The declining quality of representational governance

TEXT of a speech delivered by Prof. Wiswa Warnapala, the Minister of Parliamentary Affairs at a meeting of the Lions Club of Colombo, September 23, at the Hotel Inter Continental.

I AM happy indeed to be present on this occasion, which I am told, is an important annual event for the members of the Lions Club of Colombo, whose President, Mr. S.P. Perera has been known to me for more than three decades.

It was during my post-graduate days at the University of Leeds that I met him, and since then I travelled a long way via the world of academia to reach the hurly burly of parliamentary politics.

In the last eleven years, I got an opportunity to get myself actively involved in politics and today I have been asked by the Government to look after Parliamentary Affairs.

Therefore, it is not at all inappropriate if I make use of this opportunity to speak a couple of words on the supreme legislative institution of the country, the Parliament.

Since the Lions Club consists of a set of distinguished citizens interested in the welfare of the people, I think that my topic tonight is very relevant.

As you are well aware, Sri Lanka is one country in South Asia which had a very robust and dynamic system of parliamentary government and it enjoyed comparative stability for nearly two decades. The system based on the Westminster model worked well as an institution of representative government in this country.

It is in this context, that one is compelled to ask the question whether the Parliament, as the supreme legislative institution, has declined in the last two or three decades.

I would like to draw your attention to some of the major issues relating to this decline as you all represent a vital segment of the educated public opinion in this country.

Today it has become fashionable, among the new generation of instant populists, to disparage the Parliament and to dismiss anything that happens in this supreme legislative institution as being irrelevant to the serious business of government and politics.

Both government and politics are intertwined in any system of government, and it needs to be considered a serious business in the popular perception of the people.

It is this popular perception which needs to be corrected, if the institution is to survive as the main institution of government. Popular confidence is a vital resource for such an institution, and the erosion of it is a reason for concern.

This deplorable facile attitude, I mean the lack of regard to the legislative institution, is not confined to the press, the educated and the conscious public; the general public, more often than not, express disgust and it is this popular perception, which otherwise is a resource for its innate strength, needs to be immediately corrected for the proper functioning of Parliament.

We know that events of considerable significance do sometimes take place in the House of Parliament, and in the past, there were occasions in Parliament which seem to be worthy of serious attention. There were excellent speeches, good debates, for that matter historical debates as well.

At one stage, it was the mirror of considered intellectual opinion in the country, and this, to a large extent, depended on the quality of the ordinary Member of Parliament who, under the Westminster model of parliamentary government, had a special role to play.

It is this assigned role which has declined in the last three decades; it is my view that because of this trend that one cannot dismiss the institution as irrelevant of today's modern government.

Human institutions, especially those of modern government, are of two kinds, traditional and contrived. In Sri Lanka we enjoy a written constitution modified from time to time by positive enactments which sometimes deviate from the very foundation.

In this context, I would like to draw your attention to one important fact; traditional institutions in any country are retained so long as they maintain their utility. Contrived or written institutions, being products of a given historical moment, require something more than utility to justify their existence.

It is my view that the electoral system which existed since the introduction of parliamentary government, apart from its utility to the politics of a new independent state, provided stability to a system which, in the given setting, functioned fairly efficiently and guaranteed comparative governmental stability.

Therefore the system, despite a few deficiencies, came to be intellectually and theoretically acceptable to the people who, in their own popular perception, saw no fault of Parliament as the supreme institution of the country.

The ordinary voter, with party affiliations or no such affiliations, elected a set of persons in whom they could invest and repose confidence, and they were expected to implement public policies through which they could enhance their standard of living.

It was true that Parliament became the source of legislation; the grievances of the constituents or the constituency grievances had to be addressed, and this, to a large extent, was possible under the first-past-the post system where the individual Member of Parliament could easily identify himself with the needs of the constituency.

Under this system of representation, which, in fact, evolved for a considerable period of time and took root in the political culture of the country, there was popular acceptance of the role of the elected Member of Parliament and there was also popular confidence in the individual role of the Member of Parliament.

Today this has declined to such an extent that people, including those who elect them, have lost confidence in them, resulting in a situation of political retardation in the country. For instance, there are assertions in the press that the prestige of Parliament has fallen so low.

It is arguable that if constitutional changes, including electoral changes are to be made, the changes should be related to one another in a coherent way; if fundamental changes are to be made, they should not be done on the basis of the traditional method of piecemeal constitutional reform.

The role of the elected representative, here in this case the ordinary Member of Parliament, though underwent a transformation in the context of the new electoral system where the electorate is now an entire district, the MP still remains a legislator in a popularly elected supreme legislature.

