General Election 2022: Busy, but no more than usual

Candidates and competition in the 2022 election in Papua New Guinea

By TERENCE WOOD
KEEPING track of even the basics in Papua New Guinea’s General Election 2022 (GE22) has been difficult.
With polling already underway, the exact number of candidates contesting is still, it appears, unknown.
Newspapers reported numbers in May and June, but these were wrong.
Finally, late last week what appeared to be a comprehensive count of candidates was released.
Even this was not entirely accurate: it is based on a list that includes candidates who have withdrawn from competition, as well as others (including one sitting member) who have recently passed away (none under suspicious circumstances).
And it is probably prone to change – there may still be legal rulings that affect the final numbers.
Still, the current list is as good as we are going to get. Here is what the numbers have to say so far.
Candidate numbers are up, but not by many.
Correcting for the deaths and withdrawals that I know about, 3,619 candidates appear to be contesting in GE22.

The final number could change, but only by a handful.
This is the highest number of candidates ever to have ever stood in a GE in Papua New Guinea (PNG).
The increase from 2017, as the chart below shows, is nearly 9 per cent.
That sounds significant, but thanks to the decision to increase the number of seats in 2022, there are also seven more electorates.
And the average number of candidates per electorate has increased by only 0.7 candidates.
GE22 in PNG will be busy, but for the country as a whole, no more so than usual.
Although the increase in the overall number of candidates is modest, there is a massive variation between electorates.
One of the most startling aspects of electoral competition in PNG is just how much it varies around the country.
It varies in many ways, including levels of cheating and violence, but one of the most basic forms of variation is the number of candidates standing.
Some competitions are crowded, others remarkably quiet.
In the busiest electorate – Moresby North-East – 76 candidates are standing.
This is a record for PNG.
It is also a far cry from the Bougainville electorate, where only six candidates are contesting in GE22.
Explaining just why some electorates have so many candidates and others so few is not easy: if you are thinking it is a tale of crowded urban electorates versus peaceful rural ones (which is largely the case in Solomon Islands, for example), you are wrong.
Right next to bustling Moresby North-East, is Moresby South, where only eight candidates have thrown their hats into the ring.
It is also not entirely a story of regional differences.
As you can see in the next chart, which shows the average number of candidates per region, as well as candidate numbers in the busiest and quietest seats, there are clearly fewer candidates per electorate in the Islands Region, but the variation between the other regions is a lot less than within them.
When it comes to candidate numbers, competition is different in the Islands but less so between other regions.
Nor is it a clear-cut story of size and population.
The average number of candidates in the large, populous provincial seats is very slightly less than in the smaller open seats.
(There was also no correlation between candidate numbers and votes cast in 2017.)

Part of the explanation, we think, for varying candidate numbers, is that more candidates enter the field when they think their chances of winning are higher.
You can see this in the impact of incumbency on candidate numbers: incumbents have an advantage in elections in PNG – they are more likely to win than anyone else (even if they are still not that likely to win in an absolute sense).
But some electorates, either because they are new as a product of redistricting or because their sitting member died recently, do not have incumbents.
And in GE22, on average fewer candidates are standing in electorates without incumbents.
The presence of an incumbent still does not explain all of the variation in candidate numbers.
There is an incumbent in Moresby North-East after all.
But weaker incumbents also usually boost candidate numbers. For whatever reason, many people fancy their chances against the sitting member in Moresby North-East in GE22.
Finally, unfortunately, the publicly available data does not have details on gender.
However, reported numbers suggest women will comprise about 4.6 per cent of total candidates.
If correct, this is a slight fall from 2017 (5.4 per cent). But let us see first: a variety of different women candidate numbers have been bandied about over recent months, each apparently final, only to subsequently change.
Many remains to be seen in GE22: how badly procedural problems will blight the electoral process, who will win, who will lose. But thus far, in terms of candidate numbers at least, it is shaping up to be a typical election.
Typical in PNG means variety though.
Right now PNG is a single country struggling to hold a general election.
Yet within the overall process, there are 118 seats up for grabs, each with very different dynamics.

Disclosure: This research was undertaken with the support of the ANU-UPNG partnership, an initiative of the PNG-Australia partnership, with funding from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The views represent those of the author only.
This article appeared first on Devpolicy Blog (devpolicy.org), from the Development Policy Centre at The Australian National University.

Terence Wood is a Research Fellow at the Development Policy Centre. His research focuses on political governance in Western Melanesia, and Australian and New Zealand aid.