that they contribute judgment rather than a mere reflection of opinion.

Max Weber, in his 1919 lecture Politik als Beruf, identified three decisive qualities in the politician: passion, in the sense of devotion to a cause; a sense of responsibility, weighing consequences rather than acting on pure conviction; and judgment – Augenmaß, a sense of proportion, the capacity to maintain inner distance and calm realism. Weber also observed that modern politics had become a profession, and worried about parliaments filled with those who live “off” politics rather than “for” it. One can think of a few examples in our present Parliament. Training in law, journalism or party organisation might supply useful skills, he thought, but it was the three inner qualities that mattered.

Modern theorists add a qualification that Burke ignored. Hanna Pitkin (The Concept of Representation, 1967), Anne Phillips (The Politics of Presence, 1995) and Jane Mansbridge argue that a legislature should to some degree mirror the society it governs, because lived experience – of poverty, motherhood, disability or minority status – is itself a form of knowledge relevant to lawmaking. On this account the relevant experience is not elite training but the diversity of ordinary life: a direct challenge to Burke’s natural aristocracy, though arguably compatible with his insistence on judgment.

Drawing these threads together, a defensible set of qualifications for the lawmaking MP might include practical judgment formed by substantial experience of some sphere of life; a general education sufficient to grasp evidence, follow complex argument and scrutinise expert advice without needing to be the expert; the moral qualities of independence, integrity and responsibility for consequences; a deliberative capacity – the willingness to listen, to revise one’s views and to reason publicly; and, more contestably, experiential proximity to the governed.

It would be unfair, however, not to acknowledge that Burke’s is not the only respectable position. The delegate tradition – running from the Levellers through Rousseau, who thought sovereignty could not be represented at all, to modern populist and participatory democrats – holds that the chief qualification is fidelity to constituents, and that an emphasis on elite judgment and credentials is a recipe for oligarchy. Joseph Schumpeter, from another direction, argued that voters merely select between competing elite teams, which makes personal qualifications a matter for party selectorates rather than for theory. And the debate between Brennan’s epistocrats and their critics – David Estlund argues in Democratic Authority that expertise cannot confer a right to rule: “you may be right, but who made you boss?” – shows that the Platonic question remains live. The mainstream democratic answer is that formal qualifications should be minimal – age and citizenship – with judgment tested at the ballot box rather than by examination, precisely because any credentialing body would itself become a site of contested power.

That last proposition runs up against a difficulty under Mixed Member Proportional representation, for under MMP the ballot box tests only part of the membership of our Parliament. The risk is that the party list will be populated with time-servers and party loyalists rather than skilled legislators. There are two sides to that argument.

The first is that the concern is well founded. New Zealand uses closed lists: voters choose the party, and the party alone determines the ranking. This severs the accountability link that Burke, for all his trusteeism, still presupposed – he had to face the electors of Bristol, and eventually withdrew rather than be defeated. A list MP faces no equivalent moment of personal reckoning. The selection pressure therefore runs inward, toward the party organisation. Loyalty, factional service, years on the party executive and inoffensiveness to the leadership become the currencies of advancement, and the skills rewarded are those of the apparatchik rather than the legislator. The difficulty is compounded by what critics call the “zombie MP” problem: a candidate personally rejected by an electorate may re-enter Parliament by the back door of the list. That complaint dates from the very first MMP election in 1996 and recurs every cycle – voters feel they have dismissed someone, only to find them back on the green benches. Nor is there a by-election when a list MP departs; the next name on the list simply rolls in, sometimes years after any voter last looked at it, which is about as pure a case of party-conferred rather than voter-conferred office as one could imagine.

Weber would recognise the danger immediately. His warning about those who live “off” politics was precisely a warning about party machines manufacturing careerists. The Burkean objection is sharper still. The trustee owes his constituents his judgment, but a list MP has no constituents in the relevant sense. To whom, then, is the judgment owed? In practice the answer tends to be the party whips. The Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Act – the “waka-jumping” law allowing a party to expel defectors from Parliament – arguably entrenched this by making the party’s claim on the seat legally explicit. A Burkean can only wince: the MP who exercises independent judgment against the party line may now be removed by the party itself, which inverts Burke’s model entirely.

Yet there is a paradox, for the list may serve the Burkean ideal rather better than its critics allow. The electorate contest is no obvious filter for legislative skill either. What wins an electorate seat is local visibility, constituency service, retail campaigning and an agreeable manner at the school fair – none of which is Mill’s “general intelligence and breadth of knowledge”, and none of which has much to do with scrutinising the clauses of a Bill in select committee. The first-past-the-post Parliament was hardly a Platonic academy. It too was stocked by party selectorates, merely at electorate level, and it often rewarded precisely the long-serving local loyalist.

The list, by contrast, is the mechanism by which a party can deliberately recruit for legislative competence. It can place a trade lawyer, an economist, a public health specialist or a tax expert high on its list – people who would never survive, or never subject themselves to, the retail grind of an electorate campaign. In practice many of New Zealand’s most technically capable ministers and committee chairs, across all parties, have been list MPs. The list is also how Parliament came to look more like the country. The marked increase in Māori, Pasifika, Asian and women MPs after 1996 came disproportionately through the lists, answering the “politics of presence” argument in a way first-past-the-post never did. There is a Millian point here too. Mill thought Parliament’s function was deliberation and scrutiny rather than drafting, and that an assembly needs a mixture of capacities. MMP institutionalises that mixture: electorate MPs supply the connection to place and grievance, while the lists supply the specialist and the minority voice. Arguably that is a better division of labour than a chamber of 120 local notables.