It is universally accepted that the legislative role of the Member of Parliament has declined in many a country where the system was modelled on the Westminster model.

This model, though came to be adapted in various forms in different parts of the world, has been questioned in Britain, especially after the style, of leadership of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Graham Allen, in his latest book titled the 'Last Prime Minister', stated that 'the Prime Ministerial form is no longer the best way of understanding the way in which Britain is governed.

The model of Westminster had been followed in all the old dominions and adopted where necessary to meet the local conditions.

In order to assess whether or not the adoption of the Westminster model was in any way responsible for the fate of the constitutions of certain countries, the following questions need to be answered. Did adherence to the Westminster model make for political stability? Did deviations from the model make for political instability?

In the case of Sri Lanka, the deviation from the Westminster model bean with the introduction of the 1978 constitution, which, though it had certain characteristics of stability, paved the way for parliamentary instability through the electoral system which it created as a panacea for all ills.

I am focusing only on the decline of the role of the individual Member of Parliament. In the past, Sri Lankan political parties always believed in a national agenda, and the MP was expected to promote it.

In the last two decades, Sri Lanka witnessed a plethora of political parties with regional agendas and their commitment was to parochial interest, and this again diluted the effective role of the individual Member of Parliament.

The present day Parliamentarian is no more a legislator engaged in public policy formation through the available instruments of the country's legislature.

His role as a legislator has visibly deteriorated and the political parties, though they often talk of discipline within parties, standards of behaviour and codes of conduct, have failed to tackle this malaise in the country's political system.

Sri Lankan political parties are mature institutions but they fear to deal with miscreants in the party as such an action could interfere with the very continuation of the party in power.

The leadership of a party is scared that the MP who misbehaved could cross-over to another party, and strangely in Sri Lanka such renegades find immediate accommodation in another political party.

This kind of indiscipline has had an effect on the legislative role of Parliament. The reason is that the political parties recruit their membership on the basis of a variety of non-party criteria.

Loyalty to the party is not the main factor. Therefore an elected MP owes little to the party hierarchy; on the other hand, the party hierarchy, though keen to get rid of such members, hesitate to take action as such a move could also interfere with its base in the given electorate.

The party, therefore, would prefer to suffer embarrassment in public rather than lose a member whose vote bank is strong and solid in the electorate.

In Sri Lanka, if an assessment is made of the quality of the member of Parliament who entered the legislature in 1947, one can come to the conclusion that men of quality entered the legislature in the first three decades, and it was primarily due to the fact the individual became more important than the party under the single member constituency system which we demolished in 1978.

Yet another fact was that the party organisations were not that developed during this period, and the social and educational background of the individual became an important consideration in the candidate's selection.

Now the situation has undergone a change with the establishment of a network of party branches linked to the party leadership in Colombo and this, in effect, has strengthened the constituency party, which would like to promote a person of its choice.

The only qualification examined is whether the particular person could win by hook or crook. Since 1956 locally acceptable people came forward as candidates and they were made accountable to the electorate, all voters knew whom their MP was.

It was this healthy feature, which came to be trasformed with the introduction of the system of proportional representation, which, due to the nature of selection of the candidate and the nature of the electoral competition, created a distance between the MP and the voter.

Electoral politics of this country, as a result of this system, which has its own advantages, underwent a change and the post-PR political culture, one important element of which was violence, had a devastating effect on the democratic politics of the country.

Lack of responsibility and accountability to the electorate distanced the MP from his own electoral base. The failure to make the MP accountable to the voter was the main reason for the decline in the standards of behaviour.

Political parties, on the other hand, do not take steps to overcome these problems which also interfere with the proper functioning of the legislature. It may be argued that the ills of the existing electoral system could only lead to an even weaker government; we witnessed a number of weak governments and it was entirely due to the innate weaknesses in the present electoral system.

In my view, good parliamentary government could be guaranteed only with a comprehensive reform of the existing electoral system, with which neither the quality of the MP nor the stability of a Government could be guaranteed in Sri Lanka.

Seen from a perspective of democratic theory, what needs to be done is to develop a proper understanding of the concepts of sovereignty and representation.

The authors of the constitution of 1978, when recommending the scheme of proportional representation, have not given thought to the relationship between sovereignly and representation

Therefore, today in Sri lanka, politics is being transformed from the narrow 'representative politics' of the past into today's 'network politics', in which the notions of participation and representation flow in one direction.

There is a trend towards a distorted form of representation, and it is this aspect, which needs to be corrected with a new set of reforms in the electoral system of Sri Lanka.