PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

A representative parliament I 25
gerrymandering’). Or, if minorities are concentrated in a particular region,
a more favourable number of parliamentary seats can be assigned to that
region.
■ Party candidate quotas, so that in certain regions a minimum percentage of
those on a party list must be drawn from minority communities. For example,
in Singapore 14 out of 23 constituencies are Group Representation
Constituencies, with a requirement that at least one candidate in each party
team must belong to a minority.
■ Reserved seats for representatives of minority communities. This is the
most widely used method, currently employed by some 25 countries from
every region of the world. India currently reserves 79 of its 543 seats in the
Lok Sabha for scheduled castes and 41 for scheduled tribes. Mauritius
reserves 8 of its 70 seats for the ‘best losers’ representing the four constitutionally
recognised ethnic communities. Slovenia reserves one each for the
Italian and Hungarian ‘national communities’.
None of these methods is wholly uncontroversial. Minority quotas on mainstream
party lists may deprive minority communities of representation through
their own autonomous organisations, which they may prefer. On the other
hand, measures to support autonomous organisations may serve to reinforce
separate identities and militate against national unity. New Zealand’s
approach to this dilemma is to allow its Maori voters the choice of registering
on either the national electoral roll or a separate Maori roll, and to allow the
number who opt for the latter to determine the number of reserved seats in parliament.
Protecting minority rights without arousing majority resentment is,
however, a difficult issue everywhere, and solutions will always depend on the
particular circumstances of a given country. Nor should we overlook the possibility
that the communities which are marginalised in their parliamentary
representation may comprise a majority of a country’s population.
Special electoral arrangements may be necessary in post-conflict situations,
or where democracy is being restored after military intervention which has
been communally related. Such arrangements may be transitional, and subject
to some disagreement about how democracy should be understood, as this
submission from Fiji exemplifies:
In terms of representation the communal electoral system for the election
of Members of the House of Representatives has been specifically
designed to address the multi-ethnic diversity of the Fiji Islands. Given
the struggles that the Fiji Islands have had in the past with respect to
maintaining democracy, this system is at this time considered the most