By Dennis John, February 2018
Democracy originates from the Greek word “demokratia”, which literally means “rule of the people”. There are mainly two types of democracies around the world: representative and direct democracy. Direct democracy is a form of government where people vote on policy initiatives directly, however in representative democracies, the public vote for candidates who will vote for the policies themselves in the government. Direct democracies are less efficient, as a vote needs to be held on every policy, but this does not happen in representative democracies, hence most democracies are representative democracies, such as the United Kingdom, but Switzerland is an example of a direct democracy.
Most democracies use a system known as First Past The Post (abbreviated to FPTP). In this system, the region is split up into areas known as constituencies, each electing a single Member of Parliament into government. A survey taken by Freedom House said that in 1970, 45 countries proclaimed themselves as democracies. Another survey taken by Freedom House states that in 2010, this number has more than doubled, and now 115 countries are democracies, which is 63% of the world’s countries.
Despite this, voter turnouts in elections are decreasing rapidly. In fact, according to a survey conducted by Ipsos Mori, only 17% of people trust politicians to tell the truth, which is the lowest of any profession. As society becomes more educated, many people believe that democracy appears Janus-faced – it is two headed and deceitful. This is clear as many parties propose policies in their election manifesto which they are unable to fulfil in their time having most of the seats in the government.
Before discussing about the challenges faced to the modern democracy, it is important to understand the other forms of political establishment which are prevalent around the world. There are four types of political systems in the world: autocracies, democracies, oligarchies and monarchies. An autocracy is a democratic system where the country is ruled solely by one leader, such as Saudi Arabia. This, like an oligarchy, can produce very fast economic growth for the country, however an oligarchy is a system where the country is ruled by a few powerful people, such as China, where the country is mainly ruled by the Communist Party of China(CPC), and most power is in the Politburo (the highest level, consisting of 24 members in 2012). A monarchy is a system where the monarch exercises the role of sovereignty. There are two types of monarchy, which are absolute and constitutional monarchies. A constitutional monarchy is a system which gives the royal family limited powers, and usually works with the elected officials and the members in the government, however, an absolute monarchy works like a dictatorship, because the monarch has complete rule over their country, so while an absolute monarchy is quite autocratic, a constitutional monarchy is a bit more like an oligarchy or a democracy. Saudi Arabia can be classified as being both autocratic and an absolute monarchy, both at the same time. The United Kingdom is an example of a country which has both a constitutional monarchy, and is a democracy. A democracy is a system in which the citizens vote for laws. They can either do this directly (direct democracy), or indirectly via representatives in the government (representative democracy), and these two forms of democracy are most commonly recognised as the main two types of democracy.
What are the challenges to modern-day democracy?
Election campaign funding has always proven to be a controversial topic. To lead successful campaign advertising, the parties require a lot of money. They get this from wealthy donors, who often give money to a candidate to get something back in return, if that candidate wins the election. However, the problem is the parties with the wealthier donors will be able to spend more on campaign funding, leading to the belief that the money controls the results, not the people. Rather than trying to please the people in the country, the parties try to please the funders more than the public. According to information from 2010 from the US, only about 0.05% of the American population can be classified as relevant funders.
In addition, it is evident that democracy slows down the rate of economic development. This is because a variety of opinions are present in a democracy, leading to an instability in every democracy. However, in an autocracy or oligarchy like China, the process would be fast, as the government just give a notice to the public, and there is nothing they can do about it. In just two years China has extended pension coverage to an extra 240m rural dwellers – far more than the total number of people covered in America’s equivalent scheme. The Chinese infrastructure projects for 2018 include building 5000km of new expressways. While the democratic government are doing a public consultation, the rate for economic growth is slowing down, as they must postpone the building of this infrastructure, which does not give the freedom for the government to consider future development plans. Therefore, China has one of the fastest-growing economies in the world today, and this is another challenge for democracy. One example of a slow process is the HS2 rail network building system in the UK and the proposed Heathrow expansion plans, which have been going on for years now, because of the opposition from the local people living there.
