Stephen Beban
MA Candidate in Political Science
School of History, Philosophy, Political Science & International Relations
Qualifications
Bachelor of Arts and Graduate Diploma of Commerce; majors in Political Science, Philosophy, International Relations, and Public Policy.
Profile
I have been working full-time as a Policy Advisor in the Ministry of Justice’s Policy Group for the Criminal Law team for the last 8 years. Before that, in 2016 I was a research analyst at FairVote (a US non-profit working on electoral reform). I am also an occasional guest contributor at The Spinoff (particularly for visual breakdowns of the last few New Zealand elections).
When I studied political science at Victoria, I became passionately interested in the effect of electoral systems on how well they do (or don’t) represent the public will. My Master’s research is exploring how countries balance proportionality and representativeness (and secondarily government stability) in their electoral system designs, and whether could they do it better.
I will be doing a comparative analysis of 29 liberal democracies over the last 35 years. I will then test the hypothesis that we can better optimize for these outcomes compared to the systems currently in-use. This will involve synthesising successful features from existing electoral systems, and simulating if the new system design produces high-scoring proportionality and representativeness metrics.
Supervisors
Professor
School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations