By international comparison, Aotearoa New Zealand’s parliament has stood out in recent years for high levels of descriptive representation of both women and migrant-background ethnic minorities. However, this diversity is unevenly spread across parties and fluctuates across electoral cycles, raising questions about how gender and ethnicity intersect in political parties’ candidate selection practices and philosophies of representation. Moreover, while existing research on Europe and North America has shown that ethnic minority women can benefit from a double advantage (Celis et al 2014; Celis & Erzeel 2017; Mügge 2019) or face double jeopardy (Debus & Himmelrath 2024; Mügge & Erzeel 2016), the applicability of such findings to a case like New Zealand is uncertain, given its settler colonial context and the markedly different ethnic and socioeconomic composition of its migrant population.
This paper presents a recently completed dataset of all candidacies for the six main parties in New Zealand elections, 2005-2023. The paper first asks how gender and ethnicity intersect in candidate selection patterns. We examine how candidacy patterns vary across parties and over time, by gender and ethnicity, before turning to consider the viability (safety) of these candidacies in the two tiers (SMD and list) of the mixed-member electoral system. This permits evaluation of the double advantage versus double jeopardy debate.
The paper then considers party type more closely. Extending existing research on centre-left and centre-right parties (Barker & Crawley 2025), we examine whether niche parties (including Green, populist, and libertarian right) demonstrate distinctive candidate selection patterns compared to historically dominant catch-all parties, especially given the smaller number of viable candidacies available to them in the mixed electoral system. With niche parties’ varied ideological positions (ranging from anti-immigration, populist, to cosmopolitan), electoral system constraints and opportunities, and relationships with ethnic minority communities, we suggest gender and ethnicity intersect in distinctive ways in their candidate selection. Finding a lack of a consistent and linear party system-wide pattern of diversification in candidate slates, and given niche parties’ growing electoral success in New Zealand and cross-nationally, we conclude by discussing future prospects for female and ethnic minority descriptive representation.
