Editorial | Shoring up democracy

As was again proven on Wednesday, the mechanics of Jamaica’s democracy are healthy. They work well.

So, for the 19th time in 80 years of universal adult suffrage, Jamaicans voted for the government of their choice in an election which domestic and international observers judged to have been free and fair, and, for the most part, free from fear.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) was returned to office for a third consecutive term in a closely fought contest in which it gained an estimated 51 per cent of the popular vote, winning 34 of Parliament’s 63 seats. The People’s National Party (PNP), resuscitated after its implosion in 2020, when it managed to get 14 seats in parliamentary vote, won 29.

In the tradition of election in liberal democracies, the PNP’s leader, Mark Golding, with relative grace, quickly conceded the JLP’s victory and his party’s defeat.

“I acknowledge and concede the results and congratulate the Jamaica Labour Party,” Mr Golding said in a speech soon after the outcome became clear.

“Jamaica’s democracy is important and we must cherish it, though it sometimes brings bitter disappointment,” he added.

GRACEFUL AND PEACEFUL

This newspaper has little doubt that the transfer of power would have been equally graceful and peaceful had the results been in favour of the other side and the seat count close, as happened in the 2007 and the 2016 parliamentary elections.

But notwithstanding this embrace of the functional processes of democracy by the political class and those who cast ballots at election time, this newspaper remains concerned at apathy among the vast majority of voters towards elections and its potentially corrosive impact on the deeper principles of democracy.

It is an issue to which Prime Minister Andrew Holness made a passing reference in his victory speech Wednesday.

The matter, however, demands deeper thought and engagement from the island’s political institutions, especially the major political parties, but with the greater burden resting with those who are at the helm of national leadership.

That Mr Holness’ party will have a workable majority in Parliament masks the worrying trend of low participation rates in elections, which has taken a firm grip over the past quarter century.

For Wednesday’s election there were 2, 077, 779 people on the voters’ register. According to the Electoral Commission of Jamaica 39.5 per cent of them voted. That translates to just under 821,00 people, of whom, at the early count, 413,500 cast ballots for the JLP.

In other words, six in 10 registered voters opted out of the election and only 20 per cent, roughly, of the people eligible to cast ballots actually did so for the party which will manage the affairs of the country over the next five years.

Wednesday’s voter turnout was a 1.7 percentage point improvement on the number (37.8 per cent) that voted in 2020. In the election of that year, the amount that endorsed the JLP as a ratio of the registered electors was similar to Wednesday.

OVER 70 PER CENT

There was a time, particularly between the 1960s and into the 1990s, Jamaica’s voter turnout was regularly over the 70 per cent and venturing into the high 80s. But since the turn of the millennium, it has been in reverse, starting with the fall to 59.2 per cent in 2002, although it edged up to 61.46 per cent in 2007. Since then the turn of registered voters has been: 53.17 per cent (2011); 48.37 per cent (2016); 37.8 per cent (2020); and Wednesday’s post-pandemic participation of 39.5 per cent.

In his speech Wednesday night, Prime Minister Holness insisted that his party’s achievement was not ‘victory by default’ although he acknowledged his and his party’s concern “about the turnout”, but stressed the majority who voted cast their ballots for the JLP.

“Our democracy, by this election, is proven to be intact,” Dr Holness said.

That is an obvious truth with respect to the moving parts of the system and the right of individuals to freely participate in the systems. Yet it can’t be good for the higher ideals of democracy when the vast majority of citizens feel that the act of voting to be so alienated from the process of governance that they believe it to be of little value to cast ballots. It was a concern that the former leader of the PNP, Peter Phillips raised after the 2020 election, which was shared by Dr Holness.

Dr Phillips called for a national response to the crisis, warning that if continued to fester Jamaica’s democracy could fall to the control and availability of groups that have “the most power” or deepest pockets.

A great part of the problem, to which Dr Holness and his government must place high on their agenda, is the distrust Jamaicans have for their leaders and institutions of the state, which they believe are corrupt. This long preceded Prime Minister Holness’ problems with the Integrity Commission (IC) over income, assists and liabilities filings, which Dr Holness believes is unfair and has been weaponised by opponents to hurt him.

Nonetheless, 86 per cent of Jamaicans, according to Vanderbilt University’s 2023 biennial survey on attitudes to democracy in the Americans, believe that public officials are corrupt. Half of the country’s adults would tolerate a military coup if its aim was to tackle corruption. And while 58 per cent were committed to democracy, 28 per cent said that democracy, as practised in Jamaica, didn’t operate in their interests.

These are issues that the re-elected JLP must attack frontally if this drift on attitudes against democracy is not to continue and more and more voters stay away from the poll. Strengthening anti-corruption institutions and reversing the sense that the ruling party is hostile to the IC are among the answers.

The parties also have to find new and creative ways to engage citizens beyond their bases.