Recently, I was on a transpacific flight. The time you get during the flight is quite a lot, and with me traveling in the economy class means that the laptop runs out of juice within the first two hours of the flight. So a fairly good deal of time was left for me to "think."
With the November election heating up, Hillary, Obama and McCain at the back of my mind, I started thinking about democracy. Is democracy the best form of government?
Democracy is allegedly the "government of common people." As the saying goes, democracy is the government
1. By the people
2. For the people
3. Of the people
Before we look into whether or not enfranchising "common men/women" is a good thing, lets look at whether or not democracy achieves its goal of providing representation to common man.
Take the recent 2004 elections for that matter. George Bush Jr. won the election with a margin of 10%. The final tally read 54-44. This was enough for the USA to declare George Bush Jr as the next president of the USA. What is wrong here?
Agreed Bush won more votes than Kerry. But even so, nearly 50% of the country was against Bush. By making Bush the sole winner, the voice of nearly 50% of US citizens has been effectively quelled. It is as though, people who voted for Kerry don't count.
A more interesting case is that of the 1992 election in which Bill Clinton was declared the winner. Bill Clinton won only 43% of the total votes, while George Bush Sr and Ross Perot raked up the remaining 57% of the votes. In other words, when Bill Clinton became the president, a majority of the US citizens were against him.
By making winner take all, democracy, in its current form, is effectively disenfranchising people who voted for losers. Theoretically, the number of discontented people can be arbitrarily close to the total electorate size (assuming large number of candidates). Practically, in any closely contested election, nearly 50% of the people will always be unhappy at the election outcome. Democracy fails to provide representation to every common man. At best, it can be described as "a form of government which provides representation to people who voted for winners."
Next Post: Is representation to every common man a good thing?
