13 December 2001, 877 words
The 18-18 result on Monday shows that Trinidad and Tobago had a perfect democratic election. Or so physicist and computer scientist Danny Hillis would say, if he knew about this country. Hillis writes, "In a perfectly functioning democracy, both candidates will appear equally imperfect, voter turnout will often be low, and all elections will end in near ties."
Hmm. Maybe he has visited us. Although Hillis was writing about the last presidential election in the United States, much of what he says can be applied to our system (not least because our general elections are in important respects really the election of a chief executive).
In an article on the online magazine Edge, Hillis uses graphs to demonstrate his argument. Assuming that an issue can be represented by a single point on a political spectrum, he says that people will vote for a "Good Candidate", who is defined as the one whose opinions are closest to that of the voters. In such a situation, some voters are unhappy with the results but even more would have been happy if the "Bad Candidate" (i.e. the one whose opinions was furthest away from the majority of voters) had won. This was the situation we had in the 1986 NAR sweep, when the only unhappy people were PNM diehards.
Of course, even in this very simplified version of the democratic process, there are situations where most of the voters are unhappy with the results. This is when voters are highly polarised on an issue and the candidates are uncompromising in their positions. In such a situation, Hillis shows that almost half the population will be unhappy with the election's outcome, no matter which candidate wins.
The issue which polarises voters in Trinidad is, of course, race, and no political leader - including Basdeo Panday - has ever made a serious effort to deal with the issue.
In a related scenario, Hillis says that if the voters are polarised but the candidates willing to compromise, then almost all of the voters will be unhappy with the result. This may well apply to the 18-18 outcome (although non-voters like me and Lloyd Best are quite pleased about it) and the argument does seem particularly relevant to the UNC party election which put Ramesh Maharaj into the position of Deputy Political Leader and which, in turn, sparked off the brouhaha that led to an early election. Hillis argues that "As unpleasant as these outcomes may seem, they still represent successes of the democratic process. No other choice of leader would have led to a better result."
Interestingly, Hillis also shows that the choice of a third candidate is more likely to lead to an outcome which displeases voters rather than otherwise because, he says, the third candidate is likely to function as a Spoiler, taking away sufficient votes from the Good Candidate to put the Bad Candidate in power.
This is why, he says, a two-party system is better for voters and the democratic process. "In a many-party system, the voters are more likely to be happy with the choice of candidates, because they can find a candidate that is close to their own position. Unfortunately, the voters are less likely to be happy with the result of the election, because it will not necessarily choose the Best candidate...the candidate who gets elected will be the one that has the broadest constituency, not the one who best represents the will of all the voters."
What this means is that, in a two-candidate system, either candidate gains votes by adopting a position which appeals to the widest cross-section of voters - i.e. a Best Position where an equal number of voters are on either side of the theoretical political spectrum. "The closer one candidate moves toward the Best Position, the closer the other candidate will have to move to remain electable," says Hillis.
This would explain the manifesto-stealing accusations which flew so thickly during the last election campaign. There are two things I find particularly fascinating about Hillis's thesis, however. The first is its logical explanation of the saying "A people gets the government it deserves." This applies only to democracies, because if politicians have to reflect voters' opinions in order to get elected, then in a real sense they do represent what we want, good or bad. The corruption of the UNC administration was not a sociopolitical aberration: if it were, the party would not have received so many votes. The drawback of democracy is that it also means mob rule: and a mob can always be counted to reflect humanity's lowest common denominator.
The second thing I find fascinating about Hillis's thesis is its implication that evenly-balanced electorates, such as that in Trinidad and Tobago and in the US and some other Caribbean islands, do not come about by happenstance, but are an almost inevitable outcome of the democratic process. If this is so, the system evolves an integral check and balance: and I can hardly conceive a more effective check and balance than an 18-18 tie. It just proves the truth of what Winston Churchill once said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for every other form."
Copyright©2001 Kevin Baldeosingh