The South Pacific country of Papua New Guinea (PNG) has used two different electoral systems—the Alternative Vote (AV) from 1964 to 1975, when it was an Australian territory, and FPTP from 1975 to 2002. It has since reverted to the alternative vote again.
Its experience is interesting for a number of reasons. First, PNG is one of the few developing countries with an unbroken record of continuous competitive elections and numerous peaceful changes of government. Second, the change from one electoral system to another has had a series of unexpected consequences which illustrate the different effects apparently similar electoral systems can have. Third, PNG is one of the few countries to have adopted, abandoned, and then re-adopted a particular electoral system.
Papua New Guinea inherited the AV system from Australia and used it for three elections in 1964, 1968 and 1972. Unlike Australia, however, PNG is a highly ethnically fragmented society, with over 850 separate languages and several thousand competing clan and tribal groups.
Its experience lends support to the claims that AV can promote inter-ethnic accommodation and moderation in deeply divided societies by allowing voters to express not just their first choice of candidate but also their second and later choices. Because of the nature of PNG society, under AV most voters invariably gave their first preference to their own clan or ‘home’ candidate. In many seats, however, this was not enough for any single candidate to gain a majority of votes; they needed the second preferences of other groups as well. In order to gain a majority, candidates had to ‘sell’ themselves as a good ‘second-best’ choice to other clan groups—which meant, in general, someone who would be attentive to the interests of all groups, not just their own. It also meant that those candidates who formed alliances and cooperated with each other would often be more successful than candidates who attempted to win the seat from their own voter base alone. This gave many candidates an incentive to act in an accommodating manner to other clans. The mechanics of the system also ensured that the winning candidate would have the support of an absolute majority of voters. In a substantial number of cases, the winning candidate was not the one who had the biggest ‘bloc’ of supporters but rather the one who could successfully build support across several groups.
Thinking that it would be a simpler system which would have similar effects to AV, Papua New Guinea changed to an FPTP electoral system at independence in 1975. However, the different incentives provided by the new FPTP system led to quite different results from those expected. Because candidates no longer needed an absolute majority of votes cast in order to be successful—just more votes than any other group—the candidate from the largest clan would often win the seat outright. There was no incentive to cooperate with anyone else. Electoral violence increased because it was in some candidates’ interests to stop opponents’ supporters from voting rather than to campaign for their second preferences as they had done under AV. Also, because there were so many clans all trying to win the seat, candidates learned that they could be successful with very limited support.
At the 2002 elections, over half of the MPs in the Parliament were elected with less than 20 per cent of the vote. Several candidates who won seats gained only 5 per cent. In an electoral cycle increasingly dominated by concerns about corruption, power and money politics, this led to a range of negative campaign tactics, such as encouraging rival candidates to stand in order to ‘split’ a dominant clan’s voter base. This increased pressure for the reintroduction of AV. In 2003, the PNG Parliament re-adopted what it called ‘limited’ preferential voting for all future elections. Voters will be required to mark a minimum of three preferences.
The Papua New Guinea case illustrates just how dependent much of the accepted wisdom regarding electoral systems is on the structure of the society concerned. Despite having an FPTP electoral system, PNG had a very fluid party system, based on individuals rather than ideologies. All governments under FPTP were weak coalitions, which sometimes changed on the floor of the Parliament as well as at elections. The single-member system of representation resulted in high levels of turnover of politicians from one election to the next, as members could not both be in Port Moresby at sessions of the Parliament and be continually visible in their districts.
Accordingly, a strong sense of accountability on the part of many local members to their electorate developed: without it their chances of re-election would be slim. This matches a strong sense on the part of the electorate that the function of their member is to deliver direct benefits to the community, building on Melanesian tradition that a ‘big man’ ensures that his community shares in his wealth and good fortune. As one member has memorably put it, ‘When people elect me to Parliament, they think I own the Bank of Papua New Guinea.’
Under the AV system, this sense of accountability tended to be spread across a number of groups, thus helping to manage inter-ethnic conflicts. However, this was itself a reflection of the extreme fragmentation of the country’s society.
