There are certain terms that people think they understand, but when you ask more closely, you realise that people’s understanding of the meaning can vary widely.
Democracy is an example of this, if you look at what the meaning is as defined by academics, you find the meaning is more precise than some might realise
The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as:
A system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.
The dictionary also clarifies that the usage of democracy often refers to specific methods of democracy, such as:
Control of an organization or group by the majority of its members.
The practice or principles of social equality.
However these are examples of how the idea of democracy is implemented, and not absolute definitions of democracy.
For practical reasons, it is generally inefficient to try to engage all the eligible members of a population in voting on all the issues that may affect them, hence why we see the rise of representative democracy in most societies – the population elect a smaller group to act on their behalf and represent them.
One of the problems with representative democracy is the methodology of electing the representatives, and the consequences this produces.
To understand this lets look at a fictional school, Anytown High:
lets look at a class election in a class of 20 students:
Sam receives 6 votes
Lou receives 5 votes
Jo receives 4 votes
Des receives 3 votes
2 students did not vote
Now under “First Past the Post”, as the student who received more votes than any other student, Sam would be elected, however critics would argue twice as many votes were cast for other students as for Sam, so this would not represent the view of most students.
A solution might be to have a run-off between the top 2 students, in this run-off
Sam receives 9 votes
Lou receives 8 votes
3 students did not vote\
So we will say Sam is elected as having received more votes than the other candidate, even though technically Sam received less than half of all the votes available.
The number of people not voting can often be cited as cause to not accept a result, especially if a relatively high number of votes are not cast.
Now lets look at what happens when all the class representatives meet, we will assume there are 6 classes, and each class had 2 ‘parties’ – Woozle Party and Neezle Party
Class 1:
Woozle 9 votes
Neezle 8 votes
Class 2:
Neezle 14 votes
Woozle 6 votes
Class 3:
Woozle 13 votes
Neezle 6 votes
Class 4:
Neezle 14 votes
Woozle 5 votes
Class 5:
Woozle 12 votes
Neezle 8 votes
Woozle won 3 classes and Neezle won 2 classes, so there are more Woozle members than Neezle, however if you look at total votes cast within the classes, there were 45 votes for Woozle and 50 votes for Neezle.
This is where we often get complaints about the representative democracy system, where even if the individual representatives received a majority of votes in their individual election, when collated as a whole, the grouping may have received less than half the votes cast. This is a fundamental problem with the representative system, when scaled up you still get the same criticisms of lack of proportionality and accountability as you do at the lower levels, but short of electing our governing bodies directly, this is a problem we will not be able to get around – the mechanics of the system generates the possibility of differences in the individual elections being not represented in the wider body. Most of the time, this incongruity is accepted as the price of the efficiency of the election process, but inevitably there will be some who seize on these differences to make the case that the system is “un-democratic”