Robert Buddan, Contributor
CONGRATULATIONS TO the newly-elected President of the People's National Party. I wish the President the best, first in uniting the party and then in managing the Government. Congratulations to all the contenders for having the courage of their convictions, and to their campaign teams and supporters as well for backing that courage.
The first matter to explore and understand is the meaning and impact of the competition for leadership of the party. The degree of competitiveness for leadership over the past months has, in my view, been well within the limits of what is acceptable. Talks about a 'bitter and divisive' campaign have misunderstood and exaggerated what in fact is a playing out of a natural pluralism in the party. Besides, in the four-way contest, two of the campaigns were never involved in any of the quarrelling.
Between the other two, claims of bribing delegates are being investigated and whether confirmed to be true or not, point to the need for strong campaign finance regulations (in both parties). The only other serious charge has been K.D Knight's remarks about Portia Simpson Miller's ability to lead. The party's monitoring committee has already rapped him for this and both contenders had instructed their campaigns not to say things of that nature.
Questions about Mrs. Simpson Miller's ability were legitimate to raise anyway. The way it was done was churlish but it is proper to raise questions about someone's competence to govern a country, the most important job of all, and especially since politicians are often criticised as incompetent and for promising all and everything that, it later turns out, they cannot deliver. In fact, it is something of a backhanded credit that the party has raised this within its own ranks about one of its leaders.
Besides, Mrs. Simpson Miller's camp need not take the remarks personally. Public opinion polls had confirmed the popular perception that while she was seen as the most caring candidate, Dr. Phillips was perceived as the person with the better governing ability.
The PNP's leadership race was certainly no more divisive than the primaries in the United States usually are. This open, four-way contest in the PNP is a new and welcome experience in Jamaica and the Caribbean. It is only 'divisive' relative to the past when one person faced weak competition in a two-person race. It was not as divisive as party contests sometimes are in comparable countries like the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. We just don't hear about these and so we don't have the basis upon which to compare what we mean by 'divisive'. Closer to home, a bitter internal party campaign took place in the Dominican Republic in 2004 in which the then ruling party's presidential candidate was disavowed by the party itself.
PARTY DEMOCRACY AND PLURALISM
The leadership election in the PNP signals two more important things that we must keep in sight. One is the importance of elections in the party as the method of upward mobility rather than patronage by the 'maximum leader' as Carl Stone argued in his thesis about patron-clientelism in Jamaica's parties. Stone argued that Jamaican parties operated on a patron-client authority structure rather than as a democratic-electoral one. The other point of importance is the pluralism that exists within the PNP, and indeed, many modern political parties. Again, Stone saw only a monolithic paramilitary-type organisation based on strong discipline. He actually criticised the JLP for being like this but both the JLP and the PNP are better seen as democratic-pluralist.
Modern parties are re-branding. They are trying to break out of the old right wing-left wing caricatures and make themselves more relevant in today's world. They are trying to reinvent themselves at a time when parties do not command the support or trust they did in an earlier age. They are trying to re-brand as democratic, globalist, inclusive, and managerial rather than as authoritarian, national, exclusive, and populist.
As better-educated and diverse social classes enter these parties, they develop different visions of what the party must re-brand itself as. This is really what was important about the PNP contest.
PLURALISM IN JAMAICA'S PARTIES
Different communities within the PNP have visions of what the party should stand for. This is the result of a growing pluralism in the party and that is a natural product of the modernisation of party and the society and world within which it evolves. We must therefore adjust our perceptions of parties. Traditionally, we have seen them as either united or divided fearing division as factionalism and weakness. The new perception should be to see parties as organisations, united around common aims and purposes, but diverse in terms of their visions and ways of realising those visions. When parties cannot accommodate this diversity, they splinter and new parties are formed out of them, much as the NDM was formed out of the JLP.
Diversity only leads to divisiveness when parties cannot accommodate the social pluralism that exists in the society itself and which become reflected in the party. Political parties reflect the pluralism of gender, class, ethnicity, generation and party politics itself. For instance, the PNP campaign was seen as a contest of man versus woman leadership; and/or brown and black; more educated and less educated; insider and outsider; elite and poor, all the lines of tension that exists within the society.
These are not inventions by the campaigns to divide the party and propagandise against candidates. What the party must do is maintain unity within diversity and appreciate that pluralism is an essential fact of modern parties and societies.
MANAGING PARTY UNITY
Probably the most important challenge for the PNP is to manage the potential conflict between this very democracy and pluralism. The conflict occurs when elected party leaders fail to achieve sufficient unity from amongst its diverse community, raising questions about its ability to govern. This problem weakened the British Conservative Party, especially after the retirement of John Major. A number of leaders elected by the party have failed to unite the party's diverse community. The party failed to win Britain's last general elections even though polls had shown that the Labour party would lose unless Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair as leader.
The British Labour Party has gone on to serve for the longest continuous time in its history. In Canada, on the other hand, the Liberal Party lost power recently after 12 continuous years because of infighting and division within it. It gave way to a conservative party that was more united. The Liberal party has traditionally been the most united of Canada's major parties. It has traditionally had heated leadership contests but these were soon forgotten so that they did not harm party unity. But longstanding tensions between Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin led to Chrétien's fall and scandals eventually brought Martin himself down.
Democracy and party elections are important but they are not enough. Leaders must unite their party. The British Labour Party has done this better than the Conservative party of late; and the Canadian Conservative Party has done this better than the Liberal Party of late as well. The evidence from a number of cases suggests that personalities and issues aside, party unity is a very important factor determining which party wins an election. Over the last 20 years, the PNP has learned and benefited from this more than the JLP has in Jamaica's case. It is entirely in the hands of the PNP' s plural communities to determine whether this will continue to be the case.
Robert Buddan is a lecturer in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies. You can send your comments to Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm
