Democracy in Divided Societies: Electoral Engineering for Conflict Management

by Benjamin Reilly

Overview

Reilly analyzes the design of electoral systems for divided societies, examining various divided societies which utilize "vote-pooling" electoral systems—including Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland and Fiji. He shows that political institutions which encourage the development of broad-based, aggregative political parties and where campaigning politicians have incentives to attract votes from a range of ethnic groups can, under certain conditions, encourage a moderate, accommodatory political competition and thus influence the trajectory of democratization in transitional states. This is a challenge to orthodox approaches to democracy and conflict management.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521793230
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/13/2001
Series:	Theories of Institutional Design
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.55(d)
Lexile:	1710L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

Introduction: democracy in divided societies; 1. The historical development of preferential voting; 2. The historical development of preferential voting; 3. Centripetal incentives and political engineering in Australia; 4. The rise and fall of centripetalism in Papua New Guinea; 5. Electoral engineering and conflict management in divided societies: (i) Fiji and Sri Lanka compared; 6. Electoral engineering and conflict management in divided societies: (ii)Northern Ireland, Estonia and beyond; 7. Technical variations and the theory of preference voting; Conclusion: assessing the evidence.

Editorial Reviews

"This richly insightful and well-researched work is an important contribution to the literature on electoral systems and ethnic conflict management. It will attract considerable interest and enthusiasm from academic specialists, as well as from politicians and policymakers looking for institutional strategies for managing conflict." Larry Diamond, Stanford University

"This is a superior work, engaging, important and timely. It concerns some of the most significant issues to theorists and practitioners of democratization, of electoral systems, of voter behavior, and of ethnic-group conflict and methods to ameliorate it. It engages recent debates and provides new evidence and insight." Donald L. Horowitz, Duke University

"Benjamin Reilly makes an important contribution to the debate on the appropriate institutional design of electoral systems for mitigating conflict and sustaining democracy in ethnically plural societies." American Political Science Review

From the Publisher