El Salvador joins the panachage (free-list) ranks, president’s party holds steady

El Salvador held its legislative election on 1 March, using a modified electoral system. The country had already left behind the closed list in 2012, replacing it with an open list. This year the country moved to panachage, the variant of open list in which voters may vote for candidates on different lists (sometimes called “free list”).

El Salvador is one of the few pure presidential systems still using an electoral cycle (a long-term interest of mine) consisting of all non-concurrent elections, with presidential terms of five years and legislative terms of three years. This election is in the first year of the incumbent president’s term, and offered neither “surge” nor decline in his party’s legislative support.

I was first tipped off to the change to panachage by a remark in a Tico Times article just before the election that said:

For the first time, voters will be able to select individual candidates from any party rather than being forced to vote for a single party with an established list of candidates. Voters can still opt to simply choose a party.

This is definitely far more detailed than your average journalistic note about an electoral system. But to be sure, I checked with the Tribunal Supremo Electoral, which has a very useful gallery of ballot images and instruction cards. Below I post an image of the instructions for the district (department) of Cabañas.

It offers the voter five options:

1. 1. Vote solely for the list of a party or coalition;

1. 2. Vote for a list and mark the photo of “one, various, or all the candidates” on that list;

1. 3. Mark the photo of “one, various, or all the candidates” in one list (without also indicating a list vote);

1. 4. “Mark candidates of distinct political parties or coalition” or candidates of distinct parties and a non-party candidate”, not exceeding the total number of deputies elected from the district.

1. 5. Mark the photo of a non-party candidate.**

It is option 4 that clearly establishes panachage.

By contrast, in 2012, the options excluded any mention of marking candidates across different lists.

See also images of a portion of the ballot from 2015 or 2012.

For a long time the only panachage–or free list–systems in use at the national level (to my knowledge) were in Luxembourg and Switzerland. In 2005, Honduras adopted such a system, and now one of its immediate neighbors has followed suit. (I believe Ecuador still uses a panchage system adopted several years ago; Venezuela used one at least once, but only at the municipal level.)

As for the election itself, there was a considerable delay in reporting the results. It does not seem that the panachage system had anything to do with the delay.

Preliminary results suggest that the opposition ARENA will have a plurality of seats, with 35 (of 84). That would represent a gain of two seats from the 2012 legislative election. The governing FMLN is likely to have 31 (no change) and its ally GANA 10 (-1). The PCN (the pre-1979 ruling party, still just hanging on) is expected to have 6 (-1) and the PDC would have 2 (a doubling of seats for this party that was the main alternative to the right before the civil war ended).

El Salvador hence essentially maintains its long-term relative stasis and close left-right division. The incumbent president, Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the FMLN, was elected by a very narrow margin a year ago. This election barely changes the balance of power, even though it occurs within the first year of a president’s five-year term and hence could qualify as a “honeymoon election”. In Salvadoran politics, there really isn’t much of a honeymoon, or any near-term prospect for the much-anticipated realignment. The big swing to the FMLN in the 2009 legislative election looks, in retrospect, like a blip within what is otherwise ongoing stasis.

It will be interesting to see if the move to an electoral system allowing cross-party voting for the first time begins to break down El Salvador’s remarkably rigid partisan lines.***

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* Elections could be concurrent every 15 years, as they were in 1994. However, in 2009, the legislative election was shifted to the “counter-honeymoon” and held in January, with the presidential election, as usual, in March.

** In both options 4 and 5, the reference to independents is singular; logically if voting for an independent is an alternative to voting for a party, one could vote for only one independent just as one can vote for only one party. On the other hand, in a panachage world, one actually can vote for more than  one party (assuming a vote for any candidate also counts for the party on whose list the candidate was nominated), so why would there need to be a restriction on the number of votes that a voter may give for independents? (Note that it is probably quite difficult for an independent candidate to be elected in any case.) [I edited this footnote shortly after posting.]

*** Whether the partisan lines over El Salvador can ever be broken down in the United States is another matter.

Trinidad & Tobago political reform

At the end of August, the Senate of Trinidad & Tobago (T&T) passed a package of constitutional amendments, which include some significant changes to the electoral system. [Note: This reform never was implemented, but I will leave the rest of this planting unchanged.]

