Constituency campaign intensity and split-ticket voting: New Zealand's first election under MMP, 1996

New Zealand's first MMP general election in 1996 witnessed a large proporti on of the electorate splitting their votes. This varied very substantially across the 65 constituencies, and estimating procedures have been used to s how similar variations in the proportions of those who voted a straight-tic ket and those who split their tickets between different party combinations. It is hypothesised that some of this variation was related to the intensit y of the campaigns for constituency votes. The candidates' returns on elect ion spending are used as a measure of this intensity and regression analyse s provide strong support for the hypothesis. In general the more that candi dates spent the better their performance relative to that of their party (a nd the poorer their opponents' performance).