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Mandatory power-sharing laws aim to balance power between groups in contexts where majoritarian democracy might disadvantage minorities. Yet, unless veto arrangements are in place, cabinet-level decision-making usually continues to operate under majority rule. Minority parties participating in such power-sharing executives may lose support in their own communities owing to a failure to deliver substantial reforms or to advance minority objectives and become seen as ‘Uncle Tom’ type figures who no longer represent their own community. This article explores examples of these dilemmas facing power-sharing cabinets in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Bosnia–Herzegovina, Fiji, and the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia.

Fiji’s 2018 election was the first test of prime minister and coup leader Frank Bainimarama’s FijiFirst government after a period in elected office and the second election since the militar...

We show how to extend the Laakso-Taagepera measure of the effective number of parties so as to incorporate both party and ethnicity in a way that allows both ethnic-specific, party-specific, and composite measures that we refer to as extended L-T indices. While the aim of this article is methodological, we also illustrate our approach with U.S. two-party data from presidential elections, using two-group, three-group, and five-group categorizations of ethnicities to show how party ethnicization in that country has grown since 1952. For comparison, and to show the generality of our approach to situations with more than two parties, we present data from the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina ( Federacija Bosne i Hercegovine), where we have three ethnic groups but also more than two parties.

The ‘Pacific Solution’ of transporting asylum seekers who arrive by boat in Australian waters to detention centres on Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has attracted considerable international attention. Most of this has focused on the treatment of those detained and the morality, practicality and sustainability of Australian refugee policy. In this issue of ‘Pacific Currents’, we focus on the consequences for the Island nations. This article sets the scene for articles on Nauru and Manus Island by: 1. outlining the policy debates that led to the two phases of the ‘Pacific Solution’; 2. assembling data covering the numbers and costs involved; and 3. exploring the policy options in the wake of the PNG Supreme Court’s April 2016 ruling that the Manus Island centre was in violation of the constitution. All three papers are particularly concerned to explore the domestic political and legal ramifications of the centres for Nauru and PNG, and to examine the impact on Australia’s reputa...

The July 2017 end of the 13-year 2003–17 Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) presents an opportunity to look back at what this achieved, how the mission was constituted, and how it compares with other contemporary so-called state-building missions in places like Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq, Sierra Leone, and East Timor. In other settings, intervention missions rebuilt security forces from scratch. In Solomon Islands, which had no domestic military forces, the initial surge in the foreign military presence was short-lived. Over the 13 years as a whole, the policing operation was the core focus of RAMSI (despite much propaganda emphasis on the civilian components). RAMSI pursued a ‘two forces’ model, with key objectives of the mission being delivered by an organisationally separate ‘Participating Police Force’ (PPF), largely comprising officers from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) force. In the initial phases of RAMSI, the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF) was largely left on the sidelines, encouraging a deep sense of demoralisation among the senior officers. Over the longer run, the RSIPF was reconstituted, with a new generation of younger officers emerging. Major disturbances accompanying the 2006 election, and more sporadic public order breakdowns thereafter, encouraged Australia to extend the policing operation beyond the termination of the military component and, in 2013, beyond the end of the civilian parts of RAMSI. This chapter assesses the initial core organisational framing choices of RAMSI, examines what has been achieved, and asks what the likely legacy will be.

The world’s small states may seem at grave disadvantage. They are often scattered far-flung island groups with poor internal connections, though some are landlocked or mountainous survivors from an...

Links with the Crown are often thought to play a largely ‘symbolic’ role in the contemporary politics of the Pacific Islands. Yet the Queen appoints Governors-General for three Pacific Island states, albeit acting on advice, and did so in Fiji until that country became a Republic in October 1987. All four countries have witnessed constitutional crises in which the Governor-General has played a critical role. This paper examines those crises, and other occasions that have tested the link with the Crown. It argues that the common minimalist defence of such institutions (influenced by one reading of Walter Bagehot's well-known views) – i.e. that such arrangements tend to work better than republican or presidential alternatives by elevating a relatively disinterested arbiter to broker political transitions – misses the fact that realm territories have tended to face similar and comparable difficulties to those Pacific nations that abandoned the link with the British Crown at independence, and that these issue...

