What happens in Parliament is important but it more or less reflects what happens outside it, in the economy and society generally. Focussing exclusively on what individual members of the House of Representatives do – will they vote for, against or abstain on a particular motion, will they follow their party’s line or not – may lead us to ignore how their behaviour reflects deeper rumblings in the bowels of the country.
First of all, in case you haven’t noticed, people today are talking- Mario Vella
Same goes for the political parties. What happens inside a political party, especially a major one, cannot be understood in isolation from what is happening in society. Political parties may choose this or that leader, this or that policy, but ultimately the choice made by those members qualified to actually make the choice will have to be endorsed by the national electorate. Parties may well ignore what is happening outside of their party headquarters but they do so at their own peril.
And sometimes they do. The actions of politicians and political parties are not always “rational” but then rationality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The beholder may disagree that a certain decision is rational – in the sense that it is the best possible choice to reach a specific goal – but that may simply be so because the player is not aiming at the same objective as the beholder. It could also be that the player knows things that the beholder does not, or the other way around. In Herbert Simon’s sense, their necessarily bounded rationalities may simply have different boundaries.
It would be fun to set Maltese students of sociology this exercise. Revisit Max Weber’s four types of rationality (instrumental, belief-oriented, emotive and habitual) by discussing some of the choices and positions made and taken by Maltese politicians, parties (and the electorate itself) since World War II. Would you define the choices involved in the situations below as “instrumental”, “belief-oriented”, “emotive” or “habitual”?
1947-1948: When Nationalists opposed a “moderate programme of social services proposed by the Labour government, e.g., compulsory unemployment insurance and old age pensions to be paid for by an income tax” and “dubbed (it as) a ‘Kremlin-like policy’, the work of extreme socialists, the Fabians (sic)” (Edith Dobie writing in The Western Political Quarterly, December 1956, quoting the Nation of January 3 and 21, March 24 and December 1, 1948).
1974: When six Nationalist MPs abstained and 49 Labour and Nationalist members voted in favour of a Republican Malta. 1998: The way the PN handled the PL’s crisis. 12 February, 2011: When the majority of the PN executive committee voted in favour of a motion declaring their party’s position against the introduction of the right to divorce. May 28, 2011: When 122,547 Maltese citizens chose to vote “yes” in the divorce referendum and 107,971 voted “no”. July 25, 2011: When 52 MPs voted in favour of the divorce law, 11 voted against, five abstained and one was absent.
What about today? But let’s get out of the lecture room and talk to people. First of all, in case you haven’t noticed, people today are talking. They are talking like never before. It used to be said that one fundamental distinction between Labourites and Nationalists was that whereas Labourites openly criticised their own party and their own government no matter who might have been listening, Nationalists never did so if there was the slightest suspicion that there was a Labourite in sight. This is changing and it is changing fast.
It was enough for a civil servant known or even just remotely suspected of Labour sympathies to walk into an office for heated conversations between his Nationalist colleagues to suddenly dry up. Old timers will tell you how common such situations were when night manoeuvres were underway to oust George Borg Olivier. It happened again later when the manoeuvres in the dark were aimed at Guido de Marco and later still at John Dalli. Now it is no longer rare for younger Nationalists, especially the better educated ones and those that have had considerable exposure abroad, to refuse to keep their mouth shut when “one of the others” walks in mid way through a discussion on, say, Lawrence Gonzi’s stance on divorce.
It is no longer surprising today for intelligent young people with a Nationalist pedigree to openly question the rationality of Dr Gonzi’s line on a number of issues. Only a few of them will migrate to “the other side” – that step is still too long for most of them – but many more than the blinkered castellans at Pietà dare imagine would be quite satisfied with seeing a thorough changing of the guard in the Nationalist Party. They may not sympathise with Franco Debono’s style but they have infinitely less sympathy with Dr Gonzi’s way of doing (or not doing) things. Nor are they impressed with the return of mythical old horses in the party’s control rooms. They find attempts to resurrect the legendary electoral organisation of the 1980s as pathetically retro.
Dr Vella blogs at http://watersbroken.wordpress.com .