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Comparative scholarship suggests that democracy in ethnically-diverse societies is likely to be fostered by the development of broad-based, aggregative, and multi-ethnic political parties, rather than fragmented, personalised, or ethnically-based party systems. However, surprisingly little scholarly attention has been given to how party fragmentation can be addressed or how broad-based parties can be sustained, despite some remarkable recent experiments in conflict-prone societies such as Indonesia, Turkey, Nigeria, Kenya, Thailand, the Philippines, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea aimed at influencing party system development. Drawing on these and other cases, this article identifies four strategies of 'party engineering' that have been used to promote broad-based, cross-regional, or multi-ethnic political parties in new democracies around the world.

Since the early 1900s, the federal land management agencies—the Forest Service in particular—have focused their wildfire management efforts on suppression. A century of wildfire suppression policy has created a buildup of natural fuels in the Nation's forests that contribute to larger, more damaging fires today. This, coupled with the rapid development of the Wildland-Urban Interface, makes today's wildfires a greater threat to human life and property. As a result, the federal government's annual expenditures for wildfire management have ballooned in recent years. Relying on the billions of tax dollars spent each year to fight wildfire, individuals have continued to develop property on fire-prone lands and insurers continue to issue them policies with premiums that do not reflect the true risk of wildfire. This situation creates an implicit subsidy for residents of fire-prone lands, which presents many of the same pitfalls as the National Flood Insurance Program's explicit subsidy for residents of flood-prone lands. This Note advocates for a reform of the way we pay for wildfire management. Specifically, it encourages the federal government to implement a National Wildfire Insurance Program that employs a "homeowner mandate" to shift the costs of wildfire management to those who directly benefit from it: the residents of the Wildland-Urban Interface.

In this article I investigate whether 'political engineering' can work to address problems of party system instability in new democracies. I look at the ambitious recent attempts to engineer the development of stable party politics in Papua New Guinea, one of the few post-colonial states to have maintained an unbroken record of democratic government. Despite its enviable status in this regard, in recent years Papua New Guinea has been plagued by increasing political instability caused, in part, by the fragmentation of its party system. The article analyses Papua New Guinea's new political institutions, introduced in 2001, which are designed to encourage the development of a more coherent party system, stabilize the formation of executive government, and fundamentally change the conduct of the electoral process.

Many of the small island democracies of the South Pacific are natural laboratories for constitutional and electoral experimentation, but have tended to be ignored by comparative political science research. This article examines one apparently unknown case of electoral innovation from the region: the use of Borda count voting procedures for elections in the Pacific Island states of Nauru and Kiribati. It introduces the basic concept of the Borda count and its relation to other electoral systems, and surveys arguments about the virtues and drawbacks of Borda count electoral systems. It then discusses in some detail the way that the Borda count is used for elections in Nauru and Kiribati, including the political impact of the system, and empirical examples of different types of strategic behaviour at work. It concludes by examining the broader significance of these cases for comparative studies of democracy, elections, social choice, and voting theory.

The South Pacific region features enormous variation in state performance. While Polynesian nations such as Samoa have proved to be relatively successful post-colonial states, Melanesian countries like the Solomon Islands are increasingly categorised as 'weak', 'failing' or 'failed' states. Drawing on a range of comparative studies by economists and political scientists in recent years, this article argues that cross-country variation in ethnic diversity between much of Polynesia and Melanesia is a key factor in explaining differences in state performance across the South Pacific. It shows how different kinds of ethnic structure are associated with specific political and economic outcomes, including variation in political stability, economic development, and internal conflict from country to country. In so doing, it helps explain why some parts of the South Pacific appear to be failing while others are relative success stories - and why this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

In 1997, Fiji's Constitution Review Commission (CRC) produced a voluminous proposal for constitutional reform, The Fiji Islands: Towards a United Future, which recommended that Fiji move 'gradually but decisively' away from communalism towards a free, open and multi-ethnic political system.

During the past two decades, numerous Asia-Pacific states have made transitions to democracy founded on basic political liberties and freely contested elections. A little-noticed consequence of this process has been strikingly congruent reforms to key political institutions such as electoral systems, political parties, and parliaments. Across the region, these reforms have been motivated by common aims of promoting government stability, reducing political fragmentation, and limiting the potential for new entrants to the party system. As a result, similar strategies of institutional design are evident in the increasing prevalence of "mixed-member majoritarian" electoral systems, new political party laws favoring the development of aggregative party systems, and constraints on the enfranchisement of regional or ethnic minorities. Comparing the outcomes of these reforms with those of other world regions, there appears to be an increasing convergence on an identifiable "Asian model" of electoral democracy.

n this essay, Benjamin Reilly ponders the puzzling pattern of democracy's presence or absence across Southeast Asia. Indeed, the dearth of democracy in the region's richest countries (Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore), together with its strength in the poo

On many measures of ethno-linguistic diversity, Papua New Guinea is the most fragmented society in the world. I argue that the macro-level political effect of this diversity has been to reduce, rather than increase, the impact of ethnic conflict on the state. Outside the Bougainville conflict, and (to a lesser extent) the recent upsurge of violence in the Southern Highlands, ethnic conflicts in Papua New Guinea have not presented a threat to national government. In contrast to most other ethnically diverse societies, the most consequential impacts of ethnic conflict in Papua New Guinea are at the local level. This paper therefore examines the disparate impacts of local- and national-level forms of ethnic conflict in Papua New Guinea.

An intense scholarly and public policy debate concerns the optimal design of institutions for new democracies, particularly those facing deep ethnic or cultural cleavages. This paper surveys the main contending models that have been advanced for ethnically diverse democracies - consociationalism, centripetalism and communalism - and examines the key components of each of those models. It then explores some aspects of their application, arguing that there is much more cross-over between the models than is commonly assumed.

Comparative scholarship suggests that democracy in ethnically-diverse societies is likely to be fostered by the development of broad-based, aggregative, and multi-ethnic political parties, rather than fragmented, personalised, or ethnically-based party systems. However, surprisingly little scholarly attention has been given to how party fragmentation can be addressed or how broad-based parties can be sustained, despite some remarkable recent experiments in conflict-prone societies such as Indonesia, Turkey, Nigeria, Kenya, Thailand, the Philippines, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea aimed at influencing party system development. Drawing on these and other cases, this article identifies four strategies of 'party engineering' that have been used to promote broad-based, cross-regional, or multi-ethnic political parties in new democracies around the world.

During the past two decades, numerous Asia-Pacific states have made transitions to democracy founded on basic political liberties and freely contested elections. A little-noticed consequence of this process has been strikingly congruent reforms to key political institutions such as electoral systems, political parties, and parliaments. Across the region, these reforms have been motivated by common aims of promoting government stability, reducing political fragmentation, and limiting the potential for new entrants to the party system. As a result, similar strategies of institutional design are evident in the increasing prevalence of "mixed-member majoritarian" electoral systems, new political party laws favoring the development of aggregative party systems, and constraints on the enfranchisement of regional or ethnic minorities. Comparing the outcomes of these reforms with those of other world regions, there appears to be an increasing convergence on an identifiable "Asian model" of electoral democracy.

n this essay, Benjamin Reilly ponders the puzzling pattern of democracy's presence or absence across Southeast Asia. Indeed, the dearth of democracy in the region's richest countries (Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore), together with its strength in the poo