Of course this raises the question – how do people decide who to vote for then?

Even under a FPP system one would get this problem of policy time inconsistency. Suppose there are only two parties, A and B, with opposing ideological platforms. Polling before the election shows the two parties have 40% support each with 20% undecided. There is a strong incentive for both parties to begin shifting their policies to capture at least 10% of the undecided voters, while hoping they do not alienate thir “core”.

Is it about credibility in the conventional economic sense? Politicians apparently do fewer backflips than we the proletariat seem to believe. http://www.posc.canterbury.ac.nz/research/postgradconfabstracts/abstractmmccluskey.shtml

I would posit that politicians make rather vague promises that can be interpreted a number of ways (we will get tough on crime) thus not tying them down but also likely to disappoint at least some part of the electorate.

I would also suggest that credibility is less important given that significant policy decisions seem to be ad hoc. They are not well signalled beforehand and sometimes may be triggereed by unexpected events (e.g. the deposit guarantee, interest-free student loans). It may well be that the electorate has come to expect this type of behaviiour and thus do not believe that promises will actually be the major policy initiatives over the lifetime of a government.

But with MMP it is a group of parties determining policies – as a result the hit to one parties credibility is lower as they could say they had to change tack.

Furthermore, if all parties have broken promises (which is the case with National and Labour) neither has much credibility and so people still have to run with the party that “sounds like” its doing what they want. For promises what matters is “relative” credibility – and National and Labour seem to have found a collusive eqm where neither of them have any 🙂

But if they promise to do one thing and do another then their future promises are less credible, which harms their future electoral prospects. If that weren’t the case then the accusation of flip-flopping wouldn’t be so politically damaging. So surely there’s an incentive to keep at least the majority of one’s promises.

A conflict between “self-sufficiently” and “sustainability”

Two things:

First you are right about the “too early” – it was just a poor time, given that we were coming out of a long recession and people were relatively uninterested in evironmental issues.

Secondly, the too early was about a green-blue party, not a green party persee. The value party is like an extreme version of the current Green party which is both more prescriptive and has a different definition of “substainabilty” than a green-blue party.