The Organisation of American States report on the 28th November 2011 elections in Guyana. criticised our system of proportional representation and recommended that it be reformed. In last week’s article, I proposed that we should always seek the kinds of constitutional reforms that could engender cross-ethnic political cooperation and perhaps aid the fortunes of third, “non-ethnic,” parties. I also suggested that a change in the way we choose our parliamentary representatives could be one such area of reform.
The citizens of Guyana vote for a party list at both the national and regional elections. The country has 10 regional constituencies to which are allocated 25 of the 65 seats in the National Assembly. According to the constitution, parliament may extend the number of constituency seats to no more than half of the elected members of the National Assembly. The constitution also requires that these arrangements should be so structured as to ensure that the total number of seats allocated to any party in the National Assembly must, as closely as possible, match the number of votes cast for that party “thus minimizing the level of disproportionality between the percentage of votes earned by parties and the percentage of seats allocated to parties in the Assembly.”
The kinds of criticisms that the OAS report mentions are well known and can significantly affect the manner in which we govern ourselves. Perhaps the best known and most damning is that our closed list, proportional system gives the party leaderships too much control over the legislature by allowing them to decide who goes to parliament and thus how individual representatives behave. So although the system allows for regional representatives, most of these people are usually more or less unknown to their constituencies and do not have sufficient ties to them to make them accountable for their growth and development.
The tremendous power our closed list system gives to the party bureaucrats was clearly seen in the recent public controversy between Mr. Aubrey Norton and the APNU hierarchy. As you will recall, notwithstanding the enormous contributions Mr. Norton and his supporters believe he had made in mobilising support for APNU during the elections, Mr. Norton was not chosen by the party leadership to be a member of parliament and this led to some level of protest. Apparently his exclusion was based upon a principle that prevents persons from being a member of parliament for more than two terms. However, not only was Mr. Norton not told of this principle beforehand (which might have not only curtailed his participation in the elections process but, given the existing tight parliamentary majority, affected the outcome) but it has been claimed that the principle has been unevenly applied. I have warned previously about this kind of dubious appeal to principles!
In Guyana, party control was further strengthened by the passing of a rule (which incidentally was supported by both the PPP/C and the PNCR) which makes it all but impossible for a parliamentarian to cross the floor. Given the current balance in the national assembly, the PPP/C must be ruing the day it introduced that piece of legislation, the absence of which would have placed it in a better position to induce opposition members of parliament to cross to its side!
The abovementioned concerns have led to calls in the press for an open list proportional system, where parliamentarians will be chosen from party lists presented to the electorate in the order that they appear in the lists. However, my concern here is not only how to construct more constituency freedom and accountability but to point to the possibility of doing so in a fashion that will encourage cross ethnic voting and aid third parties.
There is no doubt that with certain reforms our proportional system could prove adequate to the task if, keeping in mind the need to maintain national proportionality, we establish the greatest number of constituencies in which voters are given two votes: one to choose a party and the other to choose a named candidate. There are various versions of this system, but most briefly, consider a single transferable vote multi-member constituency system, where voters can be made to compulsorily rank named candidates and the winning candidates are required to reach an electoral quota (usually arrived at by dividing the number of votes by the number of seats into which the constituency is divided). Any candidate reaching the quota is elected and the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and their votes are distributed to the remaining candidates in proportion to their next preference on the ballot papers, and this continues until all vacancies are filled. A top-up mechanism can then be utilised to establish national party proportionality.
With this kind of system that allows constituents to choose their own representative at the party constituency level, more accountability can be brought to bear and voters encouraged to choose parties outside of their ethnic preference. One theorist claims that “Compulsory ballot ranking exerts a profound influence over the preference transfer process. With optional systems, voters’ top preferences are of critical importance, and there may be a high rate of ballot exhaustion. That possibility suggests a reappraisal of the positive assessment of compulsory ranking due to its requiring the expression of preferences across the ethnic divide. … Inability to exhaust ballots may impart a centrifugal influence if supporters of the more moderate parties are required by the provisions of the voting system to choose between one or the other of the large communal parties.” (Horowitz, Donald – 2004 – “The Alternative vote and interethnic moderation…” Public Choice).
The OAS recommendation that we should seek to make our constituency arrangements more accountable deals with only one dimension of our problem and then in a narrow fashion. All parties accept that major all-round constitutional reforms are necessary even if there is no agreement on the specifics. In my opinion, the OAS’s suggestion is narrow because accountability of the sort it discusses can exist in a still highly charged ethnic context.
Our complicated national scene demands that where possible, we broaden the scope of our intervention and put in place arrangements that will also help us to develop trust and cooperation. Such a system should force us to consider “them” even if at first only in a tentative, secondary manner. There is a significant body of theory and experience that could help us to design the kind of consensus regime that is more stable and even better that the one we at present enjoy.
