Problem with Democracy: People Not Institutions

This past week, I had to read a bunch of articles, which painted a very bleak picture for democratic governance throughout the Western world. Voter turnouts are decreasing, trust in political parties is in the toilet, and political parties are viewed as unresponsive to the needs of the population…etc.

Yet there’s a basic problem in much of the literature on satisfaction with democracy. The problem is that paper after paper actually measures citizen satisfaction with the running of democratic institutions within various countries rather than the idea of democracy itself.

It would be more apt to say that democratic institutions are in decline. And the reason they are in decline is because we foolishly let ourselves inside of the institutions. It’s not the institutions, but what men do inside of the democratic institutions that has given democracy its’ bad name.

For example, an election is one of the most basic tenets of democratic governance. If the voters elect a candidate that vows to run on a platform of slashing deficits and ending government corruption and he ends up indicted for handing out government contracts to his brother in law, while drinking fine wine and traveling on a fleet of private jets, what does the voter do? They blame the individual candidate or party… not the electoral institution itself.

If, democracy is on the decline, we have no one to blame but our foolish selves.

Does Democracy Need Authoritarian Government?

My reading for seminar this week was satisfaction with democracy. The literature I’ve read indicates that satisfaction with democracy has been on the decline since the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union. I doubt, many people are going to be shouting “Down with democracy, Up with Communism” and carrying pictures of Lenin, Stalin and Mao in the streets.

 Still the question is interesting: Does Democracy need some form of autocratic government?

During the Cold War, politicians could use the very real threat of Communism to differentiate themselves by arguing “We’ll at least were not Communists.” Following the fall of the Soviet Union, lots of inadequacies with democracy and the democratic process have had a rather harsh spotlight shined on them.

 Parties that were previously bastions of democracy were revealed to be just as corrupt as the evil communists. Furthermore, citizens have grown increasingly dissatisfied with unresponsive, “do nothing” political parties, that don’t care about them.

 Certain political figures throughout history have advocated this idea of a world completely governed democratically. Great idea, we can have mass discontent throughout the world. One can’t deny that democracy was easier with communism around. Because we could always say “Look how they live in Communist countries”!

Once the light was shined on democracy though, we found that though democracy may be preferable, it is far from the perfect paradise that some made it out to be. The fall of Communism forced us to confront the reality of democratic imperfection.