The administration of local governance is carried out in three main divisions. The largest of these are départements, which are divided into arrondissements and, further, into communes. The effectiveness of an arrondissement’s administration varies considerably with its location; the closer it is to the département capital and the more urban it is,...

The judiciary consists of four levels: the Court of Cassation (the highest court), courts of appeal, civil courts, and magistrate’s courts. Judges of the Court of Cassation are appointed by the president to 10-year terms. The Haitian legal system is nominally based on the Napoleonic Code, modified by legislation enacted during François Duvalier’s p...

Politically and socially, Haiti seems to be always in a state of transition. Although democracy is desired by many, for a long time the political climate has been shaped by a key result of Haiti’s bloody independence war: the largely mulatto elite who retreated to congested urban areas, took over the reins of government, and eventually left the rural areas to be divided among a scattered black farming population in the interior. The peasantry came to regard the government as having little relevance to their lives, an attitude that has persisted to the present day. As a result, most people believe that the formal political organization of Haiti exists primarily on paper. Rural Haitians today feel the irrelevance of a government that has been unable to bring them security, health care, clean water, and a workable transportation system. Much of the population boycotts official elections, which are considered to be corrupt.

Political parties were banned in the early years of François Duvalier’s presidency, but in the early 1960s the first of a number of official Duvalierist parties was established. Several opposition groups took shape in the following decades but were subject to frequent repression. After the end of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s regime in 1986, a large number of political parties formed. One of the major parties in the 1990s was the Lavalas Political Organization (French: Organisation Politique Lavalas [OPL]), founded in 1991 and led by Pres. Jea…