Inflated Expectations of Democracy: Towards a Systematic Explanation

George Tridimas ()
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George Tridimas: Ulster University Business School

A chapter in Power and Responsibility, 2023, pp 287-304 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Democracy has intrinsic value because it pursues the ideals of freedom, equality, and popular sovereignty which legitimate representative government, and it has instrumental value because modern democratic states are also prosperous. Yet, dissatisfaction with the ability of democracy, in the sense of majority rule to determine an electoral winner, to empower citizens and secure their economic well-being seem to be almost permanent. Using intuitions from institutional economics and social choice theory, the paper attributes disappointment with electoral democracy to its foundational design and specifically the process of aggregation of preferences, imperfectly defined voter preferences, imperfect information of voters, the impossibility of a social choice equilibrium, voting for politicians organized in political parties, intra-voter inequality, intra-candidate inequality, and the lack of an ethical meaning in the aggregation of votes.

Keywords: Democracy; Political institutions; Voting; Social choice equilibrium; Political agency; Political inequality; Democratic norms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-23015-8_16

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-23015-8_16

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