REGARDLESS of the political dispensation any country faces, the moral responsibilities of all elected politicians is primarily to advance the national cause. Indeed, there will be philosophic and ideological differences among politicians. Nevertheless, removing the philosophical and ideological veil would expose the similarities among politicians. What differences among politicians exist will relate to their methods of promoting the national cause. Recognition among people of their similarities advances trust building.

The amount of perceived power the politician thinks she/he has will determine what methods she/he will use in deliberations.  That is, it is this power-derived methodology that sustains the philosophic and ideological differences among politicians, and promote their differences.

The task at hand, then, is to target similarities among politicians wedded to advancing national development, particularly for the fact that there are more similarities among politicians than there are differences. This is true for others as well. If not, the focus on differences among politicians will intensify power plays in a parliamentary setting, which seems to be the norm in politics.
In any intense political power-play, the eye on the prize, which is advancing the national cause, becomes less important, giving way to ideological efforts to ratcheting up a politician’s power and status; and that behaviour becomes dangerous because  it tells the ordinary people that that kind of politician lives off politics; and where for that politician advancing the national cause takes second place.
And where politicians feel the need for more power, in order to exercise greater control and status, the frequency of using the zero-sum power game (one person wins, the other loses) becomes the norm; when this happens, the chance to focus more on politicians’ similarities than their differences becomes improbable.

A high level of intensity of this political power play invariably truncates development efforts; and will surely push the ordinary people to question whether the things that have been routine for them for so long are now falling apart.
When people begin to suspect that traditional institutions are collapsing and things are not what they seem to be, they  turn to ideologies and leaders who come to the people as political entrepreneurs offering political salvation; and there are examples of politicians offering up themselves as the answer to the people’s advancement and offering salvation; there is the case of Yugoslavia where Slobodan Milolevic seduced the Serbs to believe that he has the ideology and all the answers for a national revival, producing probably the bloodiest war in Europe since World war II; the ravaging political violence of  Cambodia in the 1970s and Rwanda in the 1990s are other cases in point (Chirot (2012).
The intenity in the power play gains momentum, as Chirot put it, when politicians demonstrate an unrealistic ideological urge to quick-fix the society mainly with deliberations, discussions, and debates. The intense power plays in Yugoslavia, Cambodia, and Rwanda  are clear demonstrations where politicians focused more on their differences than their similarities, and where they engaged in  intense ideological extremism.
What the intense power play juxtaposes, too,  is participatory democracy v. deliberative democracy. In a political context, the focus of deliberative democracy is to enable politicians to defend their political and moral positions with reasons, and to debate with other politicians the reasons they offer (Pateman, 2012). This is good but not enough.
And if deliberation is necessary for democracy, then it is not sufficient (Pateman, 2012), and it is deliberative democracy that is now popular and at the same time provides the ingredients for intense power plays, where democracy becomes synonymous with deiberations, discussions, and debates; a democracy of rhetoric.  Participatory democracy is the way forward.
Pateman (2012) sees some features of participatory democracy, thus:  citizens must paricipate in the democratic authority systems;  democratize democracy where citizens participate in decision making in their daily lives as well as within the larger political structures; establish a participatory society; and effect reforms to undemocratic authority systems. Pateman talks about participatory budgeting (PB) in this context of participatory democracy. Perhaps, next week, I could address PB.
Participatory democracy is amenable to using a win-win method. And where zero sum power game invariably is applied as a method in deliberative democracy, the focus on politicians’ differences and their ideological and philosophical positions becomes the rule. You see in deliberative democracy, the primary concern is with deliberations within parliament, or some other forum at the expense of democracy in the larger society and the political system; the rhetoric in deleberative democracy is too much on deliberations. The Guyana parliament today has some affinity with deliberative democracy .
Nevertheless, the Guyana parliament has to advance beyond deliberative democracy toward participatory democracy. Speaker Raphael Trotman in advocating for citizens’ inputs (a form of mini-publics to which Pateman alluded) in parliament has raised the bar of democracy by pointing the way forward to greater citizen participation in the political structure.