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A vote for what?
December 13, 2000
By Denis Solomon
WHEN this column appears, about half the country will probably be rejoicing (or at least breathing a sigh of temporary relief) and the other half will be lamenting, and/or crying foul.
Of course, there is also the possibility of a repeat of 1995, in which case there will be neither relief nor triumph, but apprehension, and much more of it than last time, as the fundamental deficiency of our system sinks in.
But whatever the outcome, anybody who reflects on what he or she has really done by casting a vote will realise that, in effect, he/she has done nothing.
Each individual voter tends to think that he or she has either elected or failed to elect a government of his/her preference. But when you vote, you do not elect a government. All you do is contribute to the election of one candidate for the House of Representatives in one constituency. Your vote has no effect whatsoever on what happens in the other constituencies.
Take this to its logical conclusion, and what do you find? That your candidate may have won by an enormous majority, and all his party colleagues have lost by a single vote each. Another party will therefore have an overwhelming majority in Parliament and form the government, despite having a minority, even a small minority, of the popular vote.
Conversely, your candidate may be one of those who lose by a single vote. In that case, any exultation at seeing “your” party in government will be completely unjustified, for what will you have done to put it there?
Overall, these are improbable but not impossible scenarios. After all, the party that ended up in government in 1995 had a minority of the popular vote.
But what I am concerned with here is the individual's voting power. In Trinidad and Tobago people go out to vote for a government, and are usually convinced that they are doing so. But that is not the fact. It is not even the theory. The theory is that we elect a Parliament, and the party configuration of the resulting Parliament determines the government.
Unfortunately, the reality is that we do not even vote for a Parliament, for in Trinidad and Tobago, once the government is formed, it completely dominates the Parliament. That is why voting in Trinidad and Tobago requires a considerable degree of self-delusion. If our Parliament had any genuine existence as the deliberative forum of the nation, then the representative work of each member, and his/her collaboration with other like-minded members, would have a value for the individual constituent independent of whether that representative was on the government or the opposition benches, or an independent.
Furthermore, the member would have a continuing influence on the processes of government. Then the voter might be able to consider that even if he/she had not elected a government, he/she would at least have some ongoing influence on it, and his/her interests would be served both in the process of legislation and in its application.
In our Mickey-mouse imitation of Westminster, that does not happen. Even the Westminster Parliament on which ours is supposedly modeled has the same deficiencies, albeit in a lesser degree. There are areas in Britain, most notably in Scotland, where for years voters felt themselves disenfranchised. These areas are solidly Labour, and during the period of successive Tory governments the majority of their inhabitants became increasingly frustrated. This contributed to the growth of secessionist feeling and a rise in support for the Scottish National Party, to which Westminster reacted with the creation of a Scottish Assembly.
In our case, the reasons for the inadequacy of Parliament are few and simple. Messianic political culture. Ignorance. Race; or rather, at critical moments, reversion to primal loyalties.
Obviously the system must be changed. But it is a Catch-22 situation. To change the system we must change ourselves, and if we change ourselves the need to change the system will no longer be imperative. But it is easier to focus on a structure than on our own character. We must work to change the system in the hope that it will then change us—or at least that in the process of changing it we will become different from what we are.
If the voter is to feel that his/her vote counts in the selection of a government, the solution could not be simpler. Separate the government (the executive) from Parliament (the legislature) and vote for each separately. After all, most of the countries of the world are organised that way. Furthermore, there is something fundamentally appealing to people's minds in the idea of directly electing whoever is to manage their affairs, with no intermediate machinery to confuse the process. Even the British have begun to move in that direction, with the direct election of the Mayor of London. With the monarchy becoming less and less popular, who knows—the system may spread to the central government, and Britain will be a real republic before we are.
Which brings up the question of reality versus appearance. There is a difference between a European and an American-style republic. Only the second really deserves the name. In European terms, Britain might be described as a hereditary republic; Germany, France and Italy as non-hereditary constitutional monarchies. In other words, they are democracies that have evolved from monarchies, all of them retaining Heads of State who to one degree or another share power with the executive. The United States Constitution, on the other hand, dispenses specifically with any trace of monarchy, and places sovereignty squarely in the hands of the people by combining the offices of Head of State and Head of Government in one directly elected individual.
Yes, I know that the US President is elected, in theory, by an Electoral College reflecting the voting patterns in the States. (The present Gore-Bush deadlock may seem to be the result of that, but it is not. It is the result of shortcomings in the balloting machinery). But the United States is a federation, in which the parts pre-dated the whole; we are not.
Once separated from the executive, the legislature would no longer be simply a battleground for the next election. It would of course need improvements to enable it to be a proper check on the executive and to enhance the quality of its legislative work. The two main steps to achieving this would be to enlarge both Houses and remove the government majority from the Senate.
To my mind, this would be sufficient, in the long run, to counteract ethnic voting. In the present set-up no single vote can ensure an ethnic government any more than it can ensure anything else. Ethnic voting contributes to ethnic government only so long as people in different constituencies are prepared to ignore plan in favour of clan in their hope for ethnic control of the country. To what happens afterwards, they give no thought. Once people realised the real strengths and limitations of their voting power, ethnicity would dropout of the equation.
There are those who say some form of proportional representation is necessary before this happens. I disagree. Far from eliminating ethnicity as an electoral factor, PR would institutionalise it. Besides, there are so many different forms of PR that the results would be totally unpredictable. We can do without that can of worms.
Copyright © Denis Solomon
