Westminster in small states: comparing the Caribbean and pacific experience

ABSTRACT

Small states, and those in the Caribbean and Pacific regions in particular, are among the most stubbornly and disproportionally democratic countries in the world. And yet, they are rarely studied comparatively, despite sharing seemingly obvious similarities – aside from being small island states with developing economies they also tend to share a British colonial heritage and Westminster-inspired political institutions. This omission is all the more puzzling if we consider that the group does not conform to the standard battery of explanations developed by democratization theorists. To pave the way for further research across these two regions, this article provides a synoptic comparison of the process of democratization in Caribbean and Pacific small states. We highlight important similarities and differences that stem from the interaction between formal institutions and informal practices. We conclude by reiterating the benefits for scholars of democratization by looking at these significant yet hitherto rarely compared cases.

KEYWORDS:

• Democratization
• Westminster
• small states
• pacific
• Caribbean

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Patrick Weller, Jason Sharman, and the journal’s reviewers and editorial team for comments and helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this article. Any errors are, of course, our own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Jack Corbett is Associate Professor in Politics at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Being Political: Leadership and Democracy in the Pacific Islands (Hawaii, 2015). Wouter Veenendaal is a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. He is the author of Politics and Democracy in Microstates (Routledge, 2014).

Notes

1. As most publications in the field of comparative politics have done, we conceptualise state size on the basis of population (Crowards, 2002; Alesina & Spolaore, 2005; Anckar, 2010). In doing we so we acknowledge the endogenous limitations of this approach, including the extent to which the label ‘small’ can belittle the countries in question (Hau’ofa, 1994). In addition, most of the countries we consider here are not just small states but also island states. We will briefly consider the importance of this below but for a further discussion of why islands constitute important research categories in their own right see Baldacchino (2008).

2. In addition to these benchmarks, institutional characteristics commonly associated with the Westminster model are 1) a ceremonial head of state (usually a monarch), 2) a non-proportional electoral system, 3) an independent, non-partisan civil service, and 4) a bicameral parliament. Some but not all of these features are apparent in the countries considered here.

3. It also reveals that while there are important similarities and differences between the two areas of the world, in some instances it makes more sense to compare countries – Trinidad and Tobago and Fiji, for instance, with their shared experience of indenture – and so the article moves back and forth between these two units of analysis.

4. We adapt Rhodes et al.’s (2009) framework in our substantive discussion as it speaks to the significance of British colonial heritage as a distinct set of democratic practices rather than the nature of colonial rule which, as a determining variable, could equally be applied to French colonisation in the Pacific and Caribbean, for example.

5. The progress towards independence was mostly also stringently controlled by the colonial powers (see Ghai, 1988: 4-6 and Levine 2009 for Pacific microstates). In some microstates (e.g. St. Kitts and Nevis, Vanuatu, and Kiribati), independence was delayed due to lingering tensions between various islands, which had to be resolved before London would permit self-rule.

6. These ‘presidentialized’ Westminster systems, where a parliamentary system exists in conjunction with an executive presidency, also exists in Botswana and South Africa. In these and other polities narratives about ‘presidentialism’ and ‘Westminster’ often exist side-by-side.

7. Jewel stands for “joint endeavor for welfare, education, and liberation.”