Denise Marsha Brown | The time for a green (climate) party is now

Calls for a viable third political party in Jamaica are nothing new. Every election cycle the public debates it, and the ballot reflects it.

In the 2025 general election, third parties not only increased their overall vote share relative to previous years but also significantly expanded their constituency coverage. Yet none has managed to gain real traction.

Contrary to popular belief, their failure has little to do with Duverger's Law and everything to do with strategic positioning: they simply fail to articulate a meaningful cleavage and lack the blackmail power required to not only influence party competition but to change the electoral system altogether. A Green Party, however, could do just that.

THE NEW CLEAVAGE: CLIMATE AS PARTY IDENTITY

In most democracies, third parties gain traction when they mobilise around a cleavage that dominant parties have neglected or inadequately addressed. A cleavage, in political science terms, is a deep social division that structures the party system (how parties are organised and positioned) and in turn, shapes political competition.

Historically, political cleavages emerged from critical junctures such as industrialisation or democratisation. These divisions create distinct voting blocs with conflicting interests that parties mobilise around. In Jamaica, the party system has traditionally been structured around distinct cleavages: class divisions, urban-rural tensions, and Cold War ideological positioning between democratic socialism and market capitalism.

The Jamaica Labor Party (JLP), founded in 1943 as the political wing of Alexander Bustamante's labor union, has historically drawn support from rural constituencies and business interests. While the People’s National Party (PNP), established in 1938 by Norman Manley, cultivated a base among urban workers, and those favoring stronger state intervention.

Over time, both political parties have come to own specific issues, a phenomenon known as "issue ownership". This is when voters consistently associate a particular party with competence on a specific policy domain, regardless of actual performance.

The JLP has cultivated ownership of economic management and fiscal discipline; while the PNP owns the broader social policy space, namely welfare and education policy. Both parties have arguably retained these core constituencies, organised around clientelist networks that flow through partisan channels.

Consequently, these issue domains are now saturated.

Previous third parties have failed precisely because they competed on traditional grounds already owned by the JLP and PNP. But this, in and of itself, does not preclude new possibilities; it actually creates the perfect catalyst for the emergence of a Green party. When traditional issue spaces are monopolised by established parties, this gives rise to "niche parties" – parties that mobilise around a single issue or narrow cluster of issues that major parties downplay or ignore.

Scholars have long established that the conditions for niche party success require two elements: the issue must be sufficiently salient to a meaningful slice of the electorate, and major parties must either dismiss the issue or offer inadequate responses.

The 2025 passage of Category 5 Hurricane Melissa, devastating as it was, provides the perfect catalyst. Hurricane Melissa completely devastated the southwestern part of the island, leveling entire communities and displacing thousands. This is not a passing crisis. The year before, Hurricane Beryl left significant damages to the island with an estimated economic loss of US$6.5 billion.

Now, barely a year later, Hurricane Melissa has struck with even greater force, with estimated damages to Jamaica's infrastructure at US$8.8 billion. The salience is therefore undeniable. Every Jamaican knows someone impacted. Every news cycle covered the destruction, and now every political conversation has turned to the government's inadequate response.

Whether the PNP would have performed any better is uncertain, but what is clear is that neither party has meaningfully addressed environmental issues. This gap reflects not inability but indifference: for both the JLP and PNP, the environment remains a footnote within their issue agendas, and we are now witnessing the consequences of that neglect.

What Jamaica needs now is a party willing to make climate action its core identity, one that can mobilise voters around survival itself, because that is exactly what is at stake. We have been reminded of this reality in the most visceral way, and the electorate is now ripe for the taking.

ON BLACKMAIL POWER

The elephant in the room is the institutional barrier. Duverger's Law suggests that majoritarian systems like Jamaica's, where only the candidate with the most votes in a constituency wins, naturally create a massive barrier to third-party success. However, it is not as insurmountable as one might imagine. Majoritarian rules do not erase all leverage.

Niche parties can still exert what is known as blackmail power: the ability to credibly threaten the vote shares of major parties. Because climate action represents a viable new cleavage, a Green Party could leverage this power in two critical ways.

First, it can force policy shifts. In a highly competitive two-party system like Jamaica's, even a modest vote share becomes an electoral threat.

Consider the last election: the JLP won 35 seats with 49.71 per cent of the vote, while the PNP took 28 seats with 48.34 per cent. The margin was razor thin. With only 63 constituencies and 32 seats needed to form a government, a Green Party with salient climate messaging could be decisive. If it were to win, for example, as few as four seats, neither major party would hold a majority. The Green Party would then decide which party forms the next government, and climate action would be the price of that support.

Should the Green Party not win enough seats to shape this outcome, the threat alone is enough to reshape the issue agenda. To attract green supporters, the JLP and PNP would be forced to meaningfully absorb climate action into their platforms. But here is the catch: a niche party dedicated to climate action is far more likely to be seen as credible, and more effective at mobilising voters on this issue.

Second, it can reshape the electoral landscape itself. Jamaicans have long called for proportional representation (PR), an electoral system in which seats are allocated according to a party's share of the vote, making it easier for smaller parties to gain representation. But parties do not simply switch systems on request. Political parties are, as Anthony Downs famously argued, vote-maximising machines. They exist to win elections, and they do not voluntarily adopt reforms that threaten their dominance. Electoral system changes do not happen out of democratic idealism. They happen out of survival.

The evidence from Europe is instructive. Political scientist Carles Boix shows that majoritarian parties embraced PR only when a new political cleavage, usually a rising socialist or left party, grew strong enough to endanger the established parties hold on power.

Once these new parties began siphoning votes from the established actors, the old parties faced a stark choice: keep plurality rules and risk being wiped out, or shift to PR so they could retain parliamentary influence even with shrinking vote shares. Put differently, PR emerged when the cost of maintaining the old system became too high.

A Green Party in Jamaica, capitalising on climate action as a salient and neglected cleavage, has the potential to force precisely this kind of reckoning. Should one emerge and grow strong enough to threaten the duopoly, the JLP and PNP will find that their best option for survival is to lower the institutional barriers to party entry.

October 28, 2025, represents the kind of “critical juncture” that has reshaped political systems globally. The conditions are set and the electorate is ready. The only question is, who will seize this opportunity?

- Denise Marsha Brown is a Jamaican Fulbright PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Missouri, US, studying political parties, electoral institutions, and voting behaviour. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com