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Regional and rural Australians have long appreciated the problem of demographics in politics particularly as they relate to the electoral process and its related party system. All Australians understand the nexus between voting, the formation of governments and the construction of public policy – including, of course, policies that come under the rubric of ‘law and order’. Regional and rural voters have worried about the scope for their policy demands to be overwhelmed by the concerns of urban communities that, in most Australian states, constitutes what might be thought of as a majority. This chapter seeks to shine light on the notions of a rural-urban divide, its consequences for the party system and its impact on policy formation. It will highlight some important demographic differences between the metropolis and the regions and note the propensity for voter volatility to manifest itself in party choices especially where multi-member proportional representation occurs. The success of independents and minor parties may be an indication of regional voter disillusion with the traditional political parties of rural Australia, the Liberal and National parties.

Violent geo-political conflicts are on the rise across the globe, particularly within fragile states. Using path-dependency theory, this paper aims to explore Fiji in the context of its public administrative history examining the legacies of history that have contributed to its ongoing conflicts.

An archival document analysis along with a theoretical thematic analysis was used to collect and assess data. Themes were identified that explain how and when the conflict became path-dependent.

Analysing conflict as path-dependent demonstrates how indirect rule while Fiji was under colonial rule, and the short time it has taken for the nation to transition from a colony to an independent State contributed to the eruption of conflicts in Fiji.

The research makes two key contributions, namely, it develops a theoretical understanding of conflict using path-dependency theory and it uncovers legacies of colonialism that have shaped conflict in Fiji.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of using proportional representation system on the fragmentation of the party system in the Algerian political system within the period from 1997 to 2017, in which Algeria has experienced five legislative elections regularly every five years by testing a hypothesis about adopting the proportional representation system on the basis of the closed list during the foregoing legislative elections has obviously influenced the exacerbation of the Algerian party system’s fragmentation, compared to other factors.

The essence of the theoretical framework of this study is to address the effect of the electoral system as an independent variable on the party system as a dependent variable. The starting point for that framework is to reassess the “Duverger’s law,” which appeared since the early 1950s and has influenced the foregoing relationship, and then to review the literature on a new phase that tried to provide a more accurate mechanism for determining the number of parties and their relative weight, whether in terms of electoral votes or parliamentary seats. This means that researchers began to use a measure called the effective number of parties (ENP) for Laakso and Taagepera since 1979. The study elaborates the general concepts of the electoral system and the party system. It used Laakso, Taagepera index of the “ENP” to measure the phenomenon of fragmentation party during the five legislative elections from 1997 to 2017 in Algeria.

The results of the study reveal that the proportional representation electoral system – beside other factors – had clear impacts on the fragmentation of the Algerian party system by all standards, whether on the level of the apparent rise in the number of the parties represented in the Algerian parliament from 10 parties in 1997 election to 36 parties in 2017 election or according to the index of Laakso and Taagepera (ENP). The average number of effective number of electoral parties in the five elections was around 7.66, and the average number of effective number of parliamentary parties in the five elections was around 4.39, which puts Algeria in an advanced degree of the fragmentation of the party system.

This study about the phenomenon of the fragmentation of the party system, which is one of the new subjects in the field of comparative politics – globally and in the Arab world. Hence, the value of this study aims to shed light on this mysterious area of science, the fragmentation of the party system in the Algerian political system during the period from 1997 to 2017.

This article develops an alternative theoretical approach to the Supreme Court’s controversial electoral redistricting decisions in Shaw v. Reno (1993) and its progeny. Instead of relying on the traditional equal protection interpretation, this paper argues that controversies over electoral redistricting are at base disputes among competing visions of democracy. In the Court’s recent redistricting cases, the majority and the dissent adopted fundamentally different visions of democracy – Individualist Democracy and Democracy as Power. In addition to elaborating these rival understandings of democracy, this article develops the concept of Symbolic Democracy to explain a central paradox in the Court majority’s decision: its simultaneous denial and recognition of the relevance of racial groups in representation.

This chapter explores how the Korean electoral management bodies (EMBs) and the election administration ensure the autonomy of administrative management from political parties and the interior ministry. In particular, the analysis focuses on the role of recognition, rights independence, and professionalism in securing the election administrations in the EMBs. Recent studies have found that the contents of the independent variable, dependent variable, and other parameters influencing fair and autonomous election management system do not differ significantly. Therefore, the institutional independence of the EMBs is not intended to guarantee fairness and impartiality in Korea either. Since 1987, the authoritarian regime collapsed and democracy began to grow in Korea. Also, the role of the EMBs granted by the constitution started to be considered.

Actively recognizing the role and expanding the rights of the Korean National Election Commission (NEC) has become a decisive factor in the formation of the autonomous and neutral election management system. The scale, manpower and budget of organizations, and personnel have increased. The role of the EMBs has also expanded proportionally. The Korean NEC has enormous authority, such as investigative power and enforcement power that the EMBs of other countries do not have. After all, recognizing the role of bureaucracy and government employees will become a very important factor in ensuring the independence of the EMBs in developing countries. Furthermore, it will be a driving force to develop democracy in developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the strategies employed by the pro-Beijing and pro-democracy camps in the proportional representation system which was used to universally elect a half of the seats in the Legislative Council (LegCo) of Hong Kong before 2019. It provides the consequences of proportional representation over the political sphere development after the handover.

This research is based on the past election results and the interviews conducted with 18 LegCo members in 2018.

This paper examines how the political parties split their lists in order to win more seats with the past electoral outcomes. Coupled with firsthand materials from interviews with the legislators, the most significant part of this article analyzes why the pro-Beijing camp performed better than the pro-democracy camp. It supplements the gap of current literature from the perspective of campaign strategies. This article also points out the Chinese authorities' miscalculation in the 1990s which resulted in the unintentional creation of fragmented politics and filibusters before 2019.

This examines the development of campaign strategies of the pro-Beijing and pro-democracy camps, and it explains how the proportional representation caused the fragmented politics in Hong Kong.