Political reform in Papua New Guinea: testing the evidence
نویسنده
چکیده
Over the past few years Papua New Guinea has implemented a series of major political reforms in the electoral, political party and parliamentary arenas. In what constitutes an extremely ambitious attempt to change the way Papua New Guinea’s political system works, the broad aim of this process of political engineering is to strengthen political parties, promote more broadly supported candidates and increase political stability. These three goals find their institutional expression in several different pieces of legislation introduced in 2001 and 2002, most notably the Organic Law on National and Local-Level Government Elections (OLNLLGE) and the Organic Law on Integrity of Political Parties and Candidates (OLIPPAC).1 Some observers have already derided these reforms as failures. Alphonse Gelu (2005), for example, has written of the failures of the Organic Law on the integrity of political parties and candidates. Bill Standish has opined that the OLIPPAC and electoral law changes ‘are likely to have little impact’ (2005:11). Writing in this journal on lessons from Fiji for Papua New Guinea, Jon Fraenkel argued that the parliamentary and electoral reforms were predicated on ‘exaggerated claims about the institutional causes of governance failures and naive expectations that juggling with electoral rules will transform political culture’ (Fraenkel 2004:130). In this paper, I argue that if judged specifically against measurable performance indicators, rather than the elevated expectations of cultural change advanced by some of these critics, Papua New Guinea’s electoral, party and parliamentary reforms have in fact already had a discernable positive impact upon political outcomes. Assertions to the contrary rely on outlandish interpretations of reform aims and at times ignore available evidence. And, as I will show, testable data to assess the impact of each of these reforms is readily available.
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