Intro

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Democracy, rule of the people, by the people, for the people, it’s an inspiring concept, but one that often falls short in practice.

I wanted to find out why, so I did 2 big studies, the first was a study of election results in a select few case study countries around the world, the second was a study of the political systems of all of the world’s countries, what I found was that the flaws with democracy as we know it today can be boiled down to 4 key issues: Proportionality, Turnout, Accountability and Direct Power.

The first 2 of these are about elections, the last 2 are what happens after them.

Proportionality

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“Proportionality” is how closely the result of an election matches how people voted, the closer the match the more “proportionate” it is, if the results don’t match we call it “disproportionate”.

Here we can see what a proportionate election looks like, these graphs show the results of how people voted and the result the system produced in the most recent Irish general election, notice how they look almost exactly the same?

And now here’s what a disproportionate election looks like, these are the results for the most recent British general election, you can see how the 2 graphs look completely different:

How is something like this possible? Under the British voting system many votes are “wasted”, meaning that they don’t count towards the final results. Votes can be wasted for many reasons such as:

• “winner takes all”,

A system where each election contest can only have 1 winner, meaning that votes that went towards a losing candidate don’t affect the result

• Electoral threshold

A system where a candidate/party has to reach a certain percentage of the vote, and if they don’t then none of their votes count

• Poor seat distribution

In most elections the country is split up into different electoral districts (sometimes called “seats”), if there aren’t enough districts to represent everyone or the districts aren’t split up fairly based on the population a problem can emerge where some votes are worth less than others

The vast majority of countries in the world today have problems like these, only 22 of them have purely proportional election systems.

Turnout

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Turnout is about how many people registered to vote actually show up on election day, the more people who show up and vote the higher the “turnout” is, as with proportionality the worse the turnout is the less the election results reflect the people.

Here’s an example for an earlier British election, here’s the results on the left vs how people voted on the right.

Already pretty bad because of disproportionality, but look what happens when we add in turnout as a factor, the graph on the left shows how many people are registered to vote but chose not to, the graph on the right adds in an estimate of how many people could register but didn’t.

The more data we add in, the less the results match the population.

In the vast majority of countries voting is optional and a large minority of eligible voters choose not to turn out, voting is compulsory in 24 countries and only 13 of those countries actually enforce those rules, ensuring turnout stays high, only 1 of those countries has a fully proportional voting system, that country being Luxembourg.

Either of these problems is enough to cripple a voting system, as the political class the system produces won’t have been chosen by the people it governs, most countries have both problems.

Accountability

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But even if we fixed both of those problems, like Luxembourg has, that still doesn’t mean we have a democracy, election day is important but so is every day after that and in most countries the people don’t have the tools to keep their politicians on the right track once they’ve gotten into power.

Only 5 countries allow the people to directly “recall” (remove from power early) all their elected politicians, 25 of them have various limitations on which politicians can be removed, while the rest either don’t have recall powers or the recall can’t be initiated by the people directly, this means that after election day in most countries, politicians have a free hand for the 5 or so years until election day comes around again, whether the public support their decisions or not, if those politicians fail to fulfil their plans, completely drop those plans in favour of something else, or just turn out to be corrupt, there’s nothing their people can do to get them out.

Direct Power

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And our last problem is that people lack power in general. Today’s “democracies” are “representative democracies”, what I would call “representism”, in representism power flows through the representatives rather than the people themselves, the only notable power the people usually have under this model is the power to choose their representatives through elections.

In the case studies I looked at the people rarely ever got a vote on political issues directly, and where they have the ability to petition their politicians, the politicians aren’t obligated to actually listen, ordinary people can’t propose laws and they can’t veto them either.

This is an inherently flawed model, even if we have the most well meaning, fair minded, clean politicians elected by the most proportional system, how well can a few hundred people represent the wishes of millions?

Not well enough, I think, voting for a politician or a party doesn’t mean you endorse everything they’re proposing, but in a purely representative model you don’t get to pick and choose, it’s take it or leave it, leaving the average voter starved for choice.

Conclusion

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And this is what’s wrong with democracy today, what we think of as democracy isn’t really democratic at all, democracy is rule by the people, representism is rule by a select elite, and while the people get to choose that elite it’s through flawed mechanisms that ensure the final result won’t be truly reflective with limited means to keep those elites doing what the people want them to do. This is why we have out of touch politicians making unpopular decisions in a system that should be rooted in popular support.

In my eyes a truly democratic model would be the exact opposite of this, one with a genuinely proportional election system, mandatory turnout to ensure people use it and politics doesn’t turn into minority rule, recall powers to ensure politicians can’t abuse the trust placed in them, and direct power to ensure the people themselves are a check on the power of the state, rather than just its own institutions.

A true democracy like this wouldn’t be perfect or solve all our problems, it would come with its own flaws, we would need to spend a lot of time educating citizens to properly use it, there would be a risk of tyranny of the majority, we would have to finely balance how much power should belong to the people themselves and how much should go to representatives, it would be a difficult process and not everyone would agree on how to do it, or even if it would be the right thing to do in the first place.

But the first step is calling a spade a spade and recognising that representism isn’t democracy, then we can argue the merits of democracy and how far to go with it, I think in the end we’ll find people do want democracy, because we can do better than the status quo, but only if we take some amount of responsibility for ourselves rather than following the endless cycle of electing the next out of touch elite, throwing them out when they fail us and starting the loop all over again.

It’s not all doom and gloom, in the last century representism has come a long way, go back a hundred years or so and very few had the vote at all, but there’s still plenty of work to do, the sooner we recognise that and get to it, the better it’ll be for everyone.

For more on this topic, including a more in depth discussion of the case studies, the issues around democracy building and a commentary on the UK’s latest general election, check out the full article below!

Changelog

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• Edit 1 - 18/11/2024 - Minor formatting changes, extra details and a correction (changed “in representism all power flows through the representatives” to in representism power flows" to be more nuanced)