“It is called a democracy, because not the few but the many govern,” stated Thucydides in Pericles’ Funeral Oration (Hooker, 1996). From the Ecclesia and Ostracism in Ancient Greece to the Constitutional Monarchy of England, and from the National Assembly in the French Revolution to the waves of democratization at the end of the 20th century, humans have come a long way to seek equity in power to rule. The transposition of preposituses has been the main driving force throughout the course of history. Compared to the centuries of feudalism and monarchism in human history, elections and democracies seem to be a rather recent and pioneer form of governance. This essay will begin with incorporating the history of elections to answer the question raised in the prompt. For a simple summary, I believe that an election per se is a deficient and inferior system. First, I will begin my essay by explaining why election policies are substandard. Later on, I will elaborate on the potential problems of elections.
An election is a decision-making process in which a group of people decides who has the right to rule via voting. Oxford Languages (https://languages.oup.com/) defines the word as “a formal and organized choice by vote of a person for a political office or other position.” There are two major components regarding elections: mechanisms and purpose. A mechanism is how an election is carried out. For instance, an election might include the entire population or just a segment of it, depending if its based on a majoritarian system or a proportional system. The purposes of elections can also vary. Some might produce a direct leader, while others produce delegates in a political system. In this essay, “the will of the people” will be defined as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s understanding of the general will. This is the shared will between all of the wills of the people (Bertram, 2023).
However, the most conspicuous and inherent weakness of elections is the “tyranny of the majority.” Simply summing the will of the majority does not necessarily represent, and has not always represented, the general will. First, the majority rule can come at the expense of heavily
persecuting the minority. One of the first ever systemized democracies in human history burgeoned in the city-state of Athens around the 6th BC. The Athenian democracy featured an Ecclesia, which was an assembly that includes all the citizens in Athens that had the purpose of deciding state affairs. This is an example of direct democracy, where every single citizen, having one and only one vote, could attend elections directly. This form of elections is where the “tyranny of the majority” is most likely to take place.
Even though the people were in charge of Ecclesia, some Athenian politicians focused on persuading the assembly, deluding them, and promoting their political success rather than actually doing good for the state. This condition offsets Ecclesia’s advantage in representing each of the voters. These demagogues were referred to as “sophists” by the Ancient Greeks, which meant politicians who used empty rhetoric to win support. To be specific, Ostracism was a procedure adopted by Greeks to expel anyone elected by the Ecclesia from Athens. The original intention was to eject politicians who could potentially become a tyrant and threaten the city’s democracy; however, it turned into an unforeseen weapon for rulers to banish their political opponents. Victims of this policy included well-known figures such Aristides and Thucydides, who were righteous and candid politicians who were just unfortunately disliked by the public. Despite having the most democratic government then, the direct democracy of Athens nonetheless failed to ensure the benefits of the majority, leading to an erroneous failure in its own history.
The fatal flaw of the Athenian democracy started to become more and more serious in the Peloponnesian War. For instance, Athenians favored the bellicose leader Cleon over another leader Nikias who proposed a peace treaty. This led to Athenians fighting multiple brutal battles against with the Spartans, which heavily damaged the Athenian economy. A few decades later, due to their losing streak against the Spartans, the Athenian devised a plan of sending an expedition to Sicily to pillage their resources. The plan garnered widespread support from the Athenian population, yet Athens never had the power to carry out a military operation across half the Mediterranean Sea, and
Sicily was beyond their military capabilities. However, the journey still took place under the pressure of public opinion, and any general or politician who questioned its practicality was either expelled or executed. The result was, unsurprisingly, Athens losing almost its entire fleet, which ultimately lead to the loss of the Peloponnesian War and the downfall of Athens.
Second, elections do not necessarily express the will of people because the results of elections do not always bring long-term well-being for the people. Fast forward to modern times, where many countries have suffered from elections where the people focused more on current situations than long term impacts. People always say, “the crowds have sharp eyes,” but there are two things that can even blind the eyes of the majority: populism and social welfare. Back in 1910, Argentina welcomed its centennial anniversary of independence, boasting their status as the 8th largest economy in the world and the strongest country in South America at the time. Another hundred years later, Argentina has regressed to a mediocre developing country. The main culprit is its political policy: the people cannot make the right decisions because they are hoodwinked by populism and social welfare.
