In the wake of violent conflicts, democracy builders and policymakers possess few tools for mitigating communal disagreements and making democratic governance tractable over the long term. Efforts at generating peace are often torpedoed by the lack of mutual trust between community members, the political weakness of moderates capable of crafting credible elite bargains, and competing mythologies about which group possesses a legitimate claim to rule. At the same time, the international community's general disdain for nondemocratic modes of governance places tremendous pressures on states to design institutions based on mass participation and political contestation. Given the international preference for democracy, electoral system design is one of the few mechanisms that policymakers can deploy in an effort to compel some degree of intercommunal cooperation. Indeed, debates about the appropriate ways to structure democratic processes, based on competing assumptions about the nature of political incentives, continue to generate spirited exchanges among political scientists. The three books under review present competing perspectives on the linkages between institutions and communal violence. While they do not address each other's core contentions directly (only one of the texts explicitly discusses the mechanics of electoral design), they each contribute substantially to our understanding of the potentials and limitations for formal rules to mitigate intrastate conflicts, particularly in bipolar states where victory at the polls is often equated with ethnic group survival.

Benjamin Reilly has, over the course of the past decade, emerged as a leading advocate for electoral system design based on centripetalism, arguing that ethnically divided states often require incentives that compel political leaders to reach across ethnic divides in order to mitigate the power of communal extremists. In Democracy and Diversity he moves beyond an analysis of ethnic politics to advance a theory of emerging Asian democracy centered on strong majoritarian electoral institutions capable of limiting the mobilization of ethnic minorities. In so doing, he notes that the emerging trends in East Asia and the Pacific stand in stark contrast to the tendency in Africa and Latin America to introduce more proportional reforms over time.

Reilly observes that in many cases of electoral reform, a veneer of democratic practice is preserved through institutional manipulations that overwhelmingly benefit entrenched majorities at the expense of smaller parties. This suggests that institutional engineers are unlikely to pick from the myriad examples of “pure” proportional representation or majoritarian models of governance. Rather, and consistent with most empirical observations, institutional designers increasingly opt for mixed-member systems that weld various elements of electoral design (pp. 111–12), but with a decided preference for nonproportional methods.

In short, crafters choose models not so much for their ability to translate citizen preference or to broaden the representational characteristics of electoral democracy, but rather in order to limit which majorities can emerge with an eye to producing more stable long-term outcomes. Lest this seem overly critical, it is important to note that all democratic electoral systems do this in one way or another. What seems clear, however, is that specific institutional designers seek very specific sorts of outcomes when designing new systems. Reilly concludes that a mixture of “stability, predictability and order” are the overriding goals of the shift to more exclusivist models of democracy in contemporary Asia (p. 181).

Reilly correctly notes that ethnic diversity is not, in itself, sufficient to generate ethnic conflict. Indeed, he has argued elsewhere (“Democracy, Ethnic Fragmentation, and Internal Conflict,” International Security 25 [no. 3, 2000: 162–185]) that high levels of ethnic diversity can actually improve the prospects for sustaining democracy. What may be more troublesome is the existence of one or two large ethnic groups where one community is of sufficient size to credibly dominate other communities. In these bipolar cases, political contestation can assume a zero-sum character, converting even the simplest political issues into statements about who “owns” the state. Both Fiji and Sri Lanka—the cases addressed by Susanna Trnka and Asoka Bandarage—exemplify the terrible potential for ethnic bipolarism to hobble democratic institution building. Fiji, in particular, is often advanced as a critical case when talking about the limits and opportunities for electoral system design as a tool for conflict management. Both Trnka and Bandarage develop arguments that rather forcefully challenge sanguine accounts concerning the conflict-mitigating potential of electoral democracy.

