Is representative democracy really democratic? Use
examples to illustrate your answer
Barry Gilheany ©
This essay examines the efficacy of representative
democracy in terms of if and how it really delivers democracy to the members of
whatever political community it deliberates on behalf of. As a measure of its success, it discusses
participation in contemporary representative democracies and takes account of
the contrasting concepts of liberal democracy that have developed either side
of the Atlantic Ocean. I shall conclude
by giving qualified approval to representative democracy in terms of democratic
outcomes delivered.
Democracy can most simply understood as a procedure
for taking decisions in any group, association or society, whereby all members
have an equal right to have a say and to make their opinions count. Democracy is based on the following principal
precepts: all members have interests that are affected by collective decisions;
all adults are capable of reaching a view about what the optimum decision would
be, both for themselves and for the association in its entirety; in the long
run the best decisions are taken where all views are publicly expressed and
debated; where a single agreed outcome does not emerge from deliberations,
decisions should be taken by a vote of all participating members and the
principle of ‘one person, one vote, one value’ embodies the overarching value
that all persons are of equal worth (Beetham, 2005).
However there have been millennial old disputes about
the meaning of democracy. For democracy
is a concept before it is a fact and because it is a concept it has no single,
fixed meaning (Arblaster, 2002). In the
words of the philosopher W.B. Gallie, some concepts like democracy, liberty,
justice and human rights are ‘essentially contested,’ whereas others are not.[1] Anthony H. Birch replaces Gallies’ term
‘essentially contested by ‘currently contestable’ on the grounds that Gallies’
distinction between concepts that are ‘essentially contested’ and those that
are not is an ahistorical distinction (Birch, 2007). In its Greek origins, the word ‘democracy’
literally means ‘rule by the people’.
‘Democracy’ in the modern sense of the term came into vogue in the 19th
century to describe a system of representative government in which the
representatives are chosen by free, competitive elections and most adult
citizens are entitled to vote (Birch: p.110).
If democracy means, in shorthand, “rule of the
people”; two linguistic issues arise. Firstly, does the ‘people’ mean the whole
adult population or only those who own enough property to give them a ‘stake in
the country’ (Birch: p.111); a situation which pertained in many countries
before the granting of universal suffrage.
Are the ‘people’ an undifferentiated mass of humanity not separated by
territorial boundaries; a grouping of atomized individuals within a given
territory who associate with each other purely for the purpose of interest
maximization or are they segmented into diverse and overlapping groupings based
on class, gender, ethnicity, profession or other self-proclaimed entity who are
united by a common allegiance to a system and symbols of governance. To come up with a value-free description of
‘the people’ is impossible but the latter definition comes closest in modern
liberal democracies.
The second linguistic l conundrum relates to
‘rule’. If ‘ ruling’ means the arriving
at key decisions, resulting in binding laws and regulations upon society then
(apart from in referendums), only a small of people can be
‘rulers’ in modern complex societies.
So in this context ‘ruling’ must be interpreted in the looser sense of
deciding the rulers and having input into their decision-making. But how loose should this sense be? Must it be paramount in a democracy that
governmental decisions, though made by only a small minority of politicians,
reflect nevertheless the popular will?
How can the popular will be discerned?
All established democracies have political systems
based on the principle that sovereignty resides in the national parliament or
assembly. The United States is
exceptional in having a political system based on the principle inheres in the
people. The US Constitution declares
that ‘We the People of the United States … do ordain and establish this
Constitution. Members of Congress,
Senators, the President and judges all supposedly derive their authority from
the people. Based on the philosophies and treatises of the Founding Fathers of
the American republic; Americans have tended to define their democracy in three
different ways: a populist way, in terms of popular sovereignty; a pluralist
way, in terms of competition between sections and pressure groups; and an
institutional way, in terms of a set of institutions and processes and constitutionally
divined federal separation of powers between Presidency, Supreme Court and
Congress. Running right through the
discourse of American democracy is wariness of the motives and behaviour of
politicians and the concomitant need for frequent elections (Birch: pp.112-113).