Gerrymandering is one of the main problems of democracy, and it can happen in representative democracies, such as the UK and the USA, where local elections are present. Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing constituency boundaries to entrench the power of incumbents. In order words, in democracies where local elections are present, the council drawing the boundaries have a huge influence on how the election results go for each party. Due to gerrymandering, parties can get more seats in government than they deserve. For example, in the 2016 American presidential election, Trump won 304 seats in government compared to just 227 by Clinton, despite Clinton getting nearly 2.9 million more votes than Trump. Furthermore, in the 2015 UK general election, SNP won 56 seats compared to UKIP winning just one, but UKIP got 12.6% of the vote polled overall in the UK, while SNP got only 4.7%. This, in turn, leads to the relationship between the state and the public weakening, as many people believe that even if they are voting, even if they win the popular vote, they might not win the election, leading to a growing disillusionment between the public and the government.
One of the main stakeholders in the democratic system are the politicians. And if democracy is to work, people need to have trust in these politicians. Another challenge to democracy is that there is an increasing distrust of politicians, and the whole democratic system in general. This follows allegations and scandals in many major democracies such as America, which would lead to the conclusion that democracy is not as fair a system as it claims itself to be. One of the scandals was that the Russian government interfered with the presidential election of 2016, which was between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. In this scandal, the Russian government damaged her presidential campaign, which affected the opinion of many people, and made them start to question whether their political system was strong, as it was accessible to foreign hackers. And in 2009, there was a UK parliamentary expenses scandal, where people found out about widespread actual and alleged of the permitted allowances and expenses claimed by MPs. The growing disillusionment between the state and the public can also be seen through the decreasing voter turnouts in local elections. One might say that this is a problem with the politicians, rather than the actual democratic system. However, this is indeed a problem formed by the way the democratic process is set up. Many people feel that our world is ready for a new political revolution, as many are disgruntled with the current system, yet what would the revolution be about? Many people are starting to look at the Chinese and Singapore political models, which have provided those two countries with a high rate of growth and made them into some of the biggest economies in the world.
Furthermore, democracy has not got a centralized voting system. Not many people know that First Past The Post is not the only form of voting the United Kingdom uses. FPTP is only used to elect MPs to the House of Commons. In fact, Alternative Vote(AV), Supplementary Vote(SV), Single Transferable Vote(STV), Additional Member System(AMS) and Closed Party List(CPL) are also used in the UK alone. In AV, voters write down their preferences on the available candidate. If a candidate has more than 50% of first preference votes then they get elected. If not, then the candidate with the lowest votes gets eliminated, and those votes go to the second preference. Finally, when one candidate has a proportion of the votes over the threshold of 50% they are elected as the representative. However, the threshold is not always 50%. To work out the threshold, the formula is votes divided by the number of representatives. For example, if 30 votes were made in an imaginary constituency, and the constituency will elect 3 representatives to Parliament, the threshold would be 10 votes to get into Parliament. AV is used to elect most chairs of select committees in the House of Commons. In SV and STV, the process is quite similar, but you are limited to 2 preferences. SV is used to elect mayors in England and Wales. STV is used to elect Deputy Speakers into the House of Commons, and is also used for the election of the Northern Ireland Assembly. AMS is also commonly known as MMPR (Mixed-Member Proportional Representation), where each person gets two votes: one for the candidate and one for the party. Seats for the constituency are filled firstly by the successful constituency candidates, and secondly, by party candidates based on the percentage of nationwide or region-wide votes that each party received. MMPR is used to elect the Scottish Parliament, and the Welsh and London Assemblies. In CPL, each party gets the number of seats proportional to the number of votes in each constituency. CPL is used to elect MEPs in Great Britain, but not in Northern Ireland, where they use STV. The problem is, some elections would have different results if they used different voting systems. For example, FPTP is a lot different to STV, as in STV, people are allowed two preferences, and there is a threshold to become a representative, however, in FPTP, the person with the most votes wins, and this allows them to win by the smallest possible margin. For example, in 2015, Belfast South was won with just 24.6% of the vote.
