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  • The guaranteed Mäori seats are a distinguishing and controversial feature of New Zealand’s democracy. In recent years, a number of reports, commentators and politicians have called for the seats to be abolished on the grounds that they are no longer “needed” in New Zealand’s proportional electoral system. These claims are usually grounded in principles of equality. This paper makes the opposite claim: that principles of equality create convincing and coherent justifications for the Mäori seats. Drawing on feminist theories of representation, particularly the work of Iris Marion Young, Melissa Williams and Anne Phillips, this paper argues that the Mäori seats provide crucial mechanisms of accountability that ensure the fidelity of Mäori representatives to their constituencies. This notion of accountability has been largely absent in debates about the Mäori seats and challenges arguments against the seats that are based solely on perceived “need” relative to proportionate presence.

  • While there is much research and writing on Māori self-determination, little of it focuses on how Māori individuals and organisations conceive the necessary antecedent to self-determination; Māori political agency. To remedy this research gap, we explored the political aspirations of Māori individuals with a research method built to study such subjective topics: Q method. Combining Q method with some practical innovations from Kaupapa Māori Research method, we developed a unique way of researching the stories our participants tell themselves about politics. Our results suggest some Māori individuals do think of politics as a collective endeavour as the self-determination literature suggests, but just as often Māori collective forums and other non-Māori political institutions are seen as barriers to Māori individual and collective political agency and thus to Māori self-determination. We also found that Māori view the political autonomy and participation necessary for self-determination as possible in numerous diverse spaces, suggesting the focus on low voter turnout amongst Māori in the literature is missing the point: the stories told by this research suggest Māori individuals perceive their political agency to be hindered, not by majoritarian politics of non-Māori, but by Māori and non-Māori elites.

Last update from database: 8/17/26, 4:11 AM (UTC)