The Morality of Floor Crossing
The fundamental unit of any democracy is the individual voter. In voting for any candidate, the primary concern of the literate voter is usually the message the candidate is promising the electorate followed by the personality of the candidate. In countries where ignorance has a preponderance over literacy, it is usually the other way around giving truth to the GK Chesterton saying, “Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly uneducated”. Populist leaders on the pattern of late Z.A. Bhutto usually manage to make a useful mix of their personalities and their message as combined contributory factors for their electability. Bhutto’s campaign slogan, “Roti, Kapra aur Makan” was as much the theme song of his pledges as was the force of his personality. In theory, therefore, the individual candidate should be voted on the strength of his own attributes in preference to Party considerations, this is confirmed by the evidence of the voting pattern where candidates in various constituencies have to face voters having differing preferences. In contrast to preference due to his (or her) personality, in third world countries voters prefer a straight Party line based on their inclination towards a Party leader (and promises made). In the case of independents, they are voted in on individual preferences rather than any ideological Party line and as such there is no moralizing about the pattern of their vote which would be based on their personal inclination. To give one example of a Party having sway over individual personalities, the MQM swept the elections in the urban areas of Sindh in 1988 on a slate of virtually faceless candidates but both the PPP and PML relied on a combination of the strength of the individual candidates as much as voter preference for their respective Parties, the Party remaining synonymous with Ms Benazir’s leadership in the case of PPP. In 1988, 1990 and in 1993, Ms Benazir’s political charisma contributed to the individual’s victory, particularly in Sindh. The same phenomenon became true of Mian Nawaz Sharif in 1993.
