Jamaican Society and the Testing of Democracy

Abstract

As a professional political scientist I am almost duty-bound to conduct an enquiry into the relationship between politics and society in Jamaica by emphasizing the political aspect of that equation. Viewed in comparative Caribbean terms, the distinctive feature of Jamaican politics is undoubtedly the country’s long-standing commitment to at least a working form of democracy. I take it, therefore, that what needs to be explained in this context is the nature of Jamaican democracy and that the question before us is the extent to which its development has been socially determined. This chapter thus begins by presenting brief profiles of Jamaican society and politics in the post-War era and then proceeds to consider the interaction of these two dimensions in the crisis years of the 1970s — a phase of Jamaican history which I have delineated as the ‘testing’ of the country’s democracy. Finally, it addresses the central analytic theme of this study by means of a discussion of the competing merits of social and political explanations of Jamaica’s experience of democracy.