The great majority of democratic theorists in Europe
have eschewed US-style populist and pluralist approaches to politics. They have defined democracy in institutional
and procedural terms, or parliamentary government with free competitive
elections and a wide franchise. However,
the normative theories they have deployed to justify democracy diverge
appreciably. French attitudes to
democracy share with the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau the assumption that
democracy is to be advocated for in collective terms rather than in the
individualistic terms found in the United States and Britain. Rousseau thought that in an ideal polity
individuals should set aside personal interests when they engaged in politics,
and commit themselves instead to the communal welfare. He postulated that the ‘real wills’, as
opposed to ‘particular will’ would merge into a consensus that he defined as
the ‘general will’. Rousseau’s
democratic credentials are highly questionable.
He did not believe in representative government, because he did not
think that people’s wills could be represented by others. His ideal centred on direct self-government
in small communities, and even here he did appear to advocate the involvement
of all, or even a majority of, adults in political decisions, writing
approvingly of the government of Geneva where less than ten per cent of its
residents had the right to participate.
However his idea of civic virtue has influenced thinking on popular
government in subsequent generations (Birch: p.117).
Despite the wording of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, French
revolutionaries did not share the American belief in popular sovereignty. They asserted the sovereignty of the French
nations and believed that the National Assembly constituted the will of the
nation. The French view of the elected
representative as an independent law maker, as opposed to being an intermediary
for their constituents or for sectional interests has generally been accepted in
Europe. French constitutional provisions
that prohibited mandates and instructions were subsequently incorporated into
the constitutions of most West European countries (Birch: p.118).
In Britain, which has no written constitution, the
same view of the elected representative is institutionalized in the
constitutional doctrine that sovereignty resides in Parliament, there being no
mention of the people, and also in the conventions that protect the privileges
of Members of Parliament (MPs). Writing
in 1929, the political theorist A.D. Lindsay of Oxford said in his book The Essentials of Democracy[2]
that ‘The purpose of representative government is to maintain and preserve
different points of view, in order to make effective discussion possible … But
this belief that everyone has something to contribute does not mean that what
everyone has to say is of equal value.’ (Birch: pp.119-124).
A representative form of democracy is thus one in
which members of a legislative body are delegated by the citizenry of the
nation to arrive at decisions which accord as far as practicable with the
agreed will of the nation and which also
reflect the preferences of the constituents who elect the members of the
legislature. In Western Europe a
consensus has emerged among theorists of democracy that it is desirable that
elected representatives deliberate more on behalf of national interests than
sectional interests while not ignoring the views of their constituents. Representative democracy differs from
oligarchies (where powerful groups take decisions for everyone else) in that
public office is open to all; selection for office is by election; there is
freedom of expression and a pluralism of independent media contributing to
vibrant public debate; there is public access to official information; there is
free associational life for citizens; there are many different channels of
upward influence; citizens have the right to vote directly on constitutional
change and rights are enforced by an independent judiciary (Beetham: pp.6-7).
Representative democracies depend upon a continuously
active citizen body if they are to function in a democratic way (Beetham: p.7).
To determine therefore whether representative democracies are really democratic in the fullest sense of the
term; it is necessary to examine the extent of political participation in
contemporary democracies. The main forms
of political participation are as follows:
1. voting in local or national elections
2. voting in referendums
3. canvassing or campaigning in elections
4. active membership of a political party
5. active membership of a pressure group
6. taking part in political demonstrations, rent strikes
in public housing, and similar activities seeking to change public policy
7. civil disobedience, e.g. refusing to pay taxes or obey
a conscription order
8. membership of government advisory committees
9. membership of consumers’ councils for publicly owned
industries
10. service user involvement in the implementation of
healthcare and social policies
11. community action relating, for example, to housing or
environmental issues in the locality (Birch: p.145)
A popular participatory democracy is a system in which
decisions are taken and policies, as a result of the widest possible free and
open discussion. The current pattern of
media ownership in Britain whereby most mass communication organs outside of
public service broadcasting are dominated by a few millionaire owners and a few
large conglomerate companies hardly contributes to a level playing field of
political discussion in that the majority of daily and Sunday newspapers extol
a range of typical right-wing opinions that extend beyond purely party politics
(Arblaster: p.92).
Another macro-issue which is potentially detrimental
to the health of representative democracies is inequality in society. There is general agreement among democratic
theorists that participation in the activities listed above enhances individual
efficacy and creates a body of ethically and politically aware and public
spirited citizens. However this view
ignores the existence of a strong social bias in the practice of political
participation. Repeated survey evidence
demonstrates an explicit correlation between education, income and social
status on the one and voting and pressure group activity on the other. For the poor and the badly educated, who it
might be assumed have most to gain from political reforms, are generally the
most apathetic and least involved in politics (Birch: p.147). Given such bias, can the system be said to be
fully democratic?
