Trevor Munroe, "Political Behaviour"
An Introduction to Politics: Lectures for First-Year Students. Kingston, Jamaica: Canoe Press, 2002: 3-6.
POLITICAL BEHAVIOUR
Political behaviour may be defined as any action regarding authority in general and government in particular. This authority includes church, school, and any others but in particular governmental authority. An obvious example of an act of political behaviour is the act of voting. In casting your vote you are, in a democracy, relating to government by voting for whom you feel should form the government. In this act of political behaviour, you also decide who you do not want to form the government. However, there are other acts of political behaviour that we need to identify, particularly because they are becoming more prevalent in Jamaica, the Caribbean, and around the world. I refer to protests, demonstrations, and roadblocks, which are acts of political behaviour because they relate to some authority. Examples of these authorities are government in general, or some other authority that provides water, fixes the roads, or upholds the law. To sharpen our understanding it is necessary to distinguish political behaviour from two other types of behaviour, economic behaviour and social behaviour.
Economic behaviour may be defined as any action relating to the marketplace: any act of production, consumption, or distribution – the producing, buying, or selling of goods and of services. When you go into the bookshop and purchase the Introduction to Politics text, you are engaging in an act of economic behaviour. Any action relating to the market is appropriately called economic behaviour.
Social behaviour is more general. Social behaviour relates to interaction – interrelationships not involving economic transactions or authority of any kind, governmental or otherwise. For example, when you leave this classroom and encounter a gathering of students, what takes place there is social behaviour. Social behaviour is a very important part of life, because it is how we deal with one another. If we have an argument or a difference of opinion, how do we deal with that difference of opinion? Do we curse, exchange violent words or deeds, or do we seek to come to some understanding of each other's views? Social behaviour is very crucial to setting the tone of life around us.
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Having made these distinctions, we need to recognize that there are relationships among these categories of behaviour. So, while we understand that they are separate we must also understand that they are connected. There is a connection between political behaviour and economic behaviour. For example, many people may choose not to vote – an act of political behaviour. They may choose not to vote because of their particular economic situation – whether they voted, or their father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before them voted, that political behaviour sometimes has not changed their economic situation. Hence, they have a disinclination to vote. Therefore, the economic condition feeds back into making them not vote. Therefore, we should understand that political behaviour and economic behaviour are connected. The opposite example is of those who benefit from contracts to build a sidewalk or to clear a patch of ground, or help to build a school, engaging in an economic activity and by virtue of benefiting from that economic activity may also engage in political behaviour.If we are economically distressed and frustrated, unable to find work, unable to purchase food, we are not likely in our social interactions with others to be gentle or understanding. Hence, at times we tend to be aggressive, as a result of frustration with our inability to meet basic needs. We see that social behaviour is often connected to economic circumstances. On one radio talk show it was acknowledged that, while Jamaica's suicide rate is increasing, it is also a fact that the rate is one of the lowest in the world, much lower than that of the United States and Trinidad. This increase is being attributed to economic frustrations and personal loss of various kinds. This example is given in order to dramatize the link between social behaviour, in that case, a very personal form of social behaviour in which someone takes his or her own life, and the economic dimension of the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
A major form of political behaviour is political participation. Political participation is defined as the extent to which citizens use their rights, such as the right to protest, the right of free speech, the right to vote, to influence or to get involved in political activity. Political participation can be subdivided into:
1. Conventional political participation, which takes place within the norms and traditions of a particular country; therefore, we say it is normal, conventional, and customary. By and large it is the less aggressive of the two. The best example is the act of voting. Other forms of conventional political participation include attending a political meeting, being a member of a political group or a political party.
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2. Unconventional political participation tends to move outside the norm, move outside the traditional, and be more aggressive, more assertive, and may even break the law. It is also more radical. The best examples are protests and demonstrations that are confrontational rather than peaceful.
Voting (conventional) and roadblocks (unconventional) are forms of political participation because in each case the citizen is using a right to act: in one case the right to vote and in another case the right to assembly and the right to march.
In relation to conventional political participation, we have identified elections and the use of the right to vote. A very interesting development in political behaviour is that in Jamaica and across the Caribbean, voting as a conventional expression of political participation is in decline. The percentage of persons who vote is decreasing as a general trend in Jamaica and across the Caribbean region. In “Caribbean Thought and the Political Process” 1 the data on voting in the Caribbean shows that in the 1990s the average percentage of people turning out to vote in the region was approximately 65 percent (see Table 1.1). This average includes Antigua and Barbuda, St Kitts and Nevis, Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and Jamaica. The average turn out to vote in the 1980s was approximately 74 percent and in the 1970s it was even higher.
In the 1940s, elections were relatively new, as Jamaica was the first predominantly black country in the entire world where people won adult suffrage, ahead of Asia, Africa, and the rest of the Caribbean. After the 1970s there was a decline in voter participation, and that is not just a Jamaican phenomenon but a regional one. More interestingly, this pattern of conventional political participation exemplified by percentage voter turnout is not Jamaican or regional only. It is also global.
With small variations, you will find a similar pattern in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other industrialized countries. This is particularly interesting, from two points of view. One is that many Jamaicans believe in the simple conclusion that not voting is a reflection of economic underdevelopment. If not voting was simply a matter of economic underdevelopment, then the United States would have the highest voter turnout in the world as it is the most economically developed. But in fact fewer people voted in the last two presidential elections in the United States than for the previous 75 years. Fewer people voted then in that country, measured by percentage, than in the Jamaican elections. Clearly low voter turnout is explained by more than simple economics.
Another explanation is that people are apathetic or neither interested in politics nor in voting anymore and are indifferent. The difficulty with that conclusion is that, while conventional political participation is declining, unconventional political participation as a type of political
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behaviour is increasing. How do you explain that often the same people who are indifferent or apathetic to voting may well be involved in massive protests and demonstrations? Unconventional political participation is increasing in many countries and is also rising in relation to global organizations and not just national ones. In Renewing Democracy, 2 I tracked protests and demonstrations in Jamaica. In 1989 there were about 20 protests/roadblocks, which increased to 200 by 1997.
Therefore, a major issue in political science and for the citizen who wants to understand what is happening around him or her is to try to explain this apparent contradiction. In the following chapter we continue to search for fuller understanding of this phenomenon. We will examine the concept of political culture. In the same way we see political behaviour changing, political culture is also changing. The change in political culture is one of the factors in bringing about a change in political behaviour.
NOTES
1 Trevor Munroe, “Caribbean Thought and the Political Process”, in Contending With Destiny, ed. Ken Hall and Denis Benn (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2000), 238.
2 Trevor Munroe, Renewing Democracy into the New Millennium: The Jamaican Experience in Perspective (Kingston: The Press, University of the West Indies, 1999).
