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Politics and democracy
How much does it cost to run for parliament in the Maldives? Candidates and experts interviewed for the Westminster Foundation for Democracy’s Cost of Politics study estimated that a successful parliamentary campaign in the Maldives costs on average MVR 2–5 million, with some races costing as much as MVR 15 million. How much does a vote cost in the Maldives? Interviews across the Westminster Foundation for Democracy’s Cost of Politics study consistently found a baseline rate of around MVR 5,000 for a vote in Maldivian elections, in both Malé and the atolls. What do Maldivian election campaigns spend money on? Between 75% and 90% of Maldivian parliamentary campaign budgets are allocated to vote-buying, with the remainder covering travel, events, materials, volunteers, and election-day operations, according to the Westminster Foundation for Democracy’s Cost of Politics study. Why do Maldivian election candidates promise government jobs? Jobs in state-owned enterprises are one of the most common ways Maldivian candidates secure votes, with one candidate in the Westminster Foundation for Democracy’s Cost of Politics study estimating that 40 to 50, and sometimes up to 100, SOE positions are promised per constituency during an election. How many women are in the Maldives parliament? Just three of the 93 members of the Maldives parliament elected in 2024 are women, even though a record 43 women ran – 11.6% of all candidates.
Social policy and education
Marriage, divorce, and family
What is the divorce rate in the Maldives? The Maldives had an estimated 8.8 divorces per 1,000 people in 2024, one of the highest divorce rates in the world, against a global rate of around 1.6 per 1,000. Why is the divorce rate in the Maldives so high? Maldivian research points to a recurring set of pressures behind the country’s high divorce rate: congested housing, financial stress, gendered expectations of marital roles, infidelity, mental health strain, substance abuse, weak support systems, and limited preparation at the point of marriage. What is the cycle of vulnerability in Maldivian family life? The cycle of vulnerability describes how harm accumulates across the stages of family life in the Maldives – childhood, the transition to marriage, marriage itself, separation, and the years after divorce – and how children raised in unstable homes carry that harm into their own marriages a generation later. What protects women and children when marriages break down? Across Public Policy Lab’s interviews with women who had been through marital difficulty, what most consistently protected children and women was a woman’s own income paired with control over how it reached her, education that opened both work and judgment, family and community willing to back her without conditions, and an institutional response when she asked for help. Why do women stay in difficult marriages in the Maldives? In Public Policy Lab’s research with women who had been through marital difficulty, asking for help was blocked by shame, by fear of losing housing or children, and by not knowing where help could be found – while social pressure to stay in the marriage was constant. How does divorce affect women in the Maldives? The economic consequences of divorce in the Maldives land mostly on women: men generally keep their employment and income, while women typically take primary childcare, face weakly enforced child support with payment delays of eight months or more typical, and in Malé often face housing insecurity. How does divorce affect children in the Maldives? Children’s vulnerability tracked their mothers’ through every stage of family breakdown in Public Policy Lab’s research: children witnessed violence at home, lived with chronic stress and disrupted routines, lost contact with a parent through absence or conflict, were used in custody disputes, and faced sudden drops in living standards. What is a marriage agreement in the Maldives? A marriage agreement is a contract a couple completes before marrying that sets out finances, work and education plans, family planning, domestic responsibilities, and how disputes will be resolved – and only 13 were registered in the entire Maldives between 2019 and 2025. What is the single parent allowance in the Maldives? The Maldives’ single parent allowance pays MVR 3,000 per eligible child per month – raised from MVR 1,000 in January 2026 – with a cap of MVR 12,000 for five or more children. Where can domestic violence victims get help in the Maldives? Case support for women experiencing family violence in the Maldives runs through Family and Children’s Service Centres in every atoll, which have on-call social workers for first response, alongside civil protection orders available through the Family Court and Magistrate Courts.
Policy research in the Maldives
AI in knowledge work
What is the intent deficit in AI? The intent deficit is the gap between what a language model can produce when it is explicitly directed and what it delivers by default: output that matches the surface form of competent professional work while missing the reasoning that would justify the specific choices for the specific audience, purpose, and context. The term was introduced by Public Policy Lab in a 2026 four-part series on AI in knowledge work. What are the six ways AI outputs fail in knowledge work? Public Policy Lab’s research on AI in knowledge work names six recurring failure modes: register inheritance, over-literal instruction-latching, evidence substitution by evaluative language, plausible citation, audience-unaware design, and content loss during format conversion. All six share one cause: a decision made without active reasoning from purpose, audience, or context. Why doesn’t prompt engineering fix AI output quality? Prompt engineering techniques are one-time conditioning interventions at the start of a session, and they act through the same mechanism as any other content in the context window: placing constraints in context. That mechanism is subject to attention-weight decay as a session fills, so a well-written prompt improves starting conditions without maintaining them, which is exactly where the intent deficit appears. What is isomorphic mimicry, and how does it apply to AI? Isomorphic mimicry is a term from state capability research, developed by Andrews, Pritchett, and Woolcock, for governments that adopt the institutional forms of capable states, the organisational charts, procedures, and named reform policies, without developing the underlying function those forms require. Public Policy Lab’s research argues that language models exhibit the same pattern in knowledge work: producing the surface form of competent practice without the reasoning from function that would make the form work. Can AI tools build professional judgement, or only substitute for it? The evidence so far points the wrong way: a 2025 study of high school mathematics in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that generative AI without guardrails harmed learning once the AI was removed. Public Policy Lab argues that a scaffold designed to externalise expert reasoning during real work, visibly and in a form the practitioner must engage with rather than receive, could build judgement instead of replacing it. This is a proposition with a proposed evaluation design, not a demonstrated result.