Political Ideology in Vanuatu

Research team

Guy Alexander Lavender Forsyth
glav713@aucklanduni.ac.nz
Twitter: @GuyForsyth5
UoA website: https://profiles.auckland.ac.nz/glav713

Quentin Atkinson
q.atkinson@auckland.ac.nz

PhD project abstract

Political ideology is a topic of growing interest for psychologists and social scientists across the world. Many researchers make claims about universal dimensions of political ideology, but current research is limited to countries with industrialised economies and centralised political systems. Vanuatu’s context is highly different from Western nations and other economically developing countries. It is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world, and is governed through the combined efforts of a national government alongside strong non-state “kastom” institutions. Working with the University of the South Pacific in Vanuatu, we conducted an online survey to measure attitudes towards a large number of political and social issues, which we identified through secondary research of Vanuatu’s history and current affairs. We then used exploratory statistical analyses to recover the dimensionality of ideology. We found three particularly important dimensions: one with issues such as censorship and punishment, one with issues like addressing inequality and developing the economy, and one with issues about women’s role in society. These dimensions predict support for different political parties and are predicted by different pieces of demographic information. To our knowledge, this represents the first application of the techniques of quantitative political psychology in Vanuatu and provides the groundwork for further research of people’s attitudes towards the issues that define Vanuatu’s political landscape.

Publication

A Brief History of Political Instability in Vanuatu
Anthropological Forum (Taylor & Francis), published May 2024

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00664677.2024.2346190

Abstract

Vanuatu has largely avoided the political violence seen elsewhere in Melanesia in the recent past. It has a small but successful tourist economy, based on its selling point as a tropical paradise. It has powerful cultural resources, in the form of Christianity and kastom, to bind its people together with a sense of belonging from a shared past and hope for a shared future. Vanuatu also has a well-earnt reputation for political fragmentation and instability, a topic which can raise strong emotions both inside Vanuatu and out. Our brief history of political instability in Vanuatu aims to put the present political situation into broader perspective by tracing different elements of instability over time. Our approach is informed primarily by the historical and ethnographic record itself and, rather than focusing narrowly on the splits and intrigues of political parties, we try to provide the broader sociocultural context from which Vanuatu’s party politics emerged and that which it operates within. We thereby attempt to highlight the interconnections that exist between different forms of instability, political, religious, cultural, and otherwise.