It has been suggested that preferential voting systems encourage moderate candidates in polities where electoral loyalties are habitually expressed along communal lines. Only two deeply divided territories in the world – Fiji and Northern Ireland – currently use preferential voting systems...

In the first discussion paper in this two paper series, Filer and Wood (2021) derived two measures of human well-being from the 2000 national census and sought to establish the relative strength of their association with 12 geographical variables in a comparative study of the 85 partially rural...