T&T has been a FPTP (M=1, plurality) system throughout its years as a democratic independent state. It has had some anomalous outcomes with FPTP, and, due to that record, in a book chapter published in 2008* I placed T&T on my “watch list” of jurisdictions in which the performance of the FPTP seemed to be setting the ground for the “inherent” conditions for a reform process to come about. Apparently T&T leaders agreed. However, the chapter was about conditions for fundamental reform to a different electoral system, such as a form of PR. The reform actually in the process of being adopted is instead non-proportional. It is still well within the “majoritarian” family. In fact, it could be seen as a move further in the majoritarian direction.

The amendments passed by the Senate call for a runoff system. The reforms have not exactly been a consensual process, with only government Senators and three independents voting for it, according to the Guardian (of T&T):

All the Opposition Senators present and six independents voted against the bill. However, the bill received the three Independents’ votes only after Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar agreed to accept an amendment to the controversial runoff clause put forward by [Independent Senator Dhanayshar] Mahabir.

The amended provision says that a majority is required for election in the first round. However, unlike the initial proposal of the government, when a runoff is needed it is not necessarily a top-two contest. Rather, the provision is that:

a third place candidate in an election, who gains 25 per cent of the votes and who is within a margin of not less than five percentage points of the second place candidate, also be allowed to contest the runoff election.

In case of a 3-candidate second round, the winner will be the candidate with a plurality. Thus we will have here a form of majority-plurality system, but with different (more “restrictive”) second-round qualifying rules than in France.

Other provisions in the original bill, and which I assume remain intact in the Senate version include (with my brief reaction):

• Term limits for the Prime Minister (unusual for a parliamentary system, although not unheard of–see South Africa and Botswana, where the term-limited “president” really is a PM).

Right of recall against individual MPs (also unusual–unheard of?–in a parliamentary system).

Fixed election dates (used to be unusual in British-influenced parliamentary systems, but seems to be all the rage these days).

Trinidad and Tobago is undergoing some fairly significant reforms. The bill awaits presidential assent, and despite a candlelight vigil outside the president’s residence by The Movement for Social Justice, assent is presumably a foregone conclusion.

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* “Inherent and Contingent Factors in Reform Initiation in Plurality Systems,” in the edited volume by Andre Blais, To Keep or Change First Past the Post.

A vice president is not an outsider, Panama edition

In Sunday’s election in Panama, the incumbent Vice President was elected President. The BBC headline reads, “Outsider Juan Carlos Varela wins Panama election”. But wait, he is the Vice President. That most certainly does not meet any sensible definition of an “outsider”.

Yes, as the BBC notes, Varela had become the leader of the opposition after a falling out with current President Ricardo Martinelli. Presidents and other officeholders of their parties falling out once the president has been elected is pretty ordinary in presidential democracies. So are elections of outsiders. But you really can’t get more insider than a vice president, regardless of his relation with the chief.

Oh, I could (co-)write a book about such things.

UPDATE: In a comment, I take a look at what little data I have to shed a (little) light on the matter.

Costa Rica: Araya ends campaign

The changes in the Costa Rican party system really are fundamental. Last week, Johnny Araya, the presidential candidate of the current ruling party, National Liberation (PLN), quit the runoff race. The PLN was the country’s strongest party for most of the democratic period since 1949, but Araya won just under 30% of the vote in the first round in February.

Araya’s decision means Guillermo Solis of Citizen’s Action will be elected, essentially unopposed. It also means Costa Rica will have a president who won under 31% of the vote. While Araya’s decision reflects polling that said Solis would trounce him, it raises the question of whether one of the other candidates in the highly fragmented first-round field could have mounted a stronger challenge. Maybe not, as the third place candidate, Jose Villalta, had just 17.25%.

Meanwhile, has anyone seen a breakdown of the legislative seats? Legislative elections were concurrent with the first round of the presidential election, but various sources I have consulted still do not show the result.

Salvadoran presidential runoff, 2014

Today Salvadorans vote in their runoff presidential election. FMLN candidate Salvador Sánchez Cerén should win easily. For one thing, he almost won in the first round, with about 49% and a 10-point lead over runner-up Norman Quijano of ARENA. Second, polling has shown that those who voted for third-place candidate, Tony Saca, a former president from ARENA, were splitting at least evenly if not towards Sánchez Cerén. The latter might seem like a surprise–a right-wing ex-president’s supporters swinging to a former guerrilla fighter–but Saca split from his party in 2010 and led a group of ex-ARENA legislators in forming part of the legislative majority of incumbent president Mauricio Funes, also of the FMLN.

