ORIENTACIONES PARA LA ENSEÑANZA Y EL APRENDIZAJE DE LAS ACTITUDES Y VALORES

Not only did informal voting not decrease, but much more 85% o f the candidates won their seats with less than a majority o f votes. Strikingly, about 45% o f the victorious candidates won with 30% or less. The immediate implications o f the experiment with the first-past-the-post system have been twofold. First, the new electoral system encouraged candidates with the largest bloc o f ethnic (clan) votes in an electorate to concentrate on his/her base alone rather than to seek co­ operative exchanges for second or third preferences with candidates from other clans. The first- past-the-post system imposed a clear-cut choice that provided no alternative to villagers but to express their choice in a ‘friendly’ versus ‘antagonistic’ pattern. In effect the first-past-the-post system did not encourage inter-clan and inter-community co-operation in a country which is notoriously socially and ethnically fragmented. Secondly, the first-past-the-post system diminishes the legitimacy o f the parliament as the decision-making body for the national governm ent... it may very well be dumped for the next national elections (1978, 79-80).

Even the Electoral Commission, which had supported the change, appeared to have doubts about the new system. Echoing Wolfers’ earlier criticisms, the Electoral Commissioner, J.S. Mileng, expressed support for a change to a full preferential system as “a fairer system of voting” and suggested that the problem with the old AV system was that “the voter is not required to mark his/her full support for the running candidates, therefore the voting system tends to swing towards that of the ‘First Past the Post5 Voting System”. While FPTP was simpler and easier to administer than AV, it did not enable voters “to consider placing a second choice for the next best candidate ... a strong voting block always has the chance of electing its candidate outright, whilst candidates coming from a minority group would have no chance of getting elected” (PNG Electoral Commission 1983, 78-79). Similar criticisms were voiced by a number of other electoral officials, who claimed that FPTP facilitated voting blocks and enabled candidates with small localised support to triumph over their competitors. The following comment, from the Obura-Wonenara returning officer, was typical:

The first-past-the-post system was again criticised by the electors as well as the officials because it does not allow an elector to express his second and third choice for the remaining candidates. With the voting trends in the area, a heavy block tends to vote for its own man leaving no opportunity for a man from a less developed area (PNG Electoral Commission 1983, 78-79).

The relatively new phenomenon of campaign violence in 1977 was a recurring concern, with the Electoral Commission saying that the 1977 poll featured “the most hectic and wild campaign activities that were ever seen in Papua New Guinea”. Returning officers in Chimbu and Enga provinces stated that tribal fighting and attacks on polling staff were so widespread as to constitute a serious problem for electoral officials, and both returning officers’ reports stated that officials would not perform the same duties again due to the level of violence encountered (PNG Electoral Commission 1983, 88).

The effects o f first-past-the-post

As noted earlier, elections in PNG evidence both continuity and change since 1964. However, in some areas the changes in PNG electoral politics appear to be directly related to the institutional consequences of the change of electoral system. Specifically, the introduction of FPTP in 1975 appears to be related to three characteristics of post­ independence electoral politics in PNG: the increasingly high rates of candidature at elections; the election of increasingly unrepresentative and minimally-supported candidates; and rising levels of electoral violence. The relationship of the electoral system to these factors will now be examined, and it will be argued that each of these distinguishing characteristics of contemporary PNG politics is at least partly explicable by reference to the incentives for behaviour presented by the electoral system.

Candidature rates

PNG elections have long been characterised by remarkably high rates of candidature. The first post-independence elections in 1977 saw an explosion in candidates numbers — 881 candidates standing for 109 seats, representing a 44 percent increase over the number contesting in 1972 and a 33 percent increase in the average number of candidates per seat. Hegarty argued that the increase was “largely due to the fact that, with independence, political power was at stake, and the fact that the first-past-the-post voting system gave candidates with a reasonably strong clan vote a chance of winning” (Hegarty 1983, 13). As detailed in Table 4.5 below, rates of candidature have remained high, and increased, with every election to date.

Table 4.5: Candidates per Electorate 1964-1997

Y e a r N o o f E le c to r a te s N o . o f C a n d id a te s A v e r a g e p e r e le c to r a te 1964 5 4 2 9 8 5.5 1968 84 4 8 4 5.8 1972 100 611 6.1 1977 109 87 9 8.1 1982 109 1125 10.3 1987 109 1513 13.9 1992 109 1654 15.2 1997 109 2 3 7 0 2 1 .7

Since independence, the increasing centrality of the state as a means of accessing resources and accumulating and distributing wealth has served to encourage more and more candidates to stand for election. As noted in the previous chapter, electoral victory provides the surest way of gaining access to the resources of the state itself. Some observers also argue that standing for election itself increases individual prestige regardless of the election outcome. In the Chimbu region of the highlands, for example, candidature

demonstrates local popularity, makes a ‘big man’, [and] shows how the candidate measures up against local rivals for clan and tribe leadership. In this competition, candidacy itself, having one's name on the ballot, posters, cars, supporters, is an indication o f being a big man. Secondly, success is measured by obtaining votes o f the subclan, clan and tribe. Electoral success, that is, achieving office, against thirty or forty rivals, cannot be expected. In the local contest the one who receives the largest number o f votes demonstrates that he has at least a local following (Brown

1989, 251) .

