Support Village Voice News With a Donation of Your Choice.
Claiming that it was government’s property, a few days ago the Peoples’ Progressive Party administration cunningly dismantled the Peoples’ National Congress Lethem’s office that had been in its possession of for some 50 years! While such obvious abuse needs to be consistently challenged, the PPP no longer surprises me for they are firmly on the road toward political/ethnic dominance. Indeed, we were here before, in about 2011, when the PPP unleashed myriad dog-whistles about the PNC being finished and sought to use similar highhanded tactics to suppress and harvest PNC votes. The PPP knows that in our ethnic context it has not and will not lose much political support as a result of our moralizing about its wickedness, incompetence, corruption, etc. Indeed, in this ‘One Guyana’ in which ethnic voting and elections manipulations are rife, the road to dominance dictates that the PPP’s best hope is to try and cajole PNC voters and maintain an electorally strategic hold on the state.
The main task of government, that of growing and managing a cohesive and prosperous society, is not even on the PPP’s radar, and given the laxity of the present political system, this will not change in a timely manner, so the systems must be adjusted to compel improved democratic norms.
Unfortunately, Guyana’s national proportional representation electoral system is arguably one of the most autocratic in the world. It is based on an unranked closed list system in which members of parliament cannot cross the floor, small parties find it difficult to participate and individual representation is excluded. I suspect that it is this backwardness that has led to intermittent demands for the country to revert to its colonial first-past-the-post electoral system with its direct constituency representation, and to external suggestions that the system be radically reformed.
Generally, the population appears to support the idea that every vote should have meaning: the problem is that Guyana’s type of list PR system restricts the capacity of the electorate to chose and generally hold their elected parliamentary representatives accountable. At present, 25 of the 65 members of the National Assembly are regional constituency representatives. According to Guyana’s Constitution, constituency seats can be increased to no more than half of the elected members of the National Assembly and sufficient list seats must be available to maintain national proportionality between the votes and seats a party wins at a national election. This can be constitutionally adjusted, for it only requires about 25% of the Assembly seats to maintain proportionality and equitably distributed, the remaining 50 seats could adequately be established as directly elected constituencies each representing on average about 16,000 persons. One must also consider the present situation where it is usually challenging for small parties to have to be represented in a number of geographical regions and individuals cannot participate.
Then there is the matter of allowing political parties, not the voters in their various constituencies, to present candidates for national elections. Generally, it is said that list PR makes it more likely that the representatives of minority groups will be elected. When, as in Guyana, voting behaviour is deeply ethnically divided, the list system can help to ensure that minority groups are represented in the legislature because parties can construct a list that reflects the ethnic tapestry without fearing a loss of support.
List systems may be open, closed or free depending upon the degree of choice given to the voters to nominate and vote for persons on the list. The major disadvantage of the list PR system is the weak links it establishes between the elected representative and their constituents, and when the entire population is a single constituency, the direct link between the voters and their representatives is almost totally destroyed.
Unfortunately, Guyana’s closed list system is among the least democratic forms of list systems. Voters do not have a say about who is on the list, the order in which individuals are chosen from the list as members of parliament and have only a choice of parties at national elections. Candidates are chosen and placed in a position on the list by the senior party leadership and thus are usually under the direction of that leadership and are most likely to put its interest above that of the electorate. Guyana has gone two steps further down the autocratic road.
‘In an unusual twist to the list PR system, in Guyana parties publish their list of candidates not ranked but simply ordered alphabetically. This allows party leaders even more scope to reward loyalty and punish independence because seats are only allocated to individuals once the result of the vote is known’ (https://aceproject.org/ace-
Open and free list PR systems can be much more liberal. Voters can indicate not only the party but their favoured candidate within the given party. The vote for a candidate and/or a party is usually optional but in some jurisdictions voters must vote for candidates and the number of seats received by each party is determined by the total number of votes gained by its candidates, and the order in which the party’s candidates gains seats is determined by the number of individual votes they receive. In free list systems electors may have as many votes as there are seats to be filled and can distribute their votes to candidates either within a single party list or across several party lists. The capacity to vote for more than one candidate across different party lists or to cast more than one vote for a single candidate gives the voter an additional measure of control.
The point is that a more accountable PR system that gives constituencies more control over their representatives can be configured while maintaining the proportionality between votes and seats received at a national election. This will not prevent political parties from having significant influence over what is taking place at the local level but their present iron grip can be significantly reduced if the electorate is so empowered. Unfortunately, the road to ethnic/political dominance does not allow for the possibility of such diverse representation.