Sánchez Cerén will inherit the legislature elected in 2012 in which ARENA is the largest party (33 seats), but the FMLN (31) and Saca’s GANA (11) have a majority of the 84 seats. The next legislative election is a year away.

Costa Rica’s record fragmentation

I already said this in a comment at an earlier thread, but it is the sort of thing that is at the very core of Fruits & Votes, and hence deserves its own space…

By my calculation, the effective number of vote-winning parties in Costa Rica’s 2 Feb. election was 6.21. The effective number of presidential candidates was 4.36. Both easily break the record for the country’s elections back to 1953. The old averages and maximums were 3.21 and 4.84 for vote-winning legislative parties and 2.37 and 3.30 for presidential candidates. (Historical figures based on Bormann and Golder’s dataset.)

Costa Rica’s party system sure is unrecognizable from what it was for so long!

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The effective number of parties or candidates is by now the most well established measure of electoral or legislative fragmentation. It is simply a weighted count of the number of components (parties, candidates, or anything else) where the components are weighted by their own size through squaring them. Operationally: square each component’s share (out of 1), sum the squares, and take the reciprocal of the sum. Originally proposed by Laakso and Taagepera in a 1979 article.

Elections in Costa Rica and El Salvador

Presidential elections are taking place today in two countries in Central America, El Salvador and Costa Rica. The latter country also has legislative elections, whereas El Salvador uses a non-concurrent cycle and will not elect its National Assembly for another year.

DW says:

Experts say both of Sunday’s votes will result in runoffs, as neither candidate leading in the polls is likely to get the 50 percent plus one vote needed to declare victory.

One might wonder who these experts are, as in Costa Rica, it takes 40% to win in a single round, not a majority.

For El Salvador, an average of five recent polls puts the incumbent Vice President Salvador Sanchez of the FMLN in the lead, but indeed well short of a majority: 35.6%. The ARENA candidate, Norman Quijano, currently mayor of San Salvador, is second with an average of 31.3% in the polls. In third with around 11% is Elias Antonio Saca of GANA. Saca is a former president from ARENA who split from his party with a good chunk of its caucus in the current National Assembly to lend support to Mauricio Funes, elected in 2009 as the first president from the FMLN. Obviously, his voters will prove pivotal in the upcoming presidential race just as his votes have been pivotal in the legislature.

As for Costa Rica, the race is said to be tight between Johnny Araya of the ruling National Liberation Party and Jose Maria Villalta from a left-wing Broad Front that has been only a marginal force until now. In fact, other than in 2002, Costa Rica has never required a runoff, as it has had two parties generally dominant since the current democratic regime was founded in the late 1940s. However, in recent years it has been more fragmented. (In 2006 the winner barely averted a runoff, and both leading candidates were just barely over 40%.) Perhaps runoffs are going to be needed more frequently in the future.

Honduras, 2013 election: Will electoral reform, a la Uruguay, be adopted?

The second-place presidential candidate in the 24 November Honduran election, Xiomara Castro, is claiming fraud. The official results show a widened lead for the winner, Juan Orlando Hernandez, compared to what was reported the day after the election: now at 36.8% to 28.8%.

Vote compilations released by Castro’s Libre party show substantial discrepancies compared to the official results. However,  the claimed irregularities amount to only about half the official margin. Thus even if accurate, they would not change the result.

Honduras elects its president by plurality. One might wonder if the traditional parties–Hernandez’s National Party and the weakened Liberals–might now work towards the implementation of some form of two-round system for future presidential elections.

Had a runoff been required in this year’s election, there is little doubt that Hernandez would have won. In a second round, he would have received the bulk of the Liberal vote, which was 20.3%, making for a likely comfortable majority. Even the votes of the other debutant party in this election, Salvador Nasralla’s Anti-Corrpution Party, on 13.5%, would put Castro  clearly short of half the vote–even if we assume that Castro’s “real” vote was more like 33%.

The situation is somewhat analogous to Uruguay in the 1990s. Like Honduras, Uruguay is one of the Latin American countries in which two “traditional” parties survived, and dominated, the longest. Uruguay likewise elected its president by plurality (actually an “open list” whereby the winner was the plurality candidate within the party that had the overall plurality, a system also used in Honduras on a one-off basis in 1985). With the threat of a rising new party on the left, the traditional parties moved to a two-round majority system (with primaries to set each party’s nominee). At first it worked as a means to block the upstart, with the traditional parties combining to win a runoff in 1999 against the Broad Front candidate who had a plurality (40% to 33%) in the first round. Then, in 2004, the Broad Front was able to win a first-round majority and elect the president. (Another Broad Front candidate was elected in 2009, this time requiring two rounds.)

