Category: racial politics

Are Trinbagonians for or against?

March 16, 2010 by Edmund Gall

I was doing some house-cleaning of my facebook profile - getting rid of groups and apps that weren't needed - and discovered something funnycurious (as they say in T&T - yes, foreigner, it means strange).  The number of members of the COP, PNM and UNC groups on facebook - 3,400, 2,900 & 880 respectively - is way less, even in total, than the 11,500 folks who joined the group 2 million against $2million flag!! In other words, more folks behooved themselves to click on the Join button for a group against our Hon. Sports Minister's over-compensating 'legacy flag' than for all three political parties combined.  I had to ask myself: are we Trinis more likely to be *against* something than *for* the opposite?

If the answer to this is yes - we're more likely to be against something - then that places some of our behaviours in interesting light.

When the West Indies cricket team plays against Australia, we aren't backing our boys - we really bad-minding Australia.  When folks became fans of Keith Rowley on facebook in recent days, it wasn't because they supported what he stands for - it's more to register their hatred for what he stood against.

All these years when our social-scientists presumed we voted along racial lines, it wasn't because we supported our own - it's more that we feared those who weren't.  It surely couldn't be because every single voter read the parties' manifestoes from cover to cover and made a deliberate decision to support the policies of the party they voted for.  Heck, I'd be surprised if most of the voters even knew who their party's representative for the area was - they just went in and looked for the party's symbol to place their X. {Read more}

From POPPG to COP - evolution of a third party

October 30, 2009 by Ian Ramjohn

I have voted only four times in my life¹ - one local government and three national elections.  And 100% of my voting pattern can be explained by a single factor - I voted for the Muslim candidate.²  Combine that bit of information with my surname and it's easy to conclude that my vote is driven simply by identity politics.³

It would be easy.  But while it would prodict my voting patterns fairly well, but it wouldn't do much to explain why I voted the way I did, nor would it be a useful predictor of future scenarios.  

As I mentioned on Monday, saying that "corruption, on its own, does not decide elections in Trinidad: Race does" (as Selwyn Ryan did) turns correlation into causation.  Voting patterns and election victories can be explained in terms of race, but saying that "race decides elections" is an oversimplification.  Electoral victory depends on a combination of building coalitions and motivating your base.  Add to that the fact that we don't have national elections, we have a series of local elections that are won constituency-by-constituency.  More to the point, if race decided elections, one would expect that we had experienced substantial demographic shifts over the last 40 years, an expectation that's not supported by the facts. {Read more}

The third race

October 26, 2009 by Ian Ramjohn

In the Sunday Express, Selwyn Ryan wrote

...Mr Panday is also correct when he notes that corruption, on its own, does not decide elections in Trinidad: Race does...

Taran questioned whether this assumption about Trinidadian politics remains valid, pointing out that

If COP support is an indicator, they don't follow their parents. Sure, they didn't win a seat - but they did cast a wide net on Election Day because something about COP was appealing. It wasn't Winston Dookeran's charismatic speeches. What was it?

If you're interested in predicting outcomes, phenomonological models are good enough.  Race, coupled with a few other factors, can explain the outcome of every election since 1956 with the possible exception of 1986.  If you consider mixed people as a "swing" constituency, caught between the two races, you've got your model.  Figure out how they'll vote/how they voted, and you've predicted or explained your election.  It works, it's simple...it's what they call an elegant solution.

The problem with phenomonological models is that they are only interested in emergent patterns, not in the mechanisms that generate those patterns.  Correlation, they tell you, does not imply causation.  If you want to study the underlying mechanics that create those patterns you need to dig deeper, and look for more complicated models. {Read more}