Reseña del libro "TWO-PARTY POLITICS AND CARIBBEAN UNDERDEVELOPMENT (en Inglés)"
The two-party system continues to hold sway within the Anglophone Caribbean, a virtually unchanged colonial relic copied from the UK where political power has been shared between the Labour and Conservative Parties since the end of the First World War.The Westminster first-past-the-post electoral system remains dominant with the exception of Guyana, which adopted a system of Proportional Representation in 1964; before independence in 1966 and the constitutional change from 'Constitutional Monarchy' to Cooperative Republic since 1972. This made Guyana the first Caribbean ex-colony to jettison the British Monarch as Head of State. Guyanese politics, notwithstanding, is still dominated by two Parties, which for the past 25 years, have been able to govern only via coalitions with smaller political groupings. Recent events in Guyana have exposed the tenuous nature of coalitions opportunistically formed without a common ideological glue.The Anglophone Caribbean, after more than a half century as sovereign independent states; with few exceptions; have failed to attain or sustain the levels of social and economic development consistent with the expectations of its citizenry. While Barbados has, since 2010, attained and sustained a Human Development Index above 0.8 (UNDP) and thus a ranking among 'Developed Countries', only the Bahamas (0.805) and Trinidad and Tobago (0.799) have approximated this critical threshold. Barbados, it should be noted, was, however, no less vulnerable than its CARICOM partners, to the cataclysmic impact of the 'Great Recession'; the effect of which has been significantly exacerbated by the 'First 21st Century Plague'.This work postulates that the two-party political system in the Caribbean; with its characteristic de-merits of crass opportunism; cronyism; corruption; political victimization and the virtual denial of citizen participation outside of elections; has been a major contributor to stultifying socio-economic development in the Caribbean. While Jamaica and to a lesser extent, Guyana, provide the ethnographic case studies for this hypothesis, any empirical analysis of CARICOM data will establish that the Anglophone Caribbean, by and large, has failed - dismally - to live up to the expectations of the approximately five million citizens of these former colonies of the United Kingdom; still the predominant influence in its approach to political governance.
