UK-2 written by Conor Newman
Plan
-Define democracy and direct and liberal democracies (with examples)
-The UK and democracy-are we truly a democracy?
-Other types of Government-oligarchies, totalitarian
-Arguments for: People can choose who represents them, people participate in politics
-Arguments against: People don’t know what’s best for them, tyranny of the majority etc
Introduction
In this essay I intend to argue that Democracy is not the worst form of Government as stated in the title, although it is an imperfect, flawed system, is not the worst of all Governmental systems. The quote in the title was actually spoken by Winston Churchill, who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during most of World War 2 and five years afterwards. The full quote, “Democracy is the worst form of Government, except all the others that have been tried”, actually implies a completely different meaning to that of the title’s quote, and this is the point I shall be arguing in this essay.
Democracy
Democracy comes from the Ancient Greek, “Demos”, meaning people. Democracy essentially means ‘Rule of the people’, and so can be defined as a system of Government where the majority, rather than the minority, has power. This system of Government was first seen in Ancient Athens, where a significant proportion of the population were able to directly influence decision making (although women, slaves, and immigrants were not eligible to vote). This is an example of one of the two types of Democracy-Direct democracy.
Direct democracy is when the majority of people are the ones actually making the decisions; everyone has the opportunity to vote and have their say on every issue regarding their state (In ancient Athens, the state was a city, and so did not have the size or population of most modern states). Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher at the time, was opposed to Democracy as he knew it, because he believed that politics and Governing should be left up to those with the time, knowledge and expertise to rule with the interests of the people in mind-he favoured oligarchies and monarchies to democracy. Most modern political experts now believe Direct Democracy to be inefficient and ineffective for modern society-decisions need to be made quickly, and to gather every single person to debate a topic is unwieldy and near impossible. That is why democracy has moved towards a less direct form, known as a liberal or representative democracy.
In a liberal democracy, the majority of people elect others to represent them in Government. This means that the people are not directly involved in Government, but instead select someone to actually represent their views and to make decisions in their name. This means that the people still maintain that control over Government, since they can actually choose who represents them and, if needs be, remove them, but leads the day-to-day running of the state up to others, who will generally have more knowledge and expertise in Politics than the average citizen. Liberal democracies are the most common form of Government in modern times, so there are numerous examples of them: the USA, the UK, France, Germany etc.
Representatives
There are two models of a representative. The first is the delegate model, which is the idea that a representative should not be autonomous, and so should only relay what their constituency wants, rather than acting on their own beliefs. This is based around the idea that the people should maintain the power over the way they are governed and that their representatives are only elected to regurgitate their views to the legislature, rather than actually use their own judgment or make their own decisions. Edmund Burke, an Irish politician in the 18th century, contested this idea, believing that representatives should follow the trustee model. This is a theory that representatives should be elected to follow their own judgment and make their own decisions. Although they are accountable to the electorate, they must be more autonomous and be able to decide for themselves the right decision to make. The idea behind this is that a representative will usually have more political knowledge than the average elector, and so will be able to better judge what is the best decision to make than the people.
There are problems with both of these models. The delegate model means that the representative is too restricted and cannot really voice their own views. Also, there is really no need for the people to elect a knowledgeable representative, because virtually anyone can tell a group of people the views of their electorate; a representative should be flexible and be able to utilise their own knowledge to come to an informed decision. There are flaws in the trustee model as well, since there have to be rules in place to ensure that the representative cannot rule simply without proper consent of the people. An effective representative should be somewhere in the middle between a trustee and a delegate; able to think and make judgments for themselves, but always bearing in mind their constituents.
Democracy in the UK
The United Kingdom can be described as a liberal democracy. It is split into several single-member constituencies, which means that electors vote for only one representative in their constituency. The voting system in the UK is First-Past-The-Post, a simple plurality system in which the candidate with the most votes, regardless of whether they have an overall majority, wins the election. These Members of Parliament (MPs) then take their seats in the first chamber of the bicameral legislature of the UK, the House of Commons. The other chamber of Parliament is the House of Lords, which consists of hereditary and appointed peers, although the House of Commons holds more power than the Lords due to the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949. This makes the legislative system more democratic as it means that the democratically elected body holds most of the power. However, there are flaws in this system. Firstly, people now usually vote along party lines, rather than for individual representatives, making the system inherently flawed. Also, people only have the chance to change their representatives and their Government every four or five years, and even then it is not certain that the representative or government will change unless a significant proportion of the people vote in the same way. Furthermore, the flaws of the FPTP electoral system also affect the democratic principles of the UK. Since seats are not on a proportional basis, this means that a lot of people’s votes are wasted. An example of this was the 2005 general election, in which the Labour party received a mere 35.2% of the popular vote, but held over 55% of the seats in the House of Commons-this is clearly unfair, as it means that only a relatively small proportion of the population actually voted for labour, but they still gained a significant majority.
Other forms of Government
As well as democracies, there are other forms of Government that all have strengths and weaknesses. An oligarchy is the rule of an elite few who hold the political power in society. This elite class can be in such a position of power because of its wealth, education, or through a traditional, hereditary title. There have been several examples of oligarchies in history, most notably Ancient Sparta and South Africa in the 20th century. In the latter example, the oligarchs held power simply because of their race. Oligarchies, however, can often devolve into a system where the people are discriminated against, suffer human rights abuses, and are generally maltreated, as was seen in South Africa and in other oligarchies in history. Another Governmental system is a monarchy, in which a hereditary ruler holds political power. An absolute monarchy is when the monarch holds complete power, although obviously they will usually delegate some power to others. There are very few examples of absolute monarchies left in the world, the most famous being Brunei, Saudi Arabia, and Vatican City. A constitutional monarchy, on the other hand, is a monarchy in which powers is not held by the monarch, but by their representatives, and the monarch is simply a figurehead who does hold some power, but does not generally utilise it. The United Kingdom is an example of a constitutional monarchy, as the Queen does have some powers, although she rarely utilises them and instead