REPORT #18 1998
AN INTRODUCTION TO BELIZEAN COMPARITIVE POLITICS!
Produced by the Belize
Development Trust
A method of studying and constantly changing government systems to
achieve social goals and results.
Belizean Comparative Politics from the observations of a Caye Caulker
uneducated fisherman:
To the extent that comparativists discover general patterns that
explain variations on such crucial dependent variables as democracy,
regime breakdown and revolution, economic growth, and the relative
success of business to keep operating despite government micro-management.
The fundamental concern of comparative politics is to explain across
polities the differential values or core dependent variables. If
democracy is the value on a dependent set of variables then
comparativists using other political systems have to explain such
variables as; economic growth, gross national product, the rise of a new
aristocratic class of lifetime political party dictators masquerading as
democratically elected leaders with "minister's discretion" and rubber
stamp parliaments, with no checks and balances; against such effects as
anarchy, rising crime, foreign pressures and corruption as a new accepted
political social code.
Stability favors investment and growth, but democracy and stability
seem to go together when democratic methods are gradually widened to
include more citizens in policy making.
Studies of religions and democracy have shown that Catholicism in such
countries as Austria, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Weimar Germany,
many Latin countries have shown that Catholic populations tend not to be
stable democracies. Catholicism is indeed authoratarian and hence
populations that have majority catholic populations, tend to become
unstable democracies. Democracy is more at home and successful in
secular societies of Northern Europe and North America.
To what extent Jesuit influence in Belize has had on the current crop
of politicians due to pre-independence brain washing and the resultant
failure of such politicians to widen citizen voter participation systems
of government, to make Belize a rich stable nation is worth some serious
study. Can the 3/4 billion dollar debt of Belize and lack of democratic
autonomous local governments and checks and balances on policy making be
attributed to authoritarian Jesuit rule in towns and villages of Belize
of forty to fifty years ago, when they were the hidden government in power
under the benign neglect of the paternal Colonial British system?
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