The biggest problem with Maltese politics may be that politicians are simply too close to the people.
While this may seem odd, even contradictory, scholars Wouter Veenendaal and Jack Corbett describe this phenomenon as “hyperpersonal politics”. Under their framework, the same proximity that can make politicians accessible and accountable can also allow personal relationships to substitute for impersonal, rule-based institutions. And in a country where politicians, business owners, public officials and ordinary citizens frequently inhabit overlapping social networks, maintaining a clear boundary between political authority and personal relationships becomes difficult.
This should of course, bolster the case for limiting state discretion. The greater the resources and decisions controlled by political actors, the greater the opportunities for those powers to be exercised through favouritism, patronage and personal relationships. If political power cannot reliably be separated from Malta’s dense social networks, one cannot hope that better politicians will exercise that power more impartially.
The Demand for Dependency
One would be wrong, however, to assume that dependency developed as an imposition by the politicians on passive citizens. It has often served the interests of both sides: political actors gain loyalty, legitimacy, and electoral support, while citizens gain security, employment opportunities, and access to state resources.
Malta is a near-textbook illustration of the mechanism laid out by Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan in his essay Afraid to Be Free: Dependency as Desideratum. Unconcerned with liberty and autonomy, many people are willing to exchange a degree of freedom for security, predictability, and protection even when these come at the cost of greater personal autonomy.
The relationship is therefore reciprocal. Political dependency has persisted in Malta not simply because politicians imposed it upon passive citizens, but because it has often served the interests of both sides. And as anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain notes, the personal networks and intermediaries in Maltese society force individuals to navigate institutions and obtain resources through relationships with people capable of acting as brokers. His earlier work, Saints and Fireworks, similarly demonstrated the importance of personal networks, communal loyalties, prestige and reciprocal obligation within Maltese social life.
These networks predated the modern Maltese welfare state and mass party system. The expanding state gave political actors considerably more resources with which to participate in already personalised networks of mediation and exchange. Political actors could provide employment, assistance, permits, appointments or access to state resources, while citizens could provide loyalty, political support and votes.
Such is still the case for Malta’s political appointees hired at the discretion of a minister and with no hiring criteria involved. What appears from the outside as political patronage may, for those participating, be experienced as a functioning system of mutual obligation.
A government job secured for a relative, a permit expedited through personal contacts, or assistance obtained through political connections seems then not to be evidence that the system has failed, but evidence that it has worked. Public duty and personal obligation become increasingly difficult to separate.
Here lies perhaps the central challenge for liberty in Malta. Libertarians traditionally focus on limiting what the state can do. But in a political system built partly upon reciprocal dependency, state power is sustained not only by supply from above but also by demand from below.
It is therefore insufficient to demonstrate that a smaller state would be more efficient or more consistent with individual liberty. Markets, civil society and impersonal institutions must provide credible alternatives to the security presently sought through political authority. Otherwise, reducing the state will easily be perceived not as liberation, but as removing something upon which people have learned to depend.
When Has Liberty Ever Won in Malta?
While Maltese history lacks resounding victories for Lady Liberty, there are several remarkable moments to ponder. It was in 1987 that the Nationalist Party decided to embrace liberty in its campaigning to return to power after 16 years. While it was not a straightforward ideological victory for liberalism, voters demanded greater political and economic freedom. A materialist interpretation remains most plausible: liberty became electorally powerful because restrictions upon it coincided with economic failure.
In another case of the 1996 election, much of the opposition fervour came from parts of the business community angered by the introduction of VAT. Resistance to taxation and government economic policy therefore contributed to political change even without a broader economic crisis.
A similar pattern appeared in 2003, when the Nationalist Party defeated Labour on a pro-European platform, with voters embracing EU membership, access to the single market in a decisive step away from Malta’s economic and political isolation. A decade later, Labour turned the tables by combining economic discontent, frustration with governance and demands for greater personal and social freedom into a broad electoral coalition.
None of these elections represented a libertarian realignment. Taken together, however, they tell us something important about the circumstances under which appeals to liberty can succeed politically.
Liberty Must Become Material
Liberty has been strongest when it has not been presented as an abstract concept. People rarely think of the state as the share of expenditure in GDP. They experience it through their jobs, taxes, pensions, permits, businesses, healthcare, education, housing and interactions with public institutions. A libertarian politics that speaks only about reducing government therefore risks misunderstanding why people support government in the first place.
For someone whose economic security depends upon a public-sector job, shrinking the state may sound like unemployment. For someone who relies upon political connections to navigate an arbitrary bureaucracy, removing those connections without fixing the bureaucracy does not create freedom. For someone who fears being unable to afford healthcare, simply promising lower taxation may provide little reassurance.
The objective cannot therefore be merely to dismantle dependency. It must be to replace political dependency with individual independence.
That means competitive markets capable of producing opportunity without political connections; institutions governed by predictable rules rather than discretion; a civil society capable of performing functions that have gradually been absorbed by the state; and, where some form of public provision remains necessary, systems designed around transparent rules rather than political mediation.
The historical development of the Maltese state consequently provides both the argument for liberty and a warning to libertarians.
Malta’s personalised political system demonstrates why concentrating economic and social power in the hands of political actors is dangerous. But its durability demonstrates something equally important: dependency cannot simply be abolished by declaring it undesirable.
People must believe that what replaces it will make them more secure, not less.
The political task for liberty to win is therefore larger than making the philosophical case for a smaller state. It is to show how greater personal and economic freedom can translate into greater security, more opportunity and less vulnerability to arbitrary political power.
Liberty wins when independence becomes more valuable than dependency.
