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Democracy

Democracy Now

Paul Gregory on How to End Packages and Bundling.

A major practical problem with democracy is how opinion can be organised and measured so that something resembling a general will, or a majority, or a consensus, can be identified. How can one possibly establish all the relevant opinions and values people hold? How can we find out how seriously and how consistently they hold them? The failure to recognise that this is by no means a straightforward matter gives rise to widespread confusion about what democracy is, or should be, and this confusion flows over into cynicism and discontent with democracy.

There is also a lack of clarity about the nature of political representation, and there are indeed ways in which the representative function essential to modern democracy can be – and regularly is – subverted. Hence, in practice, voters elect representatives on the strength of standardised packages of policies covering everything from abortion through to taxation passing through such widely divergent and controversial fields as education, health, transport, social security, the constitution, law & order, defence and foreign policy.

How realistic is it to suppose that most voters, or even a bare majority, are going to find that their diverse views, assuming that they do have views that they have thought through independently, are adequately reflected in one of a very few such wide-ranging packages? One might go on to ask how often there is likely to be an individual candidate, let alone several hundred, whose scope of knowledge and sense of judgement is such that they are worthy of trust on all of these issues.

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