Where, then, does the real problem lie? Not, I suggest, in the list mechanism itself, but in the opacity and internal culture of party selection. A party with a lazy, factional or patronage-driven list process will produce careerists; a party that treats its list as a recruitment tool for talent will produce skilled legislators. Both happen, sometimes within the same party in different cycles. The Royal Commission foresaw this and hoped that party membership and internal democracy would discipline the process. In an era of tiny, hollowed-out memberships that check is weak: a few thousand active members – or in some parties a small moderation committee – effectively appoint a substantial fraction of the legislature. The reform arguments follow naturally. Open or semi-open lists, as in Bavaria or Sweden, would let voters reorder candidates, restoring some individual accountability while preserving proportionality; the 2012 MMP Review received submissions to that effect but recommended retaining closed lists, partly on grounds of simplicity. Others argue for statutory transparency around list ranking, or for repeal of the waka-jumping law to restore the space for Burkean independence. What can be said is that MMP transfers the qualification question from the voter to the party, for both good and ill. Whether that produces Burke’s natural aristocracy of judgment or Weber’s machine careerists depends less on the electoral formula than on the seriousness of the parties themselves – an uncomfortable place for the guarantee of legislative quality to rest, but arguably where it has always rested, under every system, since the party machine first appeared.

Are we, then, getting the best representatives in Parliament? The honest answer is no – and it is worth being clear about why, because the problem has three distinct layers.

The first is that “best” is not a settled standard. Before asking whether the system selects the best, we should need agreement on what “best” means, and the whole of the foregoing discussion shows that there is none. Plato’s best is the expert; Aristotle’s the person of practical wisdom; Burke’s the natural aristocrat of judgment; Mill’s the cultivated deliberator; Weber’s the politician of passion, responsibility and proportion; Phillips’s the representative who shares the lived experience of the governed. These criteria conflict. A Parliament of brilliant technocrats might score highly on the Platonic measure and fail utterly on descriptive representation; a perfectly mirroring Parliament might lack anyone who can read a Treasury forecast. Since no electoral system can maximise all of these at once, “the best representatives” is not a target the system can coherently aim at. Every design privileges some conception of merit over others.

The second is that no selection mechanism actually tests for the relevant qualities. Elections test the ability to win elections – name recognition, campaigning, fundraising, likeability – which correlates only loosely with legislative judgment. List rankings test standing within the party, which may correlate even less. At no point does anyone assess whether a candidate can scrutinise legislation, weigh evidence or exercise Weber’s ethic of responsibility. Estlund’s point cuts both ways here. We reject examinations for office because “who made you boss?” – but the price of rejecting epistocratic filters is accepting that the filters we do use are proxies at best. Schumpeter’s realism is the sober conclusion: democracy is not a mechanism for selecting the wisest but for the peaceful circulation of elites, with voters choosing between pre-assembled teams.

The third layer, and perhaps the deepest, is that the supply problem may be worse than the selection problem. The question assumes that the best people are available to be selected, yet across most democracies the pool of those willing to stand has been shrinking in ways that bear directly on quality. Politics now demands the surrender of privacy, exposure to social media abuse, a sacrifice of income for professionals at the top of other fields, and existence under permanent partisan discipline. Many of the people who best fit Burke’s or Mill’s description – accomplished, independent-minded, with standing to lose – rationally decline to enter. Weber saw this coming: when politics becomes a profession with its own career ladder, it selects for those whose alternatives are worse. One cannot elect the best if the best will not stand, and that is arguably a larger constraint on parliamentary quality than any feature of MMP or first-past-the-post.

Where does this leave us? The defensible claim is a more modest one, and it is essentially Popper’s: democracy is not a device for finding the best rulers but for removing bad ones without bloodshed. On that view “are we getting the best?” is the wrong question. The right questions are “can we get rid of the worst?” and “are the incentives tolerable?” MMP performs adequately on the first – parties that promote conspicuous time-servers pay a price at the party vote, and coalition arithmetic punishes toxic list choices – and moderately on the second. There are things that would improve the odds without pretending to guarantee excellence: more transparent and contested list-selection processes; open or semi-open lists to add a voter check on individual candidates; a strong and well-resourced select committee system that develops and rewards legislative skill once members arrive (New Zealand’s is genuinely good by international standards, and much of an MP’s real formation happens there); parliamentary salaries and conditions that do not deter mid-career professionals; and repeal of provisions, such as the waka-jumping law, that punish exactly the independence Burke prized.

But certainty? No. Every system – election, list, sortition, examination – is a wager on imperfect proxies, administered by fallible institutions, drawing from a self-selected pool. It is worth remembering that Burke himself, one of the finest political minds ever to sit in the Commons, was rejected by his electors, spent nearly his whole career in opposition, and watched lesser men hold office. If the system could not reliably employ Burke, the lesson he would likely draw is the one he did draw: put not your faith in mechanisms, but in the slow cultivation of institutions, of manners, and of a political class that takes its trust seriously – and accept that even then, you are never sure.

Which brings me back to where I began. Whether any particular candidate possesses Burke’s judgment, Weber’s sense of proportion or Mill’s breadth of knowledge is not something our system will ever formally ask.

The party will decide, and then the voters. We must simply hope that both take the trust seriously – and that we end up with something rather better than simply the best of a self-selected bunch.