Such a trajectory may be the best Honduras can hope for. Of course, Honduras is not Uruguay, in many respects. But the old two-party system now has broken down, and new parties are knocking on the door. The adoption of a runoff for presidential elections may be necessary not only for the power-preserving interests of the traditional parties, but also to prevent a future regime-threatening crisis of legitimacy–assuming, that is, that the country’s democracy gets past the current, likely spurious, claims of the loser in this year’s plurality contest.

Honduras election, 2013

Honduras held a general election (president and unicameral congress) today. Xiomara Castro has claimed victory in the presidential contest, although exit polls offer conflicting reports of which candidate is in the lead. Castro is the wife of Manuel Zelaya, the president who was overthrown in a coup in 2009.

Honduras has been dominated by two traditional parties (Liberal and National) throughout its history–when it has not been dominated by its military, that is. The country has been democratic since 1981, other than the 2009 coup. (The 2009 election was held on schedule afterwards.)

Whoever wins this election, one result will apparently be the shattering of this long partisan duopoly. Castro is running as the head of a new party/movement, called Libre, formed out of the 2009 crisis, while both traditional parties are also contesting with their own presidential candidates.

Honduras stands out as one of the few countries using proportional representation for its legislature to have a series of elections in which one party almost always wins a majority of the seats, and often also of the votes.  The winning party has averaged 51.2% of the votes and 52.7% of the seats since 1981. Only in 2005 has the election not resulted in a majority in congress (48.4%) and only in 1997-2005 was the largest party short of half the votes (lowest 46.4% in 1997). The effective number of parties has never reached even 2.7 by votes or 2.5 by seats. Will this result be significantly more fragmented? It seems likely.

The National Assembly is elected in a modestly proportional system: at least as of 2009, it was a 128 seats in districts with an average magnitude of just over seven, using simple quota and largest remainders. Since 2005, lists have been open.

The president is elected in a single round, by plurality.

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(Past results referenced from data in my files)

Nicaragua presidential election rules changes–again

The ruling Sandinista party of Nicaragua is seeking to lift the current restrictions on presidential reelection, and to return to election of the president by plurality.

This was utterly predictable. Daniel Ortega has become the new strongman of Nicaragua, and has been president off-and-on since the revolution of 1979. He is 67, giving him plenty of years left, assuming continued good health. Did anyone think he would contemplate voluntary retirement?

The rules have been changed before. Ortega remains in office now thanks to a favorable court ruling that allowed him to run for reelection in 2011. His return to office in 2007, following a hiatus of several years, was facilitated by a change in the rules to a variant of qualified plurality: winning  a plurality of just 40% of the vote would suffice, but so would as little as 35% if the runner-up was at least five percentage points behind. (For the 1996 and 2001 elections, the requirement was 45%, as part of an earlier pact between the Sandinistas and the opposition.)

In the 1990-2006 period, Ortega averaged 39.9% of the vote in presidential elections. In 2011, he managed 62.5%, his highest since 1984. He must be worried that he will regress to his mean.

If the current proposal passes, it will return Nicaragua to the provisions that prevailed in the original 1987 constitution enacted in the early post-revolutionary period when the Sandinista Front was still dominant: plurality election, and unlimited eligibility for reelection.

Barring an unexpected internal split, the caudillo will get what he wants. Sandinistas won more than two thirds of the seats in the unicameral legislative assembly in 2011.

Puerto Rico election 2012

Writing at The Monkey Cage, Juhem Navarro-Rivera offers a detailed report on the elections just held in Puerto Rico. A few things stand out among the sorts of things we tend to emphasize here at F&V:

On Tuesday, November 6 voters in Puerto Rico narrowly voted out incumbent pro-statehood Governor Luis Fortuño of the Partido Nuevo Progresista in his reelection bid in favor of state Senator Alejandro García Padilla of the pro-Commonwealth Partido Popular Democrático. The margin of difference between the two candidates was less than one percent, the second-closest election since these two parties began competing against each other in 1968. At the time of this writing, the PPD is poised to win majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.

