JON FRAENKEL At first sight, the Pacific Islands seem like a graveyard for institutional determinist theories regarding the impact of electoral systems on party polarisation. Maurice Duverger’s well-known ‘sociological law’ was that first-past-the-post electoral rules tend to deliver two-party systems. Proportional representation (PR) systems were more loosely associated with multi-party settin...

Precis: Three general elections were held for the Northern Ireland Parliament during the 1920s. The 1921 and 1925 elections were contested using proportional representation, whereas the 1929 elec­ tions used the "first-past-the-post system". This paper analyses how the change in the electoral system reversed the trend towards political plurality reflected in the 1925 election results, and facil...

Despite growing interest from practitioners, politicians and the media, the political representation of Muslim ethnic minority women in the West has received scant scholarly attention. I address this gap with new data on the representation of Muslim ethnic minority women and men in 20 national legislatures from 2000 to 2010. Results reveal that Muslim ethnic minority women are increasingly elec...

This chapter argues that the value of political equality implies proportionality in an electoral system. The literature on electoral systems and democratic theory has been remarkably agnostic about how basic values may be translated into institutions. Dahl (1956) constructs an axiomatic theory of democracy based on the idea of political equality but then declares it has little to say about prac...