Profiling Politicians in Solomon Islands: Professionalisation of a Political Elite?

Abstract

This article examines the key attributes of members of parliament from Solomon Islands. Drawing on bio-data on MPs, interviews and election results, the authors’ findings show that politicians are getting older, have atypical education levels and are from an increasingly diverse range of occupational backgrounds. The authors also find that, while Solomon Islands MPs are a political elite of sorts, they remain tightly tied to their communities. They consider the implications of these findings for research on developmental leadership, political professionalisation and elite theory. They argue that none of these three literatures adequately captures the political trajectories of politicians in Solomon Islands but that this case study contributes to research in these areas.

本文探讨了所罗门群岛议会成员的一些重要属性。作者根据对议员们传记、访谈和选举结果等资料的研究，发现政治家年龄越来越大，教育水平不太典型，职业背景愈益多样。作者同时发现，所罗门群岛议员虽属政治精英，但与各自的社群都保持紧密的联系。作者讨论了这些发现对于发展型领导人、政治职业化及精英理论所具有的意义。作者指出，这三方方面的文献都未能捕捉到所罗门群岛政治家的政治轨迹，而本研究却对此有所贡献。

Keywords:

• developmental leadership
• elites
• politicians
• professionalisation
• Solomon Islands

Notes

¹This figure was calculated by comparing party affiliations as reported by candidates when registering to stand in the election with party affiliations as reported in the media immediately following the elections.

²Because we are working on sample data, not a population, we formally tested for the presence of an ageing trend by running an OLS regression with Age as the dependent variable and Year as the independent variable. The adjusted R² for the regression was 0.23, the regression coefficient for Year was 0.369 and the standard error was 0.037 (p < 0.05). Results suggest that it is extremely unlikely that the trend is merely the result of random sampling error.

³Because we are working on sample data, not a population, we formally tested for the presence of trends over time in tertiary education by running a multinomial logistic regression. Relative to the base category of no tertiary education, both the undergraduate and postgraduate tertiary categories had relative risk ratios commensurate with trends of increase (1.031 and 1.104 respectively). Both categories had p-values of < 0.05.

⁴Another possible explanation is that voters have, to some extent, turned away from elite candidates, favouring fellow villagers. Yet, inspection of non-tertiary-educated MPs elected in 2010 does not provide strong support for this view: several were relatively well-known businessmen, one was a casino owner, two were former militant leaders and two came from high-profile political families.

⁵This information was gathered from interviews with MPs and political actors from Choiseul, Shortlands, Guadalcanal, Isabel and Small Malaita.

⁶On this matter, we were fortunate to be able to interview political actors, local leaders and voters from this constituency.