Meanwhile,

Yet, despite the victory for PPD candidates at the polls, Puerto Ricans also voted on a nonbinding plebiscite to solve the political status of Puerto Rico in which a majority rejected the Commonwealth, voting to make Puerto Rico the 51st state of the Union. The plebiscite consisted of two questions, the first one asked voters if they approved or not of the current political status, the second question asked voters to choose between three status options: independence, statehood, and an “enhanced commonwealth” in which the sovereignty of the island will belong to the people of Puerto Rico rather than to the U.S. Congress. As of this writing, the voters did not approve of the current Commowealth status 54% vs. 46%, while those who rejected the current status have voted overwhelmingly in favor of the statehood option (61%) while an “enhanced Commonwealth” received 33% of the vote, and 6% voted for independence.

Sometimes, elections do not provide the clearest of mandates, do they? (At least they got a clear majority in their three-part second question on the referendum!)

And as if the mixed messages were not sufficient already,

Fortuño’s running mate, Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi defeated PPD’s Roberto Cox Alomar.

Puerto Rico assembly-size referendum

Via Manuel Álvarez-Rivera:

Voters in Puerto Rico go to the polls next Sunday, August 19, 2012, to cast ballots in a constitutional amendments referendum, concerning the Legislative Assembly’s number of members and the right to bail.

The constitutional amendment on the Legislative Assembly’s number of members proposes a reduction of the number of senators from 27 to 17, and the number of representatives from 51 to 39, starting in 2016. The number of Senate districts would be increased from eight to eleven, but each Senate district would elect one senator, instead of two. In addition, each Senate district would include three House of Representatives districts (instead of five), for a total of 33 House districts; each House district would continue to elect one representative. Moreover, the number of at-large seats in each House would be reduced from eleven to six. Likewise, the minority party representation cap would be reduced from nine to six seats in the Senate, and from 17 to 13 seats in the House of Representatives.

If we go by the cube-root rule, which suggests assembly size tends to be near the cube root of the population, the current first-chamber size of 51 is already only about one third of expected. If this referendum passes, Puerto Rico will have an extremely undersized assembly.

There is some tendency for islands (especially in the Caribbean) to have undersized assemblies. And the cube root rule might not apply to assemblies of not fully sovereign entities (though its underlying theory makes no such explicit claims). In any case, this would be a really small legislature for a “Commonwealth” of around 3.7 million.

Election campaign in El Salvador

Nice nugget from the blog, El Salvador from the Inside:

Funes was making a speech while signing over 1,350 property deeds to Salvadorans in San Isidro en Izalco  (Sonsonate).  Most of the recipients have been working or living on lands tied up in red tape or abandoned for years and without proper titles.  Funes said that during the ‘reign of conservatives & ARENA,’ a total of 34,000 property deeds were granted to Salvadorans over the span of 30 years; he compared this to his current FMLN administration, with just 2.5 years in power, which has already given 24,590.  They plan to increase that  number to 45,000 by year’s end, and by the end of their five years in power, they plan to have signed over 90,000 properties.  I liked hearing these positive statistics but given the well-timed  ‘entrega’ (delivery) of these lands to campesinos – 5 days before elections – hmm… it seemed like a campaign event.  

El Salvador elections–now open list

Salvadorans vote in legislative (and municipal) elections on Sunday. I don’t even have to look at polls to make a prediction: the FMLN will lose seats. This is the first election since the FMLN won the presidency in 2009 with the candidacy of Mauricio Funes, and a midterm decline is the typical pattern–in El Salvador and elsewhere.

This election will be the country’s first under a new open-list system. You can see a mock ballot at the El Diario de Hoy website. The system will permit the voter to vote for multiple candidates within a list–putting El Salvador on the same course followed in recent years by Honduras and Ecuador. Independent candidates also may run. These changes were in response to a Supreme Court ruling that invalidated the closed-list system that has been used until now. See Election Resources for more detail on the electoral system.

Here is an image of a sample ballot (courtesy of El Salvador from the Inside):

Jamaica 2011: As good as PR–or not (updated)

Final results show the PNP won with 53.3% of the votes, to the JLP’s 46.6%. However, even as the final vote total was much closer than the preliminary result upon which this entry was based, the PNP picked up an additional seat. (Note that this gives it exactly two thirds of the seats.)

