parliament in proportion to their numbers in the community as a whole, but because parties rely exclusively on the votes o f members o f their own community for their electoral success, there is little incentive for them to behave accommodatively on ethnic issues. In fact, the incentives are in the other direction: as it is easy to mobilise support by playing the ‘ethnic card’, the major parties in Bosnia have every incentive to emphasise ethnic issues and sectarian appeals. The result, at the 1996 Bosnian elections, was effectively an ethnic census, with electors voting along ethnic lines and each o f the major nationalist parties gaining support almost exclusively from their own ethnic group.
ethnic bargains, if any, will have to be made by elites alone, elected proportionately by list PR systems — than in cases where there is a degree of fluidity to ethnic identities (Reilly and Reynolds, forthcoming).
A secondary weakness of AV is the way it can discriminate against third-placed parties or candidates. To give a simple example: in a situation where there are three major parties supported by three main ethnic groups, a candidate with 32 percent of the vote will be eliminated before other candidates with 33 and 35 percent. Tiny differences in vote share can result in major differences in the order of elimination and thus in determining successful candidates. While it could be argued that the preferences of the eliminated candidate will at least determine which of the remaining two wins the seat, this may be completely unsatisfactory in situations of ethnic division: in an extreme case one party or group may be left with no representation at all. This suggests that AV may not be a good choice for a country facing a three-way split between major ethnic groups. AV can also be as capricious as FPTP when dealing with a situation where one party is in a permanent minority, as Johnston has argued:
If one party has, say, forty percent o f the first preference votes, but those who do not rank the party first rank it last, then it may fail to win any seats. This would only occur if it won forty percent o f the votes in each constituency, o f course, but the greater the number o f constituencies in which it fell below fifty-percent in the first preferences, the greater the probability o f it being underrepresented in the allocation o f seats (1984, 63-64).
While this scenario does indeed highlight one of the disadvantages of AV, it also serves to illustrate precisely why preferential voting can exert a centripetal force on politics in divided societies. By providing incentives for parties to moderate their policies in the search for second preferences, AV encourages parties seeking to govern outright to move away from extreme positions and towards the policy centre. If a party has a solid support base of 40 percent but is ranked last by all other voters, then clearly it needs to examine the reasons that it so polarizes the electorate — why, for example, is it not picking up at least some second preferences? Such soul-searching may well lead to a recognition that a move towards the middle ground on some important issue is required to attract preferences if the party is to be electorally viable. Preferential voting also enables minority interests to swap lower-order preferences for policy influence. The ALP victory at the 1990 Australian federal election was dependent to a significant extent on the preferences it received from green voters in precisely this manner.
The arguments for and against AV are a good example of the contextual nature of electoral system design, and how proponents of different approaches run the risk of talking past each other. There is no perfect electoral system, and no ‘right’ way to approach the subject of electoral system design. The major criteria for designing electoral systems for all societies, not just divided ones, are sometimes in conflict with each other or even mutually exclusive. Devices which increase proportionality, such as increasing the number of seats to be elected in each district, will almost inevitably lessen other desirable characteristics, such as promoting geographic accountability between the electorate and the parliament. A tension also exists in the range of electoral system options for divided societies between systems which put a premium on
representation of minority groups (such as list PR) and those which try to emphasise
minority influence (such as AV). As Horowitz has noted, “measures that will guarantee representation to a given ethnic or racial group may not foster the inclusion of that group’s interest more broadly in the political process” (1991, 165). The best option, of course, is to have both: representation of all significant groups, but in such a way as to maximise their influence and involvement in the policy-making process. This goal is best achieved by building devices to achieve both proportionality and incentives for inter-ethnic accommodation into the electoral system itself. However, these goals are not always mutually compatible.
Conclusion
Prescriptions for constitutional engineering via manipulation of electoral rules tend to be based on an underlying presumption of rational, self-interested behaviour on the part of political actors. Previous chapters of this thesis have demonstrated how the campaigning behaviour of PNG politicians and their supporters appears to have been influenced by the electoral system in place. The message of these chapters is that PNG politicians are no different to those elsewhere: they are rational actors who will respond to the incentives present under different electoral rules in order to facilitate their election. In the language of rational choice theory, they are self-interested utility maximisers. They will do what they have to do to win, and when the rules of the game change, many will change their behaviour accordingly. While a general finding that politicians want to win and hold on to power is a truism, this argument has a special significance when applied to the study of political behaviour in PNG, which — heavily
influenced by anthropology — has often focussed on the exotic or colourful examples of political behaviour as much as the rational. To give but a few examples: the discussions of the ‘election sickness’ that swept the Gadsup after the 1964 elections9; election-related cargo cult movements such as the Johnson cult10; the election of the cult leader Yaliwan at the 1972 elections (with a record 87 percent of the vote)* 11; and the persistence of candidates who contest elections without receiving a single vote (not even their own) at recent elections12 are all examples of apparently non-rational behaviour on the part of PNG politicians and/or their supporters. But concentration on these incidents has tended to obscure what is an underlying rationality on the part of PNG’s political actors, who in most cases make rational responses to electoral incentives in search of victory. Tsebelis has argued that a successful rational-choice explanation of a political event “describes the prevailing institutions and context in which the actor operates, persuading the reader that she would have made the same choice if placed in the same situation” (1990, 44). This thesis is not a work in the rational choice genre, but the conclusions I draw are very similar to those of rational choice theory in comparative politics outlined by Tsebelis: if we can show that the behaviour of political actors is an optimal response to the institutional environment, it therefore follows that the prevailing institutions are to some degree responsible for the behaviour of these actors, and thus for political or social outcomes (Tsebelis 1990, 40).
This leads me to the core normative argument of this thesis: because political actors will respond to the rules of the game, and to the incentives or constraints inherent in these rules, so deliberate engineering of these rules can have a marked effect on political behaviour. The PNG comparison of an electoral system which acts as a zero-sum game (FPTP) compared to an electoral system which, under certain circumstances, acts as a positive-sum game (AV) illustrates this point quite well. As detailed in previous chapters, there is evidence that AV served to encourage co-operative and accommodative political strategies and behaviour. There is also evidence for the