Saturday 6 September 2014

Democracy is not authoritarian

If the democratic franchise is extended to all people then we have universal suffrage and (rule by) democracy in its true expression, which is that all people have control over the government. If we do not have full democracy then we must have some form of oligarchy (rule by the few) since the government is controlled by less than all the people. There are different kinds of oligarchy but one of the them is the first-past-the-post voting system which awards the entirety of the power to the leading party, even if they fail to get a majority of the votes. In a proportional system power is delivered only to legislators who are representative of at least half of the electorate. If democratic representation is either direct or proportional then we can think of it as being a kind of anarchy since there is no absolute authority and the people are in charge, so then there is a parallel to be made between democracy and anarchy.

There is no such comparison to be made between oligarchy and anarchy since rule by a minority is not rule by the people and then must include an element of authoritarianism.

If the largest party is able to form a government (as they are able to do with fptp) then a minority is able to control the majority which is not anarchy and not true democracy. Direct democracy (including pr) is much more like anarchy than fptp because we are able to represent ourselves. If representation is true to our principles then we might think that this is not authoritarian which means it is similar to non-government. A true democracy is very much like non-government and it is a form of anarchy in that it is not authoritarian.

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