Colombo, Sri Lanka: Social Scientists’ Association, 2012. xxvii, 222 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$20.00, paper. ISBN 978-955-0762-15-6.
What are the compelling questions about Sri Lankan politics? For the last two or three decades the outside world has dominantly been concerned with the causes and course of internal ethnic conflict. The country was in a state of near-permanent civil war from 1983 until 2009. The lack of interest of the Sri Lankan government in anything that could sensibly be described as a “settlement” with the Tamil population ensures continuing critical attention from the international community. There is very little on these issues in Laksiri Jayasuriya’s latest book. His focus is on electoral politics, to a large degree descriptively, and entirely chronologically. Each of the six chapters deals with elections in six periods since 1931, albeit with a strong emphasis on the period 1994–2010. The book is effectively a re-issue of his 2005 book from the same publisher on the same topic, with the addition of a new chapter covering the period 2005–10. The earlier text has not been modified or updated in any way.
I was looking for insight into the other great question posed by contemporary Sri Lankan history: how and why did a polity that was in the 1950s such an exemplar of democratic, law-bound pluralist politics decline to become the nasty, semi-authoritarian and quasi-criminal regime that we see in Colombo today. It is not clear whether Jayasuriya shares that perspective. He certainly has a strong belief in the extent to which pluralist democratic government is—or was—embedded in Sri Lankan political institutions and culture. And he certainly concludes, in pages 168–175, with a judgment on the current government very similar to the one I give above. But it is unlikely that he believes that there is a long-term trend of change in political institutions of a kind that could reasonably be labeled “political decay.” His organizing framework is one of short-term periodic changes (“cycles”) rather than long-term trends. These cycles, sometimes garnished with phrases like “critical juncture,” “watershed” and “epochal change” are defined in terms of what others might view as relatively ephemeral changes in patterns of electoral politics. While super-sensitive to changes in the electoral system—and to electoral consequences of the shift in 1978 from a Westminster parliamentary system to a “Gaullist” presidential system with proportional representation in the legislature—Jayasuriya exhibits very little interest in other changes in political institutions. These include a whole series of changes, beginning with another constitutional change in 1972, which have weakened all political and legal institutions relative to the central executive.
It is presumably this focus on the electoral system that leads Jayasuriya to characterize the current regime as a “one-party state” (141 and 168). It is certainly true that the president has won two presidential elections as the candidate of a coalition headed by the party to which he has long belonged: the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). It is also true that a majority of the members of the legislature were elected on SLFP tickets. But to term this “one-party rule” is equivalent to labeling Stalin’s personal dictatorship as “Communist Party rule.” The party is the legitimating instrument, but it has no organizational autonomy. The ruling clique changes the composition and hierarchy of the party almost at will, inducting members of the opposition parties when it suits them.
Since 2005, Sri Lanka has been ruled by a family. Executive power is concentrated in the hands of the president and two of his brothers. The outer circle that supports them comprises another brother, the president’s son, a number of other close family members, and a few unrelated individuals, most of whom are recruited for specific purposes and few of whom have significant independent power bases. Family rule is not unusual in the world. The distinguishing features of the “Rajapakse raj” are relative stability and the high degree of coherence and cooperation within the ruling circle.
How and why did Sri Lanka descend from liberal democratic pluralism into the “Rajapakse raj”? It was of course a long, complex and to a large degree contingent process. Any analysis will be disputed. But the striking feature about the contemporary social science literature on Sri Lanka is not the disputes but the near-absence of serious engagement with the question of the causes of long-term political decay. Ethnic conflict is an important part of the story, but far from the whole of it. The descent toward unrestrained executive power began in the 1970s, well before the eruption of the Sinhalese-Tamil conflict into continuous armed violence.
The electoral data that Jayasuriya presents are certainly relevant to explaining long-term political decay. But so would so many other kinds of data, from the micro-politics of successive regimes through a range of political economy considerations to the changing international context. Jayasuriya is virtually silent on most of these. His engagement with political economy virtually stops with the claim that all Sri Lankan governments since 1977 have pursued “neo-liberal” policies. One would have expected a study of “changing electoral politics” to engage in some way with the considerable long-term changes in the structure of the national economy, occupational patterns, sources of investment, sources of government revenue, and patterns of public spending. Jayasuriya points out that the voter participation rate, that was once one of the highest in the world, peaked in 1977 and has been in decline ever since. But he seeks no explanation. Had he done so, he might have noted that the decline began after the state ceased providing subsidized food to most of the population in the later 1970s, and successive governments have steadily taxed less and less and spent less on health, education and welfare.
Mick Moore
Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, United Kingdom
pp. 372-374