Another problem with democracy is that there is a lack of democracy inside the party. It is key to understand that there are four types of people from a democratic perspective: the leader of the party, party candidates of each constituency (MPs), the party members and the public. Generally, in democracy, the leadership election only has the party’s MPs as the voters. For example, following the EU Referendum and David Cameron’s resignation, in Theresa May’s leadership election, only the 330 Conservative MPs were permitted to take part in voting in the election. One might say that the situation is improving, since in the most recent Labour leadership election, which Jeremy Corbyn had a landslide victory in, all the party members were allowed to vote. I agree that the system is improving, however we are nowhere near the situation where the public can choose the candidates representing that constituency. This is not very democratic, as in a straight FPTP vote, a person might like a party but like another party’s candidate, which means that they are in a dilemma.
How can these challenges be overcome?
To combat election campaign funding, parties should be provided with an equal, reasonable budget. Each party needs to publish evidence of all the money they have spent and got. Failure to do so means that they will be disqualified from the election. Also, if they are found to be spending over budget, they would be disqualified too, as this would mean that they are still accepting money from outside the budget, which would be made as an action against the law.
To speed up the rate of economic development in democracies, all the different viewpoints would have to be discussed, and if everyone cannot reach an agreement before a deadline, there would need to be a nationwide digital poll to be completed on the issue. A digital poll should be set up as it is much more easier and cheaper than organising polling stations. Whatever the viewpoint of the majority is, should be enforced. This is pretty much enforcing aspects of direct democracy into a representative democracy, such as India. A counter-argument maybe that the public probably do not know best, however, democracy is not democracy if it is not for the people to have the say in the decisions.
To stop gerrymandering, after every census, new boundaries should be redrawn across the whole country. However, when drawing the boundaries, the committee should contain an equal number of members from each political party to avoid bias during the drawing of boundaries.
To decrease the distrust in politicians and the democratic system in general, you could complete a government run digital poll every year for each constituency, and if an existing MP is no longer performing well as the people expect, using a digital polling carried out every year, they should be replaced and a new election should be called. You could use digital polling for carrying out new elections for different constituencies as it does not cost a lot of money. This means that if MPs are not performing properly, they can get voted out of Parliament quickly, by the members of their constituency.
To combat the lack of a centralized voting system, we should make one, and I think that it should be MMPR (Mixed Member Proportional Representation). MMPR is a good system, as it considers about a citizen’s favourite party and their favourite candidate, which is a feature not common to any other voting system, and this makes the choice a lot easier. It is not too hard to count votes either, so MMPR would be the fairest and most efficient method of voting. To solve the problem of who the candidate representing each party in each constituency is, you should also use MMPR. This is because in MMPR, each party provides a list for each constituency before the election, containing all the candidates who want to become MP for that constituency. Therefore, each voter gets to choose from more than one candidate from each party in their constituency, meaning the public gets to choose who represents that party, and not the party themselves.
Conclusion
Most political leaders have established that a strong political system is based on the system being legitimate, adaptable and meritocratic. Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” It may have been in the time of Winston Churchill, and indeed, this system had provided the UK with a lot of success in that time. However, the world has evolved, and countries which were very far behind the UK in terms of development, such as China, have now closed the gap, and are now threats to the UK. Democracy has delivered a lot to us as a sustainable political system in the past, however, if it is not able to meet the growing and changing demands of a strong political system, then it will die out.
Over time, democracy has evolved, from its beginnings in ancient Greece, has lived through the American and French Revolutions of the late 18th century, but now seems to be entering a phase, where hate of political institutions in general seems to be at an all-time high. The democratic revolution would be very important in how our lives change from this point.
We all know that at the end of the day, no system will be a perfect system. No one is asking for there to be one like that, either. But the system which will provide humans with the best quality of life and the best prospects of development is the one that we should opt for. There are many challenges for democracy that I have discussed so far, for example, gerrymandering, election campaign funding, slowing down the rate of economic development, distrust in politicians, the lack of a centralized voting system and the lack of democracy within a party, and I have also discussed several methods in which we can overcome these problems. For democracy to retain its place in society, it is a must to fix these issues.
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