Aotearoa New Zealand is a liberal democracy with among the world’s best functioning institutions. Yet we document that it has experienced a subtle democratic backsliding over the last two decades, with some mechanisms of state power changing in ways that limit democratic dissent and protect capitalist interests and economic elites. We note that it is part of a global authoritarian turn among neoliberal democracies since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Hence, we draw on the Authoritarian Neoliberalism school to show that New Zealand policymakers, like elsewhere, have weakened democratic oversight of parliamentary select committees and public scrutiny by governing through urgent decrees and centralising power in the executive, and introduced coercive measures to constrain the space for peaceful public protests against capitalist interests. We view this backsliding as likely to exacerbate the country’s already entrenched inequalities along class and ethnic lines.
Scarpello et al. (Sun,) studied this question.