Is Democracy a Good Thing?

Democracy is celebrated as a method of giving all citizens a share in political decision-making. There are two types of democracy which are potentially conflicting. There is direct democracy, where all members of the public have the opportunity to participate in the government of the state. Secondly there is representative democracy where the state reflects the true interests of the people, regardless of where their true interests lie. The key conflicts towards democracy are that firstly voters are not experts, “the captain and not the passengers should steer the ship. Also democracy, to Karl Marx, gave the public an illusion that they were making a difference to the state as a whole when really they were only making a minor difference. Democracy can also face many paradoxes. For example if most of the public were in favour of installing capital punishment and only a few maybe intelligent people were against it you create a paradox which highlights one of the problems of democracy.

Direct democracies were used a lot in early democratic states with a relatively small population. The population of the state could all vote on a wide variety of issues that would concern the state. For example we could all vote on what to do to solve the issue of the “credit crunch’ and you would be presented with a few solutions and the solution with the most votes would be put into action. These direct democracies would have a lot of problems though which is why democratic states today use the representative democracy. Firstly if you had a direct democratic state in say America, where around 300 million people live, there would be 300 million potential voters voting on these topics. The data collected from these polls would be very hard to keep track of, even by using electronic communication the amount of data produced would be very difficult to log. If this method was put into action in a smaller state it would be easier to track. However if you put this system into a state smaller than Luxembourg, there might not be enough willing voters to make the polls worthwhile. Also there is the issue of voters having to devote their time to research the topics so that they will arrive at reasonable decisions. It would be expecting too much for all citizens to keep abreast of the relevant issues so they might choose unreasonable solutions just to get them out of the way, therefore saving time from researching.