Few people who are familiar with the Guyanese political culture would have attached any substantive significance to the recent announcement that Messrs. Ramotar, Granger and Ramjattan, the respective presidential candidates for the ruling PPP/C, the PNCR and the AFC, were to have engaged in a public debate – a presidential debate, if you will – at the University of Guyana. Fewer still would have been surprised that the engagement, as it turned out, did not happen.
Setting aside the fact that such debates, while they have been mooted in recent years, have never been strongly insisted upon by either of the two major political parties, historical voting patterns in Guyana make a mockery of what presidential debates as occur during the elections season in the United States, for example, stand for. In the US those debates help voters make choices that are based on policies and to a certain extent on candidate charisma; more than that, research on voter behaviour in the US indicates that televised debates not only attract large audiences but also that voter choices can and have been influenced by voters’ perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the cases made by the debaters.
In the case of Guyana our voting patterns, historically, have not suggested that voters attach any great significance to what the candidates have to say during the campaign period. Rather, the outcomes suggest, that to an overwhelming extent, we subscribe to a less sophisticated, more cut-and-dried approach to making electoral choices. We simply vote race and by and large what the respective political parties have had to say are simply exercises in going through the motions, which, in the final analysis, counts for little as far as voter choices are concerned.
The kind of encounter that reportedly had been planned for Messrs. Ramotar, Granger and Ramjattan would, in all likelihood, have been witnessed by an audience of a few hundred mostly academics and political supporters on either side who would have gone there either for the intellectual exercise or to lend support to their candidate. Few, if any of them, would have gone there in order to help them make up their minds as to how to vote at the 2011 general elections. The point to be made here is that the culture of televised pre-elections political debates in the United States thrives on the fact that just about every citizen can witness those debates in real time and millions of them do. As far as we know there were no plans for the Ramotar/ Granger/Ramjattan debate to be screened live on state-run television which, of course, is a separate and equally important issue. After the debate, sections of the media would have reported on what was said and may even have ventured opinions on who won and who lost. Anyone who understands the significance of these debates, however, would know that the impact of receiving them live and receiving them, through second-hand media reports are entirely different things. The impact simply isn’t the same. In that sense, therefore, and even assuming that voter choices in Guyana were influenced by programmes and policies, the impact of a Ramotar/Granger/Ramjattan debate would probably still have been limited anyway.
There are, of course, those who would argue that there has been some measure of change in our political landscape and that people may well, these days, be inclined to show some level of interest in political debates in 2011. Those who say so contend, first, that we may now have arrived at a juncture where, having lived through protracted post-independence periods in office by both of the two major political parties, we are now better positioned to make objective comparisons and, indeed, informed choices at the polls. They point too to the fact that the younger generation of potential voters may be more concerned with social and economic issues than with the issue of race. It has to be said, however, that the outcomes of recent general elections provide no persuasive evidence that any of these positions are necessarily valid.
Some real change has, however, taken place in our political culture – the emergence of the AFC among other things – and that change suggests that we may, perhaps, be closer than we have ever been to embracing the choices that have to do with issues other than race. The recent intra-party contests for presidential candidates inside both the PNCR and the PPP/C – moreso in the case of the PNCR, given the available evidence – points to both a capacity and a willingness to make choices based on programmes and policies. Those contests may also have signaled the end of the protracted era of charismatic leaders, or, some might say, maximum leaders in Guyanese politics which played a significant role in the ethnic polarization that bedevils our contemporary political culture. Were it to turn out to be true that we have indeed put the era of leaders for life behind us, that, arguably, could take us closer to a condition of democratic norms and free choice as elements in our political culture.
If, however, our political culture has remained largely unchanged or is only now showing some signs of gradual change, one cannot help but wonder whether presidential debates, however efficiently they are organized and whatever the extent of public exposure to those debates, are likely to make a difference to voting patterns. Given what we know to be the objective conditions the PPP/C, particularly, would appear to have little to gain from public debates given a traditional ethnic voting pattern that gifts it a built-in numerical advantage anyway. Indeed, if anything, its political strategists might argue that by engaging its political opponents in public debates it runs the risk of having to defend policies – crime, corruption and security are some that come to mind – on which it may well be weighed and found wanting and that since those issues are likely to be belaboured on the hustings during the campaign period anyway, it would be best not to grant its opponents an additional platform on which to parade its (the PPP/C’s) weaknesses.
On the other hand, even if the PNCR would perhaps have a greater incentive to want to debate publicly with the PPP/C given the fact that in such debates incumbents often find themselves in tricky positions defending their records, if it is true that whether or not it ‘wins’ those debates is unlikely to convert into votes on polling day, then the question arises as to whether it might not be better advised to place its campaign energies elsewhere. Of course, given this equation the PNCR has probably reasoned that in the circumstances it has nothing to lose and perhaps something to gain among the non-polarized vote from engaging in public debates.
The AFC, for its part, would likely gain the most from such a debate.
Leaving all that aside, were the practice of political debates to become infused into our political culture – and even if its impact on voter choices, in the short term is minimal – that would at least bring a measure of improvement to the campaign political discourse and rival the vitriol that is usually forthcoming on the hustings for public attention. Then again, it may well be that there are sections of the electorate that are, after all, ready to allow their choices to be influenced by the programmes and policies of the political protagonists and those are far better articulated in the sober environment of political debates than in the charged and emotional atmosphere of the hustings. How does all this relate to the 2011 general elections? We can only wait and see.