The Resilience of Legislature in Fiji

This thesis examines the factors that contribute to the resilience of the institution of the legislature in emerging democracies. Although an institutionalized legislature is a defining attribute of all established democracies, the vast literature on democratization pays scant attention to this key institution in emerging democracies. Apart from a few exceptions, most literature on legislatures is based on the established democracies, particularly the United States and Europe. Only a handful of scholars concentrate on the legislatures in new democracies, who generally emphasise their failures rather than their strengths in promoting democracy in those countries. This has resulted in a gap in the literature on legislatures between the established and emerging democracies. This thesis attempts to address this gap in the literature on legislatures in emerging democracies by taking Fiji's legislature as a case study, a country that has had almost no study based on its legislature.

Fiji is an example of a multi-ethnic society with an instructive track-record of incomplete or interrupted democratization. It has established and lost parliamentary regimes on a regular basis since gaining independence in 1970, thereby providing political scientists with a valuable track record of the repeated rise and fall of parliamentary institutions. Like other institutions in Fiji, the institution of the legislature has faced numerous challenges via extra-parliamentary interventions, notably coups. Notwithstanding those challenges, Fiji's legislature managed to 'bounce back' after the coups in 1987 and 2000 and will presumably return in 2014, eight years after the 2006 military coup. Amazingly, the dominant Fiji politics literature has paid almost no attention to the 'resilience' of this institution but instead has largely concentrated on its fall.

This thesis accepts the notion that democratic consolidation in Fiji has largely been shallow, but it claims that analysts have ignored the positive factors that have supported the continuation of various democratic institutions, such as the institution of the legislature. Hence this thesis turns the usual research question asked about Fiji - why has Fiji had so many coups - and asks why a working democratic legislature has been the default position of Fiji politics since independence despite repeated interruptions to the democratic process. The thesis proposes and examines three key factors that explain the resilience of the legislature in Fiji: the prevalence of civil society organizations, the political parties and the international community. Based on this proposition, this thesis argues that although the legislature is not a fully institutionalized institution in Fiji, its resilience in the face of coups and other interpolations is due to the influence of these three factors. It further argues that the emergence and the sustainability of a future legislature in Fiji can be best understood from this perspective.

Overall, this thesis contributes towards the democratization literature in three significant ways. Firstly, it broadens the scope of the Fiji politics literature by incorporating an important but an overlooked institution of democracy by focusing on the factors that support its resilience and not those that inhibit its survival. By doing this, it contributes to the debate over the future of democracy in Fiji by teasing out the lessons from the Fiji case as well as from other selected comparative cases from sub-Saharan Africa. Secondly, the lessons from this thesis will have wider practical implications for democracy promotion in Fiji and other countries with similar problems, especially in relation to the contributions by the civil society organizations, political parties and the international community. Thirdly, and most importantly, the analysis from this thesis will have wider theoretical implications for the contribution of the institution of the legislature towards democratization, especially in relation to democratic consolidation in emerging democracies.