Multitasked Office: A Constitutional Design Choice for Small States

Anna Dziedzic

Anna Dziedzic is an Honorary Fellow of Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Multitasking is a fact of life in small states, as people are called upon to perform multiple roles within and across government, business, and the community.

In some small states, multitasking is built into the constitution. Constitutional multitasking takes two different forms.

The first is combined office, whereby functions that in larger states would be held by separate officials are combined in the one office.  The Constitutions of Kiribati, Nauru, and the Marshall Islands provide an example, in which the head of state is combined with the head of government in the single office of the President. While this is a standard feature of presidential systems of government, it is a departure from the Westminster parliamentary model that these countries otherwise adopt.

The second type of multitasking is double hatting, whereby the constitution confers additional roles on an existing office.  In Kiribati, for example, the Speaker of Parliament and the Chief Justice are ex officio members of the Council of State. The Chief Justice is also the supervisor of elections and has a role in the appointment and removal of various public officials.

Multitasked office is to be distinguished from the conferral of multiple offices on one individual in the exercise of political discretion and from the accumulation of roles and functions over time. In contrast to these practices, the creation of a multitasked office is a deliberate choice in constitutional design.

This post outlines the motivations for establishing multitasked offices in the constitutions of small states and identifies some of the benefits and risks. It draws upon my chapter in Small State Constitutionalism, which explores these issues with reference to three Pacific island states: Kiribati, Nauru, and the Marshall Islands.

Motivations for Multitasking

Multitasked office is not unique to small states. However, it does respond to the distinctive circumstances of these three small states that prevailed at the time of constitution-making.  The writings and debates of those involved in making the independence Constitutions of Kiribati, Nauru, and Marshall Islands during the period of decolonisation from the late 1960s to the 1970s reveal three key motivations for multitasked office.

First, multitasked office was a response to a shortage of qualified and experienced personnel. This shortage was partly due to small population size, but also a consequence of the deliberate exclusion of Indigenous peoples from colonial government. As a result, at the time of making a constitution for independence, there was a desire to take advantage of the skills of a few to the greatest extent possible.

Second, given the limited revenue and the high cost of government in small states, multitasking was welcomed as a way to reduce the costs of maintaining more constitutional offices than were considered necessary.

Finally, multitasking was seen as a way to manage potential conflicts between eminent people in a small state. In Kiribati, for example, it was felt that a separate head of state was akin to a monarch and incompatible with its communal, egalitarian culture, itself built on the imperative to maintain harmonious social relations in a small community. In all three states, there were concerns about rivalries between the parliament and the executive, and between the head of government and the head of state. Multitasking was thus seen as a culturally appropriate means to mitigate potentially divisive competition between individuals and institutions in government.

Potential risks

Multitasked office has continued in place under the Constitutions of Kiribati, Nauru, and the Marshall Islands for over four decades, suggesting that it has been a resilient variation of the Westminster model. The experiences of these countries, however, demonstrate some of the risks that multitasked office poses to accountable government.

A significant concern is that multitasked office leads to the concentration of power in a single office. In small states, this problem may be compounded by the personalisation of politics, in which individuals accumulate power not only by virtue of their office but also by their status in other community institutions (such as chiefly titles, church organisations or business). Personalisation of politics is a mixed blessing. Connections to the community can enhance representation, participation, and relational accountability, but they also present the risk of patronage, polarisation, and unchecked power.  In this context, combining the head of state and the head of government in one office raises particular concerns. The President can extend significant influence across all three branches of government, limiting the effectiveness of two key checks on power built into Westminster systems: the vote of no confidence and judicial review by an independent court. The realisation of these dangers may be illustrated by the removal of judges in Kiribati and the decline of the rule of law in Nauru. Both are more complex stories than can be recounted here, but they demonstrate the degree of influence that the combined office of head of state and head of government can exercise over the executive, parliament, and judiciary.

The concentration of power in a multitasked office is not inevitable. Constitution makers in the Marshall Islands addressed the concern through three features of constitutional design. First, the Constitution places most significant executive powers not in the hands of the President, but in the Cabinet. Second, the power to appoint judges and senior public servants is spread across several institutions, rather than concentrated in one. Generally speaking, the formalities of appointment are performed by the President when the appointment relates to parliament; by the Speaker when the appointment relates to the executive; and by the Cabinet for judicial appointments. Further, these appointments are often made on the advice of bodies such as the Parliament, the Public Service Commission, and the Judicial Services Commission. Third, in the Marshall Islands, the Speaker of Parliament is also a combined office with significant constitutional powers, providing a counterweight to the powers of the President and Cabinet. In this, the approach was not to avoid multitasking, but to expand it so that there are many multitasked offices across all institutions of government that function as a system of checks and balances on one another.

A second risk, which arises from multitasking by way of double hatting, is conflict of interest and incompatible offices. In small states, the prevailing sense that ‘everyone knows everyone’ places a premium on independence. Double hatting is one way to take advantage of an independent office. However, conferring additional roles on independent offices, and political roles in particular, risks undermining their independence and can open the door to conflicts of interest. These issues were front and centre in the actions of Kiribati’s Council of State in 1994. In Kiribati, a Council of State, composed of the Chief Justice, together with the Speaker of Parliament and the Chair of the Public Service Commission, serves as the caretaker government.  In 1994, the Council of State faced a brief constitutional crisis when the term of the Chair of the Public Service Commission expired during the caretaker period, raising questions about the proper membership of the Council. Because the Chief Justice – Kiribati’s only permanent resident judge at the time – was himself a member of the Council, a legal challenge was not practical due to this conflict of interest. The Chief Justice’s political role in the Council of State also appears to have contributed to a loss of confidence in the Chief Justice, who was suspended by the incoming government.

Multitasked office is an innovation in constitutional design tailored to the circumstances of small states. It comes with risks that may arise in states large and small, namely the concentration of power and the undermining of judicial independence. But as the Constitution of the Marshall Islands illustrates, these risks may be countered by embracing multitasking, generating distinctive yet effective understandings of separation of powers and accountability in small states. In this way, multitasked office is one of many features of small state constitutions that can question assumptions and refine existing understandings of constitutionalism.

This blog post is part of the IACL Blog symposium Small State Constitutionalism, which presents some of the key arguments made in chapters of the newly-published edited collection: Elisabeth Perham, Maartje De Visser and Rosalind Dixon (eds) Small State Constitutionalism (Hart Publishing, 2026).

Anna Dziedzic is an Honorary Fellow of Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, Australia.