7 - The Role of Elections in Democracy

Summary

WHY ARE ELECTIONS IMPORTANT?

7.1.1 Not Limited to Competition …

While democracy cannot be reduced to elections or explained solely by elections, very few questions about democracy can be answered without referring to elections. If politics is about making decisions and implementing them, elections are the first decision: they determine who entrusts in whom the power of making these decisions through an institutionalized procedure and for a given period of time.

Murray Edelman (1964, 3) characterized elections as a ritual act: voting is the only form in which most citizens ever participate directly in government – (elections) give people chance to express discontents and enthusiasm, to enjoy a sense of involvement. This ritualism is in fact the primary function of elections. As the wheel of history kept rolling, elections were replacing divinity of a monarch as the principal act of legitimation of authority as absolute monarchy was giving way to constitutional monarchies and republics. Voting for the same ruler or assembly symbolized belonging of a person to the same polity and reinforcing the sense of national unity, which in Rustow's (1970) observation is the main precondition of democracy. Elaborating on the same notion, Rustow (1970, 56) noted that the people cannot decide until somebody decides who the people are. No matter how much hypocrisy authoritarian rulers apply in praising the elections they have won as a democracy, at least until a certain point, most people believe that through elections, they demonstrate and/or confirm the unity of their nation. And, to the contrary, mass protests against unfair elections, such as “color revolutions” or protests in Moscow and other Russian cities after the Duma elections in December 2011, are a sure indication of a serious crisis of the legitimacy of the political regime.

Until recently, “throwing the rascals out” was not predominant function of elections.