Serial Referendums on Alcohol Prohibition: a New Zealand Invention
Abstract: The 1920s U.S. prohibition of alcohol is notorious. Less well known is that the movement was international and that many countries went through vigorous struggles over the liquor issue. This paper investigates the case of New Zealand where prohibitionists were not as successful as in the U.S. To explain the difference, we have to compare the strength of the supporters and opponents of prohibition. These are clearly visible in prohibition referendums. For economists, referendums might be the closest measure of demand for a public policy. New Zealand is particularly interesting because no other country set up national prohibition plebiscites at every general election for almost eight decades, from 1911 to 1987. This paper focuses on the first seven referendums until 1928. Their results present unique features such as the number of votes by gender in 1911; the option of prohibition with compensation in 1919; and from 1919, state-control regime as a 3rd option. Such features make these data a rather rare set to investigate how different designs influenced voting patterns. In a political economy model, the shares of Yes, No and Abstentions are assumed to be determined by a set of socio-cultural factors such as religious affiliation, degree of heterogeneity of the population, rate of urbanization, social class, women’s participation and a set of economic interests like those of the liquor industries. Census data are normally used to estimate their impact. In the case of New Zealand, it is problematic as the Census data are highly disaggregated (more than 200 counties and boroughs) which makes it extremely difficult to match with the 68 electoral districts of the referendum votes. The Census data are also available at the provincial district level but there are only nine provinces, thus limiting the power of regression analysis. Nevertheless, it is still possible to verify and confirm important hypotheses of the prohibition and temperance literature.
