Representative Democracy and Compromise

A representative democracy can be defined as a form of government where the people would elect their leaders who would then have to rule and make laws. This allows laws to be made intelligently by specialists. While the people still get a say in who makes those laws, they have no power to influence them directly. The power is therefore split. The people retain some power while the rest is held among the elected representatives. This form of governance is held by the United Kingdom where representatives such as the Members of Parliament meet in the House of Commons to to discuss and pass laws. A representative democracy tends to fall in the middle of the political spectrum, thus being referred to as a ‘compromise’. But a compromise between what?

A comparison to this is direct democracy. This is a form of democracy where political power is exercised by the citizens whose propose and vote directly on each law, without a representative acting on their behalf. The people have the power, however the minority often gets ignored in such democracies.

The most stark contrast to both of these forms of democracy would be a dictatorship such as communism. This is where one person or a small group of people govern and make all the decisions without any input from the people or anyone else and is a totalitarian political system. Any laws passed are absolute rules that are uninfluenced by public opinion.

These three systems have slightly different approaches which, when examined, will help assess whether representative democracy is a muddled compromise.

In a direct democracy, power is returned to the people in an attempt to maximise individual autonomy while retaining interest in politics. However, this does not necessarily mean that every...

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... a dictatorship entails. Any aspect of being muddled in a representative democracy can be mitigated by the motivation of key political players to reach a logical conclusion through way of compromise.

Works Cited

A.D. Lindsay, The Essentials of Democracy, 1930

E Latham, The Group Basis of Politics, 1965

Anthony M. Birch, The Concepts and Theories of Modern Democracy, 1993

Jonathan Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2006

E.W. Martin, The Tyranny of the Majority, 1961

J.R. Lucas, Democracy and Participation, 1976

AJP Taylor, The Course of German History, 2001 https://sites.google.com/site/billfitzgibbonsproject/home http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com http://www.economist.com/node/17849447 http://www.lawteacher.net/administrative-law/essays/liberal-democracies-tyranny-of-the-majority-administrative-law-essay.php