In a classic text, Elaine Scarry (The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 1985) argues that the experiences of pain and suffering are unique because they fall outside the purview of the human ability to communicate, rendering political expressions of them hopelessly inert. While it is perhaps true that many human experiences are only partially expressible through human tools of language, it bears emphasizing that postconflict states must at least try to give some form to the pitiable experiences of citizens, especially if we take the democracy-building enterprise and its normative implications seriously. This is precisely the problem addressed by Trnka. Her State of Suffering is an excellent book that builds on ideas advanced by Scarry and Hannah Arendt to call into question the very capacity of democratic reform to address the otherwise noncommunicable realities of victimization. Indeed, a core contention in her work is that the tendency of majorities to minimize the experience of minority victimization almost necessarily limits the ability of electoral reform to fully capture the ways that memory, both individual and collective, structure power relations in ethnically divided societies.

Focusing on the experiences of Fiji's Indo-Fijian community in the wake of the overthrow of Mahendra Chaudry's National Labor Party government, Trnka's book is a powerful reminder of the real-world implications of our theoretical musings on electoral system design. Indeed, it should be required reading for anyone seeking to build democracy in contexts where ethnic hierarchies and mythologies privilege one community over another. A core dilemma of electoral engineering is that it is only capable of addressing the purely mechanical dimension of formal political choice, a limitation that most scholars of electoral design, to their credit, fully concede. That said, while formal institutions can often help to compel a degree of interethnic cooperation, it is perhaps naive to assume that formal electoral rules will generate the immediate benefits that policymakers assume. In fact, in biopolar cases they may do more harm than good.

In Fiji, the limits of democratic institutions are most strongly felt in the persistence of myths of indigenous privilege advanced by many Fijian elites. The concept of the taukei, a word meaning “true landowner,” is attached to an array of informal social practices in such a way as to render any conceivable political system not dominated by the Fijian elite as totally illegitimate. In light of such ethnic myths, it is perhaps not surprising that Fiji has experienced two violent overthrows of elected governments perceived as being dominated by Indo-Fijians. For Trnka, one of the major dilemmas is that our theoretical treatments tend to focus on how we “fix” electoral systems to limit such outcomes in the future, instead of addressing the ways that the delegitimization of victim's experiences fundamentally alters the likelihood that marginalized ethnic communities can credibly act as participants in future democratic politics.

Bandarage's book, The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka, reflects many of these lessons, particularly now that the Tamil insurgency has ostensibly been defeated and the state must proceed with a normalization of politics. While Sri Lanka is often characterized as a country where ethnic tensions were successfully managed until the 1970s and 1980s, Bandarage unpacks the political goals and strategies of a broad array of Tamil and Sinhalese elites over time to demonstrate that the emergence of violent secessionism should not have come as a surprise. The deployment of ethnically exclusivist claims occurred relatively quickly in the period immediately preceding independence from Britain, although the key goals of ethnic elites differed. Bandarage particularly notes that Tamil elites faced a pressing dilemma in terms of the potential loss of both interethnic advantages over the Sinhala-speaking majority, on the one hand, and the loss of intraethnic advantages over lower-caste Tamils, on the other (p. 38). In the face of this problem, Tamil elites tended to pursue a rather extreme set of ostensibly divergent goals, preferring either an electoral system that would grossly overrepresent Tamil interests in the future independent government (the so-called balanced-representation plan that would give the Tamil minority numerical parity with the Sinhalese majority in the legislature) or, barring such a concession, forestalling independence from Britain indefinitely so as to protect their vested interests.

The Sinhalese population was equally internally divided. Bandarage observes that Sinhalese elites were particularly concerned about the inclusion of recent Tamil immigrants from India on national voter rolls, fearing that they would either electorally align with their indigenous kin or split the Sinhalese vote by drawing support from the emerging Sinhalese labor union movement. In both cases, ethnic elites deployed ethnic fears as a means of mobilizing voter support. Of special significance, the Sinhalese sought to unify their ethnic constituency through the introduction of mythologies of ethnic indigenousness, given form in the swabhasha movement, which demanded the promotion of the citizenry's “own language.” Given that an overwhelming number of civil service and professional positions were controlled by the Tamil-speaking minority, it became immediately clear that Sinhalese claims of indigenous privilege assumed an economic, as well as a nationalist, dimension.

