Party Formation Rules in the Asia-Pacific.

Comparative scholarship suggests that democracy in ethnically-diverse societies is likely to be fostered by the development of broad-based, aggregative and multi-ethnic political parties, rather than fragmented, personalised or ethnically-based party systems. However surprisingly little attention has been given to how party fragmentation can be addressed or how broad-based parties can be sustained, despite institutional experiments in conflict prone societies including Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Fiji and Papua New Guinea aimed at influencing party system development. Drawing on these various cases, this paper identifies four strategies of political engineering that have been used to promote broad-based, cross-regional or multi-ethnic political parties in new democracies around the world. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]