Related to this is the questionable assumption,
deriving from Aristotle’s opinion of
there always being rich and poor within society; that their interests would
always be opposed and that it was the business of government to persuade them
to co-exist, that all interests are
automatically legitimate and compromises must always be made to accommodate
them. Today not everyone accepts that
such divisions are immutable and that the spectrum of lobbies and special
interest groups represents all the legitimate concerns of society. For example there is supposedly a general
interest in the quality of health and education provision in society as
everybody is affected by service delivery in these two major areas of public
policy. However the most influential
lobbies in these areas represent professional group interests – doctors, nurses
and teachers- or specific groups of long-term patients and may not effectively
represent future patients and parents of children at school or college. Thus there is some validity in Rousseau’s
concerns about the fragmentation of society into a collection of interest
groups and the consequent impairment of the development of a common will or
common interest (Arblaster: pp.73-75).
How then can representative democracy be made more
egalitarian and participative? Compulsory voting, as in Australia, Belgium and
Italy, and mass membership of political parties, as in Britain, are two tactics
which could raise the exceptionally low turnout for national elections in the
US. Peter Bachrach[3], Carole Pateman[4] and Robert A. Dahl[5] advocate industrial
democracy in the grounds that since participation in key political decisions on
the national level must remain limited and that the way to make the United
States a more democratic society is to make the managers of large corporations
legally accountable to the workers and giving industrial workers a share in
decision-making at their workplace would increase their general political
efficacy. In Britain the last decades of
the last century saw the innovation of Community Health Councils, tenants’
associations in municipal housing who have to be consulted under the terms of
the 1980 Housing Act and community relations forums with BME representation
among other ‘client’ consultative initiatives.
While arguments against wider citizen participation in politics tend to
be conservative, there is also a radical argument to the effect that many forms
of participation tend to co-opt people into the system and thus blunt the edge
of protest. A general point to be made
is that all channels of communications between citizens and public authorities
are or quickly become two-way channels, which can be used by both sides (Birch:
pp.146-151).
Another development has been the increased use of the
referendum device in both the USA and Europe.
In May 2015 electors in the Republic of Ireland voted to insert the
right of gay people to marry into the Constitution. In September 2014 85% of the electorate in
Scotland voted in the referendum on whether the Scots should become independent;
an exercise which generated exceptionally high levels of civic and political
engagement in Scotland.
In 2005 voters in France and the Netherlands decided
to reject the draft constitution for the European Union. Devolution arrangements for Scotland and
Wales were approved in referenda in both countries in 1999 and the Belfast
Agreement was endorsed in 1998 on both sides of the Irish border in simultaneous
referenda. In 1978 more Californians
voted to adopt Proposition 13 in California, a proposal to cut property taxes
by more than a half passed by a two-to-one majority in the referendum than in
any of the candidate contests on the ballot paper. This clearly represents a move towards
participatory democracy though not one that has received universal approval
from academics who favour wider participation in politics.
To conclude, the argument for representative models of
democracy rests on the arguments made by Aristotle in Politeia; he
saw democracy as an essential part of his mixed-government polity but
on its own it would destroy the political
community as pursuing the impossible goal of direct rule by all (in the guise
of the General Will) would have led to untrammeled rule by the mob. However if
there is no democratic element, a state will be despotic or oligarchic (Crick,
1982) Good government must
involve rationality experience, ,expertise and not just opinion – but
must be subject to the consent of the governed (Crick, p.72). In the ideal representative democracy, the
legislator deliberates on behalf of the common interest as well as the
interests of their constituents. But
there will always be room for the expansion of the norms of democracy beyond
the purely procedural.
Bibliography
Arblaster, A. (2002) Democracy Third Edition
Buckingham: Open University Press
Beetham, D. (2005) Democracy:
A Beginner’s Guide Oxford: Oneworld Publications
Birch, A.H. (2007) The
Concepts and Theories of Modern Democracy Third Edition Abingdon, Oxon:
Routledge
Crick, B. (1982) In
Defence of Politics Second Pelican Edition Harmondsworth: Penguin
[1] Gallie, W.B. (1955-56)
‘Essentially contested concepts’, Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, 56: 167-98)
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