After over a century of political instability, a Argentinian ruler emerged who would later introduce a controversial ideology that would rule the country for the next 50 years: Juan Perón. Despite Argentina having a moderately prosperous economy at the time, its political situation has been disastrous. Politicians, the military, the working class, and students all contributed to the civil unrest and coup of the country. Perón knew that in order to gain support, he would need to win the appreciation of the people. Relying on the people’s fervent passion for nationalism, Perón, who was then president, issued a series of economic policies that would benefit the locals yet would prove to be devastating for the country’s economy in the future. He erected tariff barriers, which were supposed to help native farmers, but essentially cut off Argentina’s trade with Europe which the economy relied on. He also spent an astronomical amount of the government budget on nationalizing foreign assets. For instance, in 1948 Perón’s administration used 2.5 billion pesos
worth of cattle and gold reserve to purchase all of the British railroads in Argentina. This action pleased the Argentinian nationalists, but they were not aware that the railroad networks are already old, decrepit, and subsequently heavily overpriced. Furthermore, he severely taxed capital holders, and distributed substantial welfare to the people to a point the government could not even afford. All the acts above made Perón a popular politician among the people, winning consecutive elections. However, these also contributed to the economic collapse of Argentina in the latter part of the twentieth century.
Examples like these are not uncommon. Similarly, Greece suffered from a financial crisis in 2012, almost filing for bankruptcy. The main reason is that the ruling party that just assumed office achieved the majority of public support through handing out massive amounts of welfare to citizens. Greece then distributed as many benefits for its citizens as countries as the UK and France did when its economy was 10 times smaller. In 2012, the external debt from pension payments alone was the equivalent to two entire years of Greece’s GDP. The Greek people voted for their leaders for the immense welfare payment, yet they were unaware that it was at the expense of destroying Greece’s economy.
In conclusion, deciding a country’s cardinal tasks with elections is never a once-for-all way to govern. It puts the risks and responsibilities of the entire country in the hands of individuals. How come the Nobel Prize laureate is not decided by a referendum? It is because most people do not understand the most pioneering research in science and normal people are not professional enough to judge the quality of scientific research. Now what if we adopted referendum strategies? Then the discovery that benefited the daily lives of the wider public the most would win. Therefore, the scientific community would be incentivized to focus more on practical breakthroughs, and the scientists who studied in non-mainstream fields or scientists who studied in complicated and hard- to-understand theoretical sciences will be neglected. Similarly in politics, the people should not be given the power to decide a problem regarding the nation. Plato discussed in The Republic about
political systems—he deemed meritocracy to be the ideal government, where the states are ruled by a small group of wise philosophers. Democracy was actually a slippery slope to ochlocracy, or mob rule (Plato, 1943).
No political system is perfect, however. Elections need to pair up with the state’s executive ability and effective government structure to carry out max efficiency. First, the cultural literacy of the people greatly affects the results of elections. Citizens need to understand and grow awareness of the democratic status of their government and make well thought out decisions about their country’s future. Election is just a tool of governance, and the quality of the results of elections is determined by the quality of the votes. Second, elections can go under some optimization, such as adopting the strategy of representative democracy, in which people decide through elections consisting of a small group of people to represent them in a parliament, which will decide government affairs. Election in itself is just a tool, despite being imperfect, can still be improved.
Democracy has its advantages, but the intrinsic impairment of it makes this an ill-suited system for national politics on its own. But is meritocracy the best political system, then? Plato never conceived about a population consisting of a billion people or even a million people. On the one side, authoritarian governments are more efficient in making decisions since only a handful of people are in charge; on the other hand democracies can, in most cases, prevent dictatorship and corrupted governments. Democracy and authoritarianism are on the polar opposite sides of the political spectrum, and the facts just listed are merely a corner of the iceberg of the study on political systems. What is important, however, is that we must not have our views limited to merely these two policies. “Political practice in human society has always outpaced the progression of political theory” so the best way to investigate the efficacy of political systems such as elections is to learn from real-world experiences, and not just hypothesis (Pasquino, 2014).
The results of elections, unfortunately, hardly express the complete will of the people, considering the inherent dilemma of election as a tool to achieve greater good for all. Yet this is not
the reason to negate democracies entirely. Different governing systems have their strengths and weaknesses, and it is the topic of another discussion.
References
Bertram, C. (2023). “Jean Jacques Rousseau.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition).
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/rousseau/
Hooker, R. (1996). “Thucydides, Pericles’ funeral oration.” University of Minnesota Human Rights Library.
https://chrlibrary.umn.edu/education/thucydides.html
Pasquino, P. (2014). Majority rules in constitutional democracies: Some remarks about theory and practice. In S. Novak & J. Elster (Eds.), Majority decisions (pp. 219 – 235). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107286160.011
Plato. (1943). “Plato’s the republic.” Books, Inc.
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