What is sometimes overlooked in such analyses is the way PNG’s FPTP electoral system also encourages candidates to stand for election. The higher the number of candidates standing under FPTP, the smaller the total vote needed to gain a plurality and hence win the seat. For example, if 20 candidates with identical support bases stand for a seat, the winning candidate needs only (100 percent + 20 + 1), or just over 5 percent of the vote to be elected. In most countries with disciplined party systems, this example would seem ludicrous: two or three major parties would gain the vast majority of the votes, and the winning candidate would thus need considerably more than 5 percent to gain election. In PNG, by contrast, this type of scenario is relatively commonplace. Because many candidates rely, sometimes exclusively, on their own clan base for support, FPTP contests in electorates with many different clan groups of roughly equal size can produce winning candidates with only a marginal plurality of votes over other candidates. By contrast, other voting systems such as AV require successful candidates to gain an absolute majority of votes cast, and thus encourage alliances between parties or candidates, since the allies can each put up candidates without fear of splitting their combined vote.

The explosion in the number of candidates since independence was clearly not anticipated by the Constitutional Planning Commission and other influential players who supported a change to FPTP. The number of candidates almost doubled in the ten years between 1972 (the last AV election) and 1982, prompting the General Constitutional Commission (which was established in 1978 to review the workings of

PNG’s independence Constitution) to suggest that, while FPTP was easier to understand, the desirability of a return to AV warranted consideration should the country’s changing circumstances require it (1983, 131). The explosion of candidate numbers in the post-independence era in PNG has many causes, but one of them appears to be the possibility anyone with a modicum of clan support to stand for election and have at least a chance of winning a seat under the FPTP electoral system.

As in so many other areas of PNG politics, regional factors also appear to influence the distribution of this phenomenon. As already noted, in regions of high contestation such as the highlands, where many similar-sized clans vie to have ‘their’ candidate elected, high candidacy rates are always to be expected. In most elections, the record number of candidates for an electorate tends to occur in highlands seats — 48 in Sinasina- Yonggamugl in 1992, 45 in Kerowagi in 1987 and 29 in Kundiawa in 1982 — although the latest record of 61 candidates contesting one seat occurred in Papua’s Northern Provincial electorate in 1997. The areas of high candidature are those in which a number of competing interest groups and issue dimensions are present, such as the National Capital District seats, which have consistently attracted large numbers of able candidates.12 By contrast, many contests in the lowlands and islands are characterised by small numbers of candidates and a more consensual, measured style of campaigning.

This raises the question of to what extent the number of clans in each electoral district is related to the total number of candidates standing for election. If we assume that there is roughly one candidate for each politicised clan or tribal group, then the number of candidates in an electorate should approximate the number of clans within that constituency. But there are several problems with this approach. First, the number of candidates standing for election has tripled since independence, suggesting a more fluid relationship between the two variables than a straight one-to-one ratio would imply. Also, there is clear evidence of social forces which both deter candidacy in some areas (thus reducing the candidate/clan ratio) and which encourage frivolous or ‘vote­ splitting’ candidates standing in others (thus increasing it). Burton found both of these tendencies taking place in his survey of the Hagen Open electorate in 1987, although the strength of the forces constraining candidacy (such as pre-election agreements by clan leaders on candidacy to avoid vote-splitting) appeared to be outweighed by those

encouraging it (the accurate assessment by many candidates with a modicum of support that they have a chance of success) (1989, 272-73). Partly this is also the result of the willingness of parties in PNG to endorse multiple candidates and to generally align themselves with as many likely winners as possible. May’s analysis of the 1982 elections in East Sepik, for example, found that parties had little control over candidates from different support bases standing and claiming party allegiance at the time of nomination — a phenomenon which, he argued, split the pro-Pangu vote (1989, 227). Pokawin found a similar situation in Manus, where every candidate voluntarily associated themselves with a political party, and no less than nine non-endorsed candidates publicly associated themselves with the Pangu Pati (1989,245).

Overall, however, the hypothesised relationship between candidature, clan numbers and electoral rules would appear to offer one explanation for PNG’s extremely high candidacy rates, as there is a clear relationship between areas of greater group fragmentation with higher rates of candidature. This corresponds to the theoretical expectations of the political science literature, which argues that the effective number of electoral candidates and parties in an election is a product of the interaction between social heterogeneity and electoral rules.13 Examination of the electoral impact of racial diversity in some areas of the United States, for example, has found that “the greater the level of racial (or social) heterogeneity in an electoral district (or nation), the greater the number of effective candidates there will be in the district (or national) elections” (Jones 1997, 355). When applied to PNG, this theory would predict that the number of candidates per district would be higher in the more competitive and ethnically-diverse areas, such as the Port Moresby electorates and the highlands, than in the less divided islands region — which is indeed the case. At the 1997 elections, for example, the islands region had an average of 10.6 candidates per electorate, while candidature rates were twice as high in the highlands and over three times as high in the National Capital District (Electoral Commissioner 1997, 15).

Although high candidacy is one indicator of democratic participation, in PNG it has come to be seen as “excessive and undesirable both from the point of view of effective representation and the electoral process itself’ (Electoral Commissioner 1987, 5). In 1991 the government introduced a number of measures intended to reduce the number