The Southern Rhodesian experiment with the alternative vote (AV) is not well known among electoral specialists. Yet this was the origin of the better known claim that such a preferential voting system might ameliorate ethnic tensions in deeply divided societies. AV was one among several institutional innovations deployed by a reformist white settler government in Southern Rhodesia in response to the emergence of the African nationalist movement. Despite its usage with a highly restrictive franchise, the system delivered a preference transfer-dependent victory for a centrist government that aimed to accommodate African political aspirations in 1958. Yet that outcome was not repeated in 1962 or 1965, when Ian Smith’s Rhodesia Front instead obtained office, declared independence from the United Kingdom and – once freed of restraints from London – dismantled electoral devices aimed at encouraging inter-communal vote transfers. This article examines the debates about Southern Rhodesian electoral reform in the ...

The 2003–13 Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) is widely depicted as an ambitious ‘state-building’ project in the mould of contemporary interventions in Bosnia, Iraq, East Timor and Kosovo. Yet no new constitution was put in place in Solomon Islands, and, in practice, the core Australian policing components of the mission were largely substituted for their local counterparts. Unlike most state-building missions, RAMSI did not assume executive authority, and the critical relationship with the Indigenous government soon deteriorated, particularly after the election-related riots of April 2006. The teleological framing of RAMSI as a ‘state-building’ operation largely draws on heroic claims about future intentions made during the early phase of the mission, whereas, after the crises of 2006–07, RAMSI officials were engaged mostly in playing down expectations, narrowing the mission's objectives and preparing an exit strategy.

Fiji’s September 2014 election was the first since the military takeover of December 2006 and the first under a new open list proportional representation system. It proved a landslide victory for coup leader turned Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama’s FijiFirst Party. This was a ‘competitive authoritarian’ election, characterised by careful controls over media outlets, manipulation of rules regarding political parties and candidate nominations, and selective use of state finances to harass opponents. It was a genuine contest only in so far as the government could control the process. The outcome demonstrates the potency of incumbency in Fiji, which was also an important factor in the country’s previous post-coup elections in 1992 and 2001.

For the eight years prior to the September 2014 election in Fiji, no data were available that could enable observers to gauge the extent of support for the Bainimarama government. During that period, a range of conflicting claims emerged about shifting political loyalties within Fiji, largely based on anecdotal evidence. This paper makes use of the micro-level September 2014 election results to enquire about rural/urban, ethnic, class and provincial bases of support for the major parties. It finds that backing for the main opposition party was concentrated in areas with small populations, high levels of out-migration and relatively low voter turnout. Conversely support for the incumbent government was strongest on the more densely populated main island of Viti Levu, particularly in the fastest growing western part of that island.

Around the turn of the century, political developments in Northern Ireland, Fiji and Papua New Guinea encouraged claims that preferential voting systems could steer polities in the direction of ‘moderate’ multi-ethnic government. Sixteen years later, we have a longer time period and larger volume of data to reassess these verdicts. This article investigates ballot transfer and party vote–seat share patterns in the seven deeply divided polities with some experience of preferential voting for legislative elections or direct presidential elections (Northern Ireland, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Estonia, Sri Lanka, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Southern Rhodesia). We find little support for centripetalist claims that such systems encourage ‘moderate’ parties. We argue that where district magnitude is low, where voters are required to rank preferences and where ticket voting prevails, departures from vote–seat proportionality may favour ‘moderate’ parties, but such heavily engineered systems may simply advantage the larger parties or yield erratic outcomes.

