Miguel Afonso CaetanoDemocracy is better than Authoritarianism and way better than Monarchism. However, Representative Democracy is a Fraud. Participatory Democracy is way better than Representative Democracy.
"The fact is that any selection mechanism for representatives based on human choice (and in fact any selection mechanism other than random selection) will have inegalitarian consequences. Why is that? Because human choice is inherently discriminatory and homogenizing. Whether the skew is rational or not, choice is biased toward salient traits, or traits that are seen as superior in some ways, typically because they are rare and unevenly distributed. Those include wealth and social status, of course, but also charisma, confidence, eloquence, and height.
As a result, elections are bound to generate an inegalitarian distribution of power that is not empirically contingent but structural. So even assuming ideal conditions, which are never found in real life, not even in Scandinavian countries, elections will send to power an unrepresentative group of people over-sampling certain traits, including those that are associated with being a confident elite, and under-sampling the shy.
Am I suggesting that giving people a choice of representatives is a bad thing? No. It is plainly an improvement over rulers imposed by tradition or force. At best, however, it yields a liberal oligarchy: the rule of the few, legitimized and constrained by popular consent. That arrangement is preferable to its alternatives, but it falls short of genuine democracy—and therefore of the quality of governance we should reasonably expect from it. The alternative is not to abandon representation, but to reconfigure it."
#Democracy #RepresentativeDemocracy #Oligarchy #Liberalism #CitizensRule #Politics #ParticipatoryDemocracy
