Sometime between now and the next five years, Guyana will have to embark upon constitutional and more specifically electoral reforms. I have compiled a list of some two dozen reforms that I believe warrant consideration and have in this column dealt in some detail with the reforms having to do with the distribution of national executive authority (e.g. SN, Future Notes: 22/04/2020). Constitutional reform processes are very complicated and require expert advice, but to take advantage of such advice one should have a vision of the type of governance system one wishes to establish and a reasonably good idea of the kind of the changes that are required. I believe I have the latter and to aid the reform process as we go forward, this column will in a compact manner focus on the main aspects of some of the more important issues on my list.
Most Guyanese have been brought up under the present proportional representative (PR) electoral system, but in so far as Members of Parliament (MPs) are concerned, the demand that MPs be made more accountable to their constituencies, as they are in the Westminster political system, is arguably the most popular. From this point of view political accountability is the ability of constituents to directly exercise a check on those who once elected betray their promises or fail to adequately perform and the present PR list system does not adequately cater for this. Given the persistent demands for change some attempts have been made to liberalize the system but as the just concluded 2020 general and regional elections have demonstrated, the traditional party leaderships are the dominant actors in the selection of MPs.
It should be noted that the required changes could involve the party leaderships losing a significant degree of control over their constituents and while it might be impossible for them to exclude this item from the reform agenda, as with all issues impacting upon the control of party headquarters, vigilance will be required to ensure that the proposed new arrangements are not largely meaningless.
PR systems are usually credited with, among other things, reducing the disparity between a party’s share of the national vote and its share of the parliamentary seats. So that in Guyana, if a party gets 50% of the votes it gets 50% of the seats in the National Assembly. It also uses multi-member electoral districts, so Guyana is currently divided into 10 electoral districts (coterminous with the 10 geographical regions) that return 25 of the 65 MPs to the National Assembly and the remaining 40 seats are ascertained by proportionality of votes cast.
Guyana has the simplest of PR list systems whereby each party presents a list of candidates to the electorate and voters vote for a party. Lists can be ‘closed’, as in Guyana where candidates are placed on the list by the party leaders in alphabetical order and after the elections are completed those leaders also determine who will become an MP, or ‘open’, when candidates are placed on the list in order of the priority in which they will become MPs depending on the number of seats the party wins at the elections. The ‘open’ list system gives the electorate some idea of who are likely to become MPs before they vote.
In addition to requiring more direct constituency representation, there appears to be a consensus that the PR principle whereby there is proportionality between votes cast and seats won is desirable and some agreement that where a party list is to be used it should be an ‘open’ list. These could be addressed by:
Increasing the number of constituencies, as is already provided for in the constitution, but retaining just sufficient list seats to maintain national proportionality. Only about 25% of seats are usually required for the latter (in the Philippines 20% of seats is used for this purpose) so it is possible to double the amount of constituency MPs to about 50 (file:///C:/Users/Owner/Downloads/democracy_ en%20(2).pdf). Indeed, if necessary, the constitution can be reformed to increase the number of MPs but 50 direct representatives for a population of 750,000 appears quite adequate.
Return to the disproportional Westminster type system is unnecessary since there are other alternatives that offer substantial proportionality and greater representative accountability.
Of the older systems, the single transferable vote (STV) system in which voters rank candidates in order of preference on the ballot paper in multi-member electoral districts has been relatively popular. However, STV is criticized for being unfamiliar to voters and too complicated, although it is said that ‘Many of the criticisms have, … proved to be little trouble in practice’ (http://aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/es/esd/esd02/esd02d/esd02d01).
The relatively new and untried ‘Majoritarian Election of Candidates with Proportional Allocation of Seats’ proposal appears ideally suited for Guyana. This approach ‘keeps the majoritarian tradition of single MPs maintaining a presence in their constituency and servicing its residents’ needs, but … constituencies not giving any candidate a clear win will be allocated an MP in order to ensure that each party’ total is …. reflected more or less proportionately by the number of seats it gains.’ It also claims to allow for the elections of more women and minorities (https://aceproject.org/ero-en/regions/americas/PY/a-new-electoral-system-majoritarian-election-of).
The Constitutional (Amendment) Bill 2007 allows MPs to be recalled if they lose favour with their party. Bearing in mind Edmund Burke’s position that MPs are not mere delegates and owe their constituencies their unbiased opinion and mature judgment (SN Future Notes: 03/09/2014), this authority could be transferred to constituencies for them to discipline MPs who fail to live up to their promises and/or are ineffective. (SN Future Notes: 03/09/2014, 29/02/2012, 22/02/2012).
I have concentrated on establishing the basic constitutional arrangements for constituents to be able to hold MPs accountable. But after this has been done, local infrastructure in the form of offices and staff, the availability and reporting of MPs to constituencies, the qualifications and selections process of candidates, campaign financing, etc. will all be important for properly holding representatives accountable.
