appointed by the president. The president would be elected at a joint sitting of both houses of parliament. Elections for the Bose Lawa, Bose e Cake and the presidency would all be held under the alternative vote, although in an unusual variation the CRC suggested that, to avoid problems of intra-party competition in the multi-member seats, the first, second and third preferences given to each candidate should be added together, before the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated (CRC 1996, 329).
Following substantial public debate and evaluation of the CRC’s report by a series of parliamentary committees, the Fijian parliament adopted a new constitution in June 1997. While largely in line with the CRC’s thinking, the electoral arrangements provided by the 1997 constitution differ from those advocated by the CRC in several crucial respects. Most importantly, the Fijian parliament did not make the decisive move away from communalism recommended, and in fact reversed the suggested breakdown between open and communal seats recommended by the CRC. Of the 70 seats in the new parliament, 45 will continue to be elected on a communal basis, leaving only 25 ‘open’ seats in which genuine inter-ethnic competition will take place. Second, concerns about the workability of the multi-member AV system recommended by the CRC resulted in the system finally chosen being based on single-member electoral districts, rather than the multi-member districts recommended by the Commission. This means that to achieve the type of ‘preference-swapping’ between different communities envisaged by the Commission, the boundaries of these small districts will have to be drawn in such a way as to be ethnically-heterogeneous — a potentially difficult proposition. The CRC’s recommendation that preference votes be cumulated rather than counted separately in the new electoral system was also discarded following interventions pointing out the unworkability of such a scheme (Reilly 1997c, 83-89). The electoral system provided in the 1997 constitution is thus single-member AV, as used in Australia and in pre-independence PNG. The government also rejected a number of the CRC’s recommendations for an elected upper house. Finally, the new Constitution adds a significant element of consociationalism in its requirement for mandated power-sharing to the integrative electoral arrangements by providing that all parties that achieve at least 10 percent of the vote must be represented in the cabinet in proportion to their vote share.
Fiji’s new Constitution is thus a good example of what Donald Horowitz (an influential adviser to the Commission) has called “a redundant dose” of institutional incentives towards power-sharing and co-operation (199la, 281). If the electoral system works as intended it should result in the election of a pool of moderate candidates dependent on the support of both political communities for their electoral survival, and thus a degree of accommodation between supporters of rival groups at the local level. But even if this does not occur, the mandated grand coalition cabinet provided by the Constitution should ensure that both communities have to work together at the elite level at least. This double-dose of accommodation-inducing mechanisms means that there is a number of ‘safety measures’ built into the new dispensation: if one should fail, backup measures are there to ensure at least a modicum of power-sharing at another level. In particular, the combination of centripetal electoral institutions with consociational power-sharing provisions represents an interesting and potentially influential combination of two previously divergent approaches to constitutional engineering.
The CRC’s report also represents the most comprehensive and significant evaluation of the potential of constitutional engineering via centripetal electoral methods to date. The adoption of much of the CRC’s thinking in the new Fijian Constitution represent an important practical imprimatur for the possibilities of the centripetal model of ethnic conflict management. Fiji’s first elections under the new constitutional arrangements are scheduled to take place by early 1999. These elections will represent an ideal opportunity to see if the claims put forward for the accommodative effects of preference-swapping under AV electoral rules will materialise in a setting of deep and ongoing ethnic antagonisms. Until that time, however, the arguments of the CRC for the accommodative effects of their model must remain speculative: we simply do not know yet if AV will work to break down ethnic antagonisms in a divided ‘bi-polar’ state. We do, however, have some evidence from another divided bi-communal polity which has utilised preferential voting methods for national elections: the South Asian state of Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka
The island of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) is one of the foremost examples of a ‘constitutional laboratory’ in the world today. Like Fiji, Sri Lanka is a plural society with clearly defined ethnic groups. The majority group, the Sinhalese, constitute approximately 74 percent of the population. Sri Lankan Tamils make up 12 percent, so- called ‘Indian’ Tamils approximately six percent, and Muslims another seven percent of the population. The groups are ethnically, religiously and regionally distinct, being concentrated in different parts of the island (see Map Three). The Sinhalese are mostly Buddhists who speak Sinhala, and predominate in the island’s southwest; both Tamil groups are Hindus who speak Tamil, with Sri Lankan Tamils concentrated in the northeast and Indian Tamils in the tea plantations in the centre of the island; and Muslims are found on both the east and west coasts, often speaking Arabic, in addition to other languages (Shastri 1997, 133-34).
A nation with a bloody recent history of ethnic conflict between the majority Sinhalese and minority Sri Lankan Tamil populations, Sri Lanka has experimented with a variety of innovative constitutional and electoral arrangements in its efforts to ensure minority groups have a meaningful stake in the political process, with varying degrees of success. Like many other former British colonies, Sri Lanka inherited a Westminster model of parliamentary government, with the first full general election for the Parliament (consisting of a House of Representatives and a Senate) held in 1947. In 1971 Sri Lanka changed from a bicameral to a unicameral legislature with the abolition of the Senate. Although Sri Lanka achieved independence in 1948, it was not until 1972 that it adopted its current name and embarked on the process of writing its own constitution as an independent nation state. An elected Constituent Assembly drafted the First Republican Constitution which provided for a unicameral legislature known as the National State Assembly. In 1978 this body was renamed the Parliament after a select committee (under the chairmanship of the nation’s most dominant political figure to date, J.R. Jayewardene) drafted a revised constitution which transformed the Sri Lankan system of government into an executive presidency, with Jayewardene vacating his position as prime minister to assume the new office of an elected executive head of state.
Map Three: Sri Lanka • J a ffn a kilometres Trin co m alee Anuradhapura Batticaloa C O L O M B O
In terms of electoral arrangements, Sri Lanka adopted the British first-past-the-post system for its first general elections in 1947 (although with multi-member electorates as well as single-member ones), before converting in 1978 to a form of party list PR and preferential voting for its parliamentary and presidential elections respectively. In the process, Sri Lanka has experimented with a range of unusual and sometimes conflicting electoral arrangements, which has confirmed its self-proclaimed reputation as one of the world’s “constitutional guinea pigs”.3 Sri Lanka is of particular interest because it is the only country in the world which uses a preferential electoral system to elect an executive president.4 The structure of government chosen in 1978 was similar to the French ‘semi-presidential’ system: a powerful executive president counterbalanced by a legislature elected by proportional representation. Like her counterpart under the French model, the Sri Lankan president has substantial executive powers, with the added power of being able to hand-pick the ministry, including the prime minister — the only proviso being that all ministers must be members of the elected legislature. Hence the characterisation of the Sri Lankan Second Republic as ‘the Gaullist system in Asia’ (Wilson 1980).
Sri Lanka ’s electoral arrangements
Prior to the adoption of a new constitution in 1978, Sri Lanka’s electoral arrangements had been almost purely in the Westminster mode. Sri Lanka has a long and impressive history of competitive elections and democratic procedures, although these have been significantly marred by the ethnic conflict and political assassinations of the last two decades. Universal adult suffrage was introduced in 1931, giving Sri Lanka a record of democratic elections without equal in Asia. In 1959 the voting age was lowered to eighteen years, predating a similar move in most Western countries by at least a decade. Sri Lanka’s electoral administration is under the direct control of a commissioner of elections, a senior public servant independent of ministerial supervision who can only
3 Interview, R.K. Chandrananda de Silva, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 22 March 1996. de Silva was Sri Lanka’s