Can you put a price tag on the value of your vote? What is your vote worth? Perhaps more importantly, how much influence does your vote have? A final question is, perhaps, what is it you vote for? Not who, but for what, and why?

All these questions are fundamental to understanding how to make our vote count and to therefore achieve the things we want for our country and steering it in the right direction. At present, it is no secret that people vote according to their tribal allegiance. People are born and raised with a narrative about Maltese history that is, for the most part, coloured either Red or Blue.

According to the Blues, Malta suffered deprivation at the hands of the Reds for a generation, and the Reds have proved they cannot be trusted with power, and must be kept out at all costs. Nothing can be compromised or risked when it comes to keeping out the Reds. According to the Reds, the Blue tribe was corrupt, but it was very good at hiding its corruption and was clever about how it distributed resources to its own people, keeping the Reds out in the cold. The Reds think that they have to tolerate any mistakes from their leaders because, after so long in Opposition, they cannot afford to return to it. They will close a blind eye to the wrongdoings of their leaders, just to keep out the Blues.

Under these conditions, the vast majority of people vote based on a deep sense of fear and distrust of the opposing tribe, and will do anything to defy them. The greatest casualty in this tribal warfare is the very political issues and policies on which Malta desperately needs objective debate. For example, the environment suffers because people generally do not vote on environmental issues. What people vote on is generally beyond policy. People vote because their votes are bought by favours, handouts or 'jobs for the boys', under any administration. People vote in order to be close to the powers-that-be because, in Malta, political connections are widely perceived to be one of the most important ways of getting ahead in life.

Yet this brings us back to our questions. It seems that a price tag can indeed be put on votes. With regard to how much influence your vote has, we must acknowledge that it has very little value, if you are never going to consider voting for another Party. That is because Parties do not need to go out of their way to convince you of their policies, if you will never vote based according to policies. Tribal loyalty, or votes being bought for economic benefits, means that policy is largely irrelevant to genuine democratic discourse. Policy is therefore going to be weak, and the public good will suffer because political parties have no incentive to come up with the best possible policies.

To get better policies in Malta, we need to vote for them. Third parties in Malta usually distinguish themselves through innovation and they often fight for the genuine public good, snubbing the interests of lobbies and moneyed interests. It is only by being willing, in the first place, to vote for another Party with your first preference vote, that you give your vote real weight and value. Once the major parties see that people are willing to vote on issues, then they will be less corrupt and will adapt accordingly to win back the people they have let down.

The writer is the deputy leader of Partit Demokratiku