The Pacific Islands: The Centrality of Context for Power-Sharing in the Global South

The Pacific Island states include some of the world’s most and least heterogeneous polities. Only in Fiji and New Caledonia have the communally based political parties emerged that form the essential building blocks of what Arend Lijphart calls ‘consociational democracy.’ Most other Pacific Island states are either too heterogeneous to support such parties or so homogeneous that political parties either do not emerge at all or acquire hegemony in dominant party systems or are scarcely differentiated programmatically. This chapter argues that ‘power-sharing’ entails a potentially preferable alternative to majoritarian democracy primarily in contexts where cohesive and pillarized groups are represented by powerful actors on the national stage. Two implications for investigations of power-sharing in the Global South follow. The first is the importance of context: one needs to carefully analyze the character of cleavages (or their absence) to establish where power-sharing agreements might be appropriate or workable. Second, at least in those appropriate contexts, power-sharing rules are likely to need to be codified in law.