Archive for 7 November, 2020

Parties

2020-11-07 12:35

In continuation of yesterdays post Public decisions, a small further thought: One party, two parties, more parties? Political systems emerge around parties of common interests. We are used to a multiparty system with more or less stable parties organized around a certain value-system. Parties give structure and continuity independently of the leading figures, but they tend as well to decouple the voter from the executed power. More parties seem to mean more democracy, but on the bottom line it depends more on the structures behind the curtain, because even with the flaws of the bipartisan system and the concentration of the power to one winner in a seemingly unfair manner, the system has means of correction and the underlying votes of the people count.

Public decisions

00:35

The theory of democracy is the separation of powers: Executive, Legislative and Juridical. Coarse definition, room for variation in the detail. A worldwide established mechanism to organize a democratic system are elections, which legitimate some people to work in one of the separated fields for a certain time with a certain scope.

How the elections are organized and under which circumstances the appointment follows varies by entity, but a common ground is that the parties which are participating are following the systematic rules and accepting the outcome of the elections. In our European context we don’t understand how the popular vote can be bend that far that a candidate with more votes can be losing the election, but taking into consideration the skewness of elections in other countries, the representative democracy is showing some weaknesses everywhere. Who is eligible to vote, who is voting, who is votable? At the end the whole legal framework can be adapted to meet the needs of the people.

Important is only that everyone can participate in some form in the decision making process.