The Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship ex­per­i­ment in democ­ra­cy is over; they will not be con­test­ing the 2020 gen­er­al elec­tion. But there are em­bers from this de­mo­c­ra­t­ic ex­per­i­ment that could spark se­ri­ous de­mo­c­ra­t­ic re­new­al if the les­son of valu­ing struc­tur­al change for the pur­pose of cre­at­ing a fair­er democ­ra­cy can be sal­vaged.

This is no small feat be­cause the in­cen­tive struc­tures of the first-past-the-post (FPTP) elec­toral sys­tem of­fer an in­tox­i­cat­ing amount of in­flat­ed pow­er that fu­els the ego of those who gov­ern. Well-in­ten­tioned re­form­ers who mis­take win­ning ma­jori­ties with ev­i­dence that the peo­ple love them, in­evitably fail to de­liv­er the kind of changes that can pre­vent false ma­jori­ties from form­ing in the first place.

What I mean by false ma­jori­ties is a symp­tom of plu­ral­i­ty-based FPTP sys­tem, shared by coun­tries like Trinidad and To­ba­go, the UK and Cana­da. The win­ner of a giv­en con­stituen­cy is the per­son who gains the most votes, which sounds fair un­til you in­tro­duce mul­ti­ple par­ties and re­alise that of­ten those with the most votes could be scarce­ly 30 per cent of the pop­u­lar vote. Yet that per­son is tasked with rep­re­sent­ing 100 per cent of the peo­ple in the con­stituen­cy. Scaled to the na­tion­al lev­el, a par­ty that re­ceives less than 40 per cent of the pop­u­lar vote ends up with a ma­jor­i­ty of seats, and thus be­comes an elect­ed “monarch” for five years, ren­der­ing the Op­po­si­tion struc­tural­ly un­able to op­pose any­thing the Gov­ern­ment does not al­low it to.

Chang­ing that elec­toral sys­tem should have been a top pri­or­i­ty of a "Peo­ple's" Part­ner­ship that formed to avoid the very prob­lem of vote split­ting. Put plain­ly, in 2015 the PP act­ed like a par­ty whose main in­ter­est was in re-elec­tion rather than in a lim­it­ed and strate­gic part­ner­ship ca­pa­ble of chang­ing the rules of the game for the bet­ter­ment of the coun­try’s democ­ra­cy.

The promise of elec­toral re­form should have been top of the agen­da. It was part of the agen­da, and the con­tro­ver­sial method of run-off votes was the pre­ferred choice of the Gov­ern­ment. While this is an im­prove­ment in some re­spects over the plu­ral­i­ty mod­el shared by Trinidad and oth­er Com­mon­wealth states, there were many oth­er op­tions that might have been pur­sued.

As Hamid Ghany has ex­plained in the Guardian and else­where, a sus­pi­cion of elec­toral re­form and pro­por­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion (PR) in par­tic­u­lar can be traced to PM Er­ic Williams’ per­son­al con­tempt for PR. This kept PR off the ta­ble in the con­sti­tu­tion­al de­lib­er­a­tions of 1976 and on­wards. Williams, like all prime min­is­ters whose per­son­al in­ter­ests are served by an FPTP sys­tem that de­liv­ers in­flat­ed ma­jori­ties, could on­ly stand to lose from im­prov­ing the abil­i­ty to trans­late vot­ers’ de­sires in­to rep­re­sen­ta­tives in gov­ern­ment. But where in­flat­ed ma­jori­ties lose, democ­ra­cy wins, be­cause rep­re­sen­ta­tives are forced to ne­go­ti­ate.

In Cana­da, where I live and work, we are fac­ing a con­tentious and tight elec­tion that will like­ly de­liv­er a mi­nor­i­ty gov­ern­ment on Mon­day. I have ar­gued pub­licly that Cana­di­ans should study the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship in Trinidad be­cause the de­mo­c­ra­t­ic ex­per­i­ment of op­po­si­tion par­ties com­ing to­geth­er ahead of the elec­tion to ne­go­ti­ate a com­mon plat­form while main­tain­ing their dis­tinc­tive­ness is ex­act­ly what Cana­da needs at this mo­ment.

That kind of de­mo­c­ra­t­ic de­lib­er­a­tion cre­ates the con­di­tion through which vot­ers can care­ful­ly con­sid­er con­struc­tive pol­i­cy op­tions ahead of the poll rather than mere­ly be­ing pas­sive re­cip­i­ents of what­ev­er cob­bled-to­geth­er horse-trad­ing fol­lows the elec­tion of a mi­nor­i­ty Par­lia­ment. This puts vot­ers in the dri­ving seat to a greater ex­tent and re­spects that their po­lit­i­cal views are com­plex, evolv­ing, and nev­er ac­cu­rate­ly cap­tured by a sin­gle po­lit­i­cal par­ty.

Be­fore the PP formed ahead of the 2010 elec­tion, few would have ex­pect­ed that then-PM Man­ning’s gov­ern­ment would have fall­en. In an out­come that was hard-won through de­mo­c­ra­t­ic de­lib­er­a­tions that of­fered a fresh choice, vot­ers de­liv­ered the PP gov­ern­ment ma­jor­i­ty con­trol, which gave small­er par­ties a chance to speak their views in the Par­lia­ment. It would nev­er have been pos­si­ble with­out that ex­per­i­ment in a Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship.

With this sup­port, the PP ac­com­plished much, but they failed in the most fun­da­men­tal way: they did not change the struc­tur­al un­fair­ness of the elec­toral sys­tem. They in­tro­duced a form of PR at the lo­cal gov­ern­ment lev­el and al­though they passed im­por­tant elec­toral re­form mea­sures, they did not take it to its na­tion­al con­clu­sion be­fore the 2015 elec­tion.

Hind­sight is 2020, and be­cause of that, I flag two crit­i­cal lessons for the next de­mo­c­ra­t­ic part­ner­ship that will hope­ful­ly form be­fore next year’s polls:

1.Com­mit to a one-term lim­it.

2.To re­sist the elixir of false pow­er make end­ing the FPTP elec­toral sys­tem a core re­quire­ment be­fore the 2025 elec­tion.

In Cana­da, we were promised that 2015 would be our last elec­tion un­der FPTP sys­tem, but in­tox­i­cat­ed by ma­jor­i­ty pow­er, Cana­di­an PM Justin Trudeau aban­doned that promise. His hubris will cer­tain­ly cost him his ma­jor­i­ty gov­ern­ment on Mon­day, and quite pos­si­bly his job as PM. The re­al ques­tion for both T&T and Cana­da is this: are par­ties up to the task of putting democ­ra­cy ahead of self-in­ter­est? This is the les­son of 2015, and I hope that we have the courage to act on it in both of my coun­tries.

Dr Ajay Paras­ram is as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor in the de­part­ments of In­ter­na­tion­al De­vel­op­ment Stud­ies and His­to­ry as well as a Found­ing Fel­low at the MacEachen In­sti­tute for Pub­lic Pol­i­cy and Gov­er­nance at Dal­housie Uni­ver­si­ty, Cana­da.