Is it possible to have Democracy without Universal Suffrage?
Does the former without the latter undermine the first?
AND
Would you ever be willing to give up your, or other‘s, right to vote for a better system of government?
(Whatever your definition of ‘better’ may be)
More often than I have expected (retrospectively), I have debated the principles of universal suffrage based democracy with fellow citizens.
Nearly always the conversation will turn to the shortcomings of democracy as a system of rule. I will happily be the first to acknowledge that other systems of government can get done things done, quicker, cheaper, better, or more efficiently. I also admit that democracy (especially secular) rarely builds great wonders like a pyramid or cathedral. Churchill himself called it the worst form of government.
What will usually happen is that my companion will argue that democracy would be far better if the, for lack of a better term, ‘stupid’ couldn’t vote. This is where we part company. To me a true democracy must be universal. I know that the concept democracy with universal suffrage is a very recent thing. But I view the non-universal ones as not true democracies. Stepping stones, maybe. But not a true democracy.
I would die to defend the right of my village idiot to have the same vote as Aristotle. I could never stand for limiting the right to vote. I believe in democracy because I see it as being dominated by moderation. I believe it is the best system for reform and growth. I also believe it is the best for making the people involved in and accountable to decisions made on their behalf. I see that as meaning less bloody revolutions, or Terrors. And that matters because the sanctity of human life is paramount to me.
I thank all who contribute to this in advance for their philosophical input. 
STRONG CAVEAT
1 - I recognise that ‘universