Election of the Day: Barbados

On Wednesday, Barbados will hold its 15th general election since achieving full independence from the British in 1961, and the second since becoming a Republic in 2021. The Republican transition didn’t change much of anything about the structure of the government; the simply appointed the Governor General at the time, Dame Sandra Martin, to be the first president. The House of Assembly has 30 seats, all elected in single member districts, first past the post.

Barbados is a Duverger’s law-following country, as a stable two party system has emerged. The current ruling party, the Barbados Labour Party under Prime Minister Mia Mottley, has been wildly successful the last two election cycles, winning the popular vote by better than 2-1 and winning 29/30 seats in 2018 and 30/30 in 2022 (they appear to have lost one seat due to a by-election since then.) The only poll I can find shows them coasting to a third straight non-competitive victory.

And interesting quirk of the politics of Barbados that might inspire a twinge of jealousy among readers residing in a wide array of other countries, is that conservatism, in the modern sense, simply doesn’t exist as a political and electoral force in Barbadian politics. There was a conservative party in the colonial era, the Barbados National Party, who won four seats in the 1961 election and retained two of them in 1966, and were never heard from again. It’s the Democratic Labour party who’ll contest and likely lose more or all seats in this election. The BLP’s dominance is recent; the DLP won large majorities in the first several elections in the 21st century. These two parties have dominated Barbadian politics since the beginning, and they largely agree on almost everything important. There appears to be no discernable appetite for a politics that exists outside the social democratic consensus. Trying to find accounts of how these parties diverge, it mostly comes down to style and tone; the DLP is more populist and moralistic while the BLP is more technocratic, but on substance the daylight is minimal.

What is this election about? Accusations of corruption are being made by both sides. The DLP has accused Motley’s administration of interfering with the commission in charge of electoral boundaries (probably irrelevant if true, as the polling gives the BLP a roughly 75-20 lead), while the BLP has suggested that the DLP has been subject to undue foreign influence, in the form of falling under the control of a foreign political party, the United National Congress. (UNC is the governing center-left party in Trinidad and Tobago; UNC officials vigorously deny this charge as does the DLP leader). Insofar as there are noteworthy substantive political disagreements between the DLP and BLP, they’re not finding their way into the election coverage. This should be a suspense-free election; the range of realistic possibilities runs from “BLP wins by even bigger numbers than 2022, gets all 30 seats” to “DLP improves at the margins, picks up a couple of seats.”