This article examines strategic elements of voter behaviour in parliamentary elections where the voting method is a scoring rule other than plurality: the Borda Count, which is used for the election of ethnic minorities in Slovenia, and the Dowdall rule, which is used in the Pacific island state of Nauru in multi-seat districts. After first examining the general properties of scoring rules, and generating theoretical differences between the two rules, we look at empirical evidence from Nauru and Slovenia. This casts a doubt on predictions based simply on a voting rule's mathematical properties and on the accuracy of assumptions of sincere rank ordering.本文研究了议会选举投票者行为的策略因素。议会选举中的投票方法是一个有别于多数法的计分法则：斯洛文尼亚少数族群选举使用的波达计数法；太平洋岛屿国家瑙鲁多席位选区使用的斗多尔法则。作者首先分析了计分法则的一般属性，并对两种法则做了理论区分。然后研究了瑙鲁和斯洛文尼亚的实证资料。作者对仅仅基于投票规则数学属性的预测以及有关纯粹排行假设的精确性表示了质疑。

Alongside Thailand and Pakistan, Fiji has gained a reputation as the most coup-prone state in the Asia-Pacific region. Following a succession of coups, Fiji's military eventually established a longer-term authoritarian administration, inviting comparisons with Burma and Indonesia under Suharto, where military rulers also saw themselves as playing an overarching guardian role transcending ethnic cleavages. Yet, unlike Burma and Indonesia, Fiji's military has no heroic history of involvement in a national liberation struggle and faces no serious threat to territorial integrity. This article examines the dynamics of Fiji's three coups and the accompanying shifts in military orientation. During the initial coups, the military served principally as an instrument of the country's ethnic Fijian chiefly elite. Since the third coup, in December 2006, it has not only confronted key institutions of Fijian power, including the Great Council of Chiefs and the Methodist Church, but also dismantled core bases of Fiji In...

Laws against party-hopping are relatively common in the southern hemisphere. This is true even among Commonwealth countries, despite some disapproval of such laws expressed in the Commonwealth’s La...

Abstract The Republic of Fiji experienced three armed coups in less than twenty years – 1987, 2000, and again in 2006 – symptoms of inter-communal tensions in the country and a political, economic and social system unable to manage them. The Commonwealth, through the good offices of its Secretary-General, was the lead international actor in responding to the crisis that followed the 2000 coup. The following study provides an overview of the Commonwealth as an institution, with a focus on its conflict prevention capacity, through the lens of its actions in Fiji at the time. It seeks to identify the nature and impact of Commonwealth engagement, highlighting potentially useful lessons regarding the institution, the individuals who acted on its behalf, and the efficacy of their actions.

In Professor Horowitz’s rejoinders (2004, 2006) to Fraenkel and Grofman (2004, 2006a), he mischaracterizes our formal results, retreats from previous claims about the conditions for the alternative vote electoral system to generate centripetal outcomes, renders explicit his dubious assumptions about voter behavior in divided societies, and greatly exaggerates the global evidence in support of pro-moderation outcomes under the alternative vote. Here we respond to Horowitz's (2004), criticism in this journal of the formal model of Fraenkel and Grofman (2004) and to the broader defense in Horowitz (2006) of majoritarian vote pooling arrangements as means of mitigating ethnic conflict in deeply divided societies.

Using insights from social choice theory, particularly Black's concept of single-peaked preferences and Downs's median-voter model, the authors previously investigated the theoretical impact of the alternative vote system (AV) on the success of moderate parties in an ethnically bipolar society. Focusing on the simplest case, that with one moderate and one extremist ethnic party associated with each of the two ethnic groups, they found that for AV to necessarily yield outcomes that favor moderate parties there must be majority support for moderation and voter preferences that are single peaked with respect to the ethnic-conflict-defined dimension. Here, the authors test these assumptions with data from the 1999 and 2001 elections in Fiji, an ethnically bipolar society. They show that Fiji's objective of ameliorating ethnic divisions by the adoption of AV was not successful. In elections in 1999 and 2001, moderate parties would have fared better under a proportional representation system.

