Ebook: Democracy in Divided Societies: Electoral Engineering for Conflict Management

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.