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Elections and Political Campaigns in a Racially Bifurcated State: The Case of Guyana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Ralph R. Premdas
Ralph R. Premdas*
Affiliation:
University of Guyana, Box 841,Georgetown, Guyana
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Extract

In democratic, integrated political systems characterized by a sharing of fundamental social values and “primitive beliefs” among the population, elections serve a salutary purpose. They not only reaffirm the commitment and involvement of the citizen to the prevailing political system by the ritual act of voting participation, but simultaneously legitimize the means and processes by which political values are authoritatively allocated (Milnor, 1969: 1-2). Elections and voting “draw attention to common social ties and to the importance and apparent reasonableness of accepting the public policies that are adopted (Edelman, 1964: 3). For these reasons, elections serve to integrate the citizen into the polity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , August 1972 , pp. 271 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 1972 

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Footnotes

*

Author’s Note: I wish to thank the Ford Foundation Center for International Comparative Studies for the grant given me to conduct field research for this article in 1968-1969. I also wish to thank Professor Robert E. Scott of the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois and Anne Premdas of the University of California at Berkeley, for their invaluable editorial advice in putting this article together.

References

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