ABSTRACT
The election in 1976 was the first election in Jamaica in which ideological concerns were prominent in campaign materials and constituted readily perceived differences between the two political parties. This chapter explains details of the 1976 campaign. It discusses use of symbols of class and of class conflict. In general, the People's National Party (PNP) campaigned on its record of achievements and called upon the electorate for a mandate for democratic socialism. The Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) campaigned on the "Communist Threat" and economic mismanagement on the part of the PNP government. The differences between the JLP and the PNP on the matter of class conflicts were similar to those on the matter of racial conflict. In contrast to 1967, when references that fall into the categories under study – class, race, anticolonialism and anti-imperialism – were relatively rare and somewhat peripheral to the campaign, in 1976 those four broad rubrics tell the greater part of the election story.