Thus the result was far from proportional, after all. In fact, it was even more majoritarian than a “typical” FPTP result would be with the given input parameters. The PNP’s Advantage Ratio is 1.25, whereas the Seat-Vote Equation would predict it to have been 1.14.

I am leaving the rest of this as originally crafted. The analysis of other elections stands, but that of 2011 would be altered by this new information. Thanks to Jon, in a comment, for the tip.
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Jamaica held its general election on 29 December. Like the other former British territories in the Caribbean, Jamaica elects its parliament by first past the post (plurality) in single-seat districts. Also like other English-speaking Caribbean islands, Jamaica has a parliament that is significantly undersized, given its population. So this makes Jamaica a perfect opportunity to break out our old favorites, the Cube Root Rule of Assembly Size, and the Seat-Vote Equation.

The election result itself saw an alternation in power from the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) to the Peoples National Party (PNP). Various news reports before the election had said the election was expected to be close. But it was not. The PNP won 41 seats to the JLP’s 22. Thus the JLP was defeated after a single term, which had been its first time in power since its defeat in 1989. (That was a two-term government, although its second term then was tainted by the PNP’s election boycott in 1983.)

The Jamaican case is of some interest to comparative elections specialists because it has an almost perfect two-party system. The two main parties combined for 99.87% of the vote in this election. The PNP won 61.3%.

Only once since 1959 has the third party in a Jamaican election won more than 1% of the vote (NDM, 5.2%, 1997). That makes Jamaica arguably a more “pure” two-party system than its very large neighbor to the north, and probably the biggest country to have a strict two-party system other than that really big one.

So, how did the system perform, in terms of the proportionality of translating votes into seats? We might expect a party winning over 60% of the vote in a first-past-the-post system to be significantly over-represented. The expectation is all the greater given the small size of the parliament, for the country’s population. With a population of around 2.7 million (just over a million voters), the Cube Root Rule would lead us to expect an assembly of more than double its actual size of 63. ((To be fair, they did increase their assembly size. It was only 60 seats from 1976 to 2007!)) Smaller assemblies mean less proportionality, other things constant. They tend to produce very high disproportionality under FPTP.

Yet the PNP’s 41 seats represent 65.1% of the total, hardly at all greater than its 61.3% of the vote.

The Seat-Vote Equation suggests that a “normal” case of about one million voters, 63 seats, and the top two parties at 61% and 38% of the votes would result in a leading party winning 84% of the seats. That would have been 53 seats, to 10 for the JLP.

In the 2011 election, then, Jamaica’s electoral system produced an almost completely proportional result.

This is not a systemic tendency, or if it is, it is a very new one. In fact, the Advantage Ratio (percent votes divided by percent seats) for the largest party in Jamaica had never been below 1.10 before this election (when it dropped to 1.06). Something has been going on in Jamaican elections recently: Every election that was contested by both major parties since 1959 had seen an Advantage Ratio of at least 1.16. Every contested election from 1976 through 1997 saw this ratio be at least 1.33, peaking at 1.50 in 1997, when the PNP won a third consecutive term. Then suddenly it dropped to 1.12 in 2002, when the PNP won a fourth term, in a very close election (50.14% to 49.77%). ((And, in case you are wondering, as I was, I checked: there is only a small relationship in FPTP systems between the top two parties’ difference in votes and the largest party’s advantage ratio. The effect is statistically significant, but the coefficient is around only .007. In any case, the falling ratio in close elections in 2002 and 2007 is consistent with the modeled relationship, but the greater fall in 2011 is most certainly not.))

From looking at the data on seat allocation, I can’t tell what has changed. But I can certainly tell that something has. For the third time in a row, the result has been unusually proportional for a FPTP system–and, in 2011, quite proportional for any electoral system.

The election was called early, as one was not due until the fall of 2012. The Prime Minister, Andrew Holness, in September replaced Bruce Golding (yes, another case of inter-electoral change of PM through “intra-party” mechanisms). Apparently, Holness felt he needed to go to the people for a new mandate. Apparently, it did not work out so well.

As an aside, how often do countries (especially in the Western world) hold elections in the final week of December? I imagine it must be very unusual.

As a further aside, in how many other countries is the more right-wing of the major parties called “Labour”? Or does the more left-wing party have “National” in its name? ((Yes, of course, it also has “People’s”, which is pretty much the only way I can remember which is which.))

Data cited in this entry are from my own research files.