The emergence of such ethnic myths severely impairs the ability of policymakers to induce interethnic cooperation through the use of electoral design. Put simply, for a significant number of majority elites, the prospect of a nonindigenous party or leader assuming political control is so unpalatable as to make conflict preferable. This is where Reilly's analysis becomes all the more intriguing. At root, his argument suggests that Asian institution builders are willing to forgo highly inclusive electoral systems in favor of models that can generate stability and, presumably, limit the types of outbidding that characterize politics in Fiji and Sri Lanka.

Is this possible? Fiji's 1997 constitution was widely hailed as a document intended to foster intra-ethnic cooperation through the use of electoral rules associated with centripetalism. This worked quite well in some ways. Former Fijian coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka and Indian politician Jai Ram Reddy forged a credible preelectoral coalition, suggesting that the system did produce some incentives for ethnic elites to reach across communal divides. All of this proved rather academic, however, when the Rabuka-Reddy coalition was wholly decimated at the polls and an Indo-Fijian party was swept into office. Less than a year later, this government would be overthrown in a civilian putsch whose leaders echoed the exclusivist claims of the taukei and turned a blind eye to the heinous violations documented by Trnka.

Fiji's persistent troubles have provided a stage for some important discussions about the nature and potential of electoral design as a tool for conflict mitigation, but several dynamics tend to be swept under the rug. First, as both Trnka and Bandarage imply, electoral democracy is unlikely to generate incentives for peace if the majority of members of at least one ethnic group truly believe that they are the only community with the right to rule. Such myths of ethnic election are incredibly powerful and can turn virtually any election, and especially highly competitive elections, into a crucible for extremism. Secondly, and to the credit of those espousing centripetalist arguments, Fiji's 1997 constitution is less a study in the limitations of the “alternative vote” and more a study of how marginal changes to electoral systems can serve to utterly denude any of the potential incentives for ethnic cooperation. In Fiji, this included the retention of communal seats for specific ethnic communities (a very anticentripetalist idea) and constitutional provisions that guaranteed any party earning at least 10% of the vote a position in the government, thus ensuring that smaller extremist parties had a legitimate chance of either heading up the opposition or perhaps even controlling ministerial portfolios. This suggests that however well intentioned, ethnic elites with a hand in the process of electoral system design will still try to “tinker” with the new rules to insulate their position ex ante. While this is understandable, it may well be the case that it undermines any effort to make democracy work in bipolar states.

Taken together, the three books tend to confirm the perception that bipolar states are likely to experience a higher degree of political instability than other types of diverse societies. Consistent with some of the core themes advanced by Reilly, it is scarcely surprising that countries such as Papua New Guinea and Tanzania —two states with immense ethno-linguistic diversity—have forged relatively peaceful democracies using electoral systems with highly majoritarian characteristics, while states like Fiji and Sri Lanka have roundly failed to reduce ethnic tensions through democratic institutions, where ethnic chauvinism has tended to increase most demonstrably during tight electoral contests (such as Fiji's 1977 elections when Fijian politician Sakeasi Butadroka demanded that all Indo-Fijians be repatriated to India). As Bandarage's study of Sri Lanka so amply demonstrates, the myriad opportunities for extremist action are enabled not merely by mistrust but also by the machinations of elites within particular ethnic communities. Echoing a point made with some force by Reilly, Bandarage emphasizes the complex web of incentives that compel ethnic elites to craft their more strident claims along purely exclusivist lines.

Beyond this, the “conversation” among the three books reflects the perpetual tensions between the illiberal demands generated by persistent myths of ethnic hierarchy, on the one hand, and the need for democracies to incorporate the full array of citizen preferences and experiences, on the other. As Trnka's analysis so ably suggests, such democratic incorporation is very difficult to accomplish in the immediate wake of violent ethnic upheavals. We are thus compelled to ask not merely “how” to build democracy but, perhaps more significantly, whether and why we should attempt this, and to what particular ends, in severely divided societies?