In Donald Horowitz's rejoinder to Fraenkel and Grofman, he retreats from his previous claims about the desirability of alternative vote (AV), mischaracterizes our formal results, and nowhere addresses the extreme disproportionality of electoral outcomes in Fiji except to incorrectly dismiss this as due largely to malapportionment. Although he refuses to recognize the role AV played in the build-up to the overthrow of the Indian-led government in May 2000, Horowitz does acknowledge that the system he so strongly urged on Fiji's reformers failed to achieve its intended objectives at the elections of August 2001.

Samoa shifted to universal suffrage only in 1990, after 28 years of independent self-government under a system in which only matai (chiefs or family title-holders) were entitled to vote or stand as candidates. During the matai-only franchise era, increasing numbers of honorific titles were conferred on citizens, so expanding the electoral rolls. Broadening the franchise in 1990, it was hoped, would bring a halt to the creation of ‘ballot chiefs’ (matai palota). In this paper, we show that there were also other less widely recognised reasons for matai title proliferation during 1962–90 and reveal new data showing that, far from arresting this, the number of matai continued to dramatically expand even after the shift to a universal franchise. We also examine the impact of the 1990 reforms on Samoa's emerging party system and find evidence of the diminishing political significance of standing in the customary hierarchy.

The Pacific Islands possess a diverse range of electoral systems and political institutions. The region includes a constitutional monarchy, in which the king and nobility select 21 of the 30 MPs (T...

Ethnically divided societies that might be described as ‘balanced bicommunal’ (where there are two communities, each of which comes close to representing half of the population) pose a particular challenge to conventional principles of collective decision-making, and commonly threaten political stability. This article analyses the experience of two such societies – Northern Ireland and Fiji – with a view to exploring whether there are common processes in the route by which political stability has been pursued. We assess the manner in which a distinctive relationship with Great Britain and its political culture has interacted with local conditions to produce a highly competitive, bipolar party system. This leads to consideration of the devices that have been adopted in an effort to bridge the gap between the communities: the Fiji constitution as amended in 1997, and Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement of 1998. We focus, in particular, on the use of unusual (preferential voting) formulas for the election of parliamentarians and of an inclusive principle in the selection of ministers, and consider the contribution of these institutional devices to the attainment of political stability. We find that, in both cases, the intervention of forces from outside the political system had a decisive impact, though in very different ways. In addition to being underpinned by solid institutional design, for political settlements to work effectively, some minimal level of trust between rival elites is required.

In 1997, Fiji introduced a voting system devised by leading international electoral experts as an instrument for ethnic conflict reduction. The new preferential voting system, it was hoped, would pave the way for greater co-operation between Indian and indigenous Fijian politicians. Yet the voting system did not work as expected at the May 1999 polls. Coalitions behaved in an unpredicted way, and majorities became critically dependent on transfers of party official-controlled preference votes. The moderate multi-ethnic coalition that had earlier initiated constitutional reform was annihilated, and the predominantly Indian-backed Fiji Labour Party obtained an absolute majority, despite negligible Fijian first preference support. The new government lasted only a year in office before being overthrown by indigenous Fijian extremists.

(2000). The Clash of Dynasties and Rise of Demagogues; Fiji's Tauri Vakaukauwa of May 2000. The Journal of Pacific History: Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 295-308.

This paper examines the results of Fiji's 1999 elections. It looks at the reasons for the overwhelming victory of the Fiji Labour Party and the extent of voting across Fiji's racial divide. The paper argues that there was, in fact, very small indigenous Fijian support for the FLP. The victory of the Fiji Labour Party instead owed its origins to (i) the collapse in the vote for the major rival Indo-Fijian party, the National Federation Party, (ii) the rise of the newly-formed Christian Democratic Alliance and the associated fall in the vote for the former Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka's SVT and (iii) the introduction of the preferential voting system. The paper concludes with a critical examination of the new voting system, arguing that proportional representation might be better suited for Fiji's specific political situation.