About Sam Crawley

About Sam

I've been interested in politics for as long as I can remember. Well before I was old enough to vote, I was fascinated by the 1992 and 1993 referendums that brought MMP to New Zealand — for both the nerdy debates over electoral systems and the unique political moment of the referendums themselves.

That curiosity has never gone away. These days it's channelled into two areas: New Zealand electoral politics, and the politics of climate change. I think climate change is fundamentally a political problem — the science is settled, but the path to meaningful action runs through public opinion, elections, and policy. My PhD (Victoria University of Wellington, 2021) explored these questions directly, as did my subsequent research, recognised by the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

Outside academia, I have a background in software development, which means I lean heavily on computational and data-driven methods. I believe research should be open and reproducible, so all the analysis code for this blog is publicly available.

For more details on my academic work, see my personal website.

About This Blog

Three Long Years is where I write about NZ and climate politics for a general audience. There's no shortage of political commentary out there, and data-driven analysis is increasingly common — but work that combines serious academic expertise with genuine technical depth is harder to find. That's the gap I'm trying to fill.

Data is central to the posts on the site. But analysis requires interpretation, which inevitably means some degree of subjectivity. I aim to make it clear where I am being more speculative and less purely evidence driven. The goal of the blog is to stay as close as possible to what the evidence actually shows, and to connect to what's happening right now.

For more on my approach, see the methodology page.

Why "Three Long Years"?

The phrase "Three Long Years" is a reference to the NZ three-year electoral cycle, and is often used as criticism from one party to another (as in "we had to endure three/six/nine long years of Labour/National in power!"). I am not really into writing about the "horse race", so you could consider the name to be somewhat ironic.

But "Three Long Years" also speaks to the other focus of this blog: climate change. One of the central paradoxes of climate change is that it unfolds over relatively long time scales (at least in human terms), but the urgent need for immediate action is only increasing. For many of us, a three-year electoral cycle flies by - it does not feel "long" at all. But when climate action is continually deferred, it is simultaneously a very long time indeed.

Credits