| Summary: | The quest for development convergence with the North Atlantic has imposed on postcolonial governance a form of decomposition where rights that are integral to democratic practice are understood to exist independently of conditions for development transformation. Political modernity, and therefore the freedom to participate, can come only at the end of the process of development. This legitimizes forms of exclusion from democratic practice through the denial of the rights of participation to those seen as impediments to progress. In the West Indies, as a result, there is a disjuncture between the form and practice of democratic governance. Regime legitimacy rests on elite claims to representation of the popular will. Such claims legitimize the divergences between formalized processes of democratic elections, institutionalized in the West Indies through the Westminster model, and the actual practice of governance. Elections become transformed into a mere legitimizing discourse as postcolonial regimes renege on the promise of political freedoms denied by colonial governance.
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