[EM] Conceiving a Democratic Electoral Process

[Juho Laatu]

On 25.6.2012, at 23.10, Fred Gohlke wrote:

> Political parties are quasi-official institutions designed to acquire the reins of government.

I agree. But in democracies the voters can (at least in principle) kick the worst of the partis out of power. I note that a two-party system has some additional problems since the party that was kicked out is likely to return in power soon, even if they do not make those changes in their policy that the voters wanted when they kicked it out.

>  They do not create democracies, they build oligarchies (political systems governed by a few people).

Yes, I agree that parties typically have tendency to drive the system towards oligarchy and not towards (more voter controlled) democracy.

> As a condition of their sponsorship, they require that the candidates support the party, thus giving the party ultimate control of the elected officials.

Sponsoring is a separate topic. Different societies have different rules for the financing of the political activity. Organizations tend to drift slowly towards stronger lobbying and financing by interest groups.

> When we allow political parties to usurp the power of governing a nation, it is foolish to imagine that the people have retained any rights.

One has to be careful and continuously work against any such developments in order to stay even at the current level.

There is one fundamental problem here. If you want to change the direction or avoid this kind of developments you need to co-operate with other people. When you form such a co-operation group you already possibly form a new party (or a group that later becomes a party). At some level you are thus bound to have "party like" groups that drive the joint intereste of its members. If the reform is purely individual based it could be too weak to cause lead to any changes. Can we do better than manage our parties and other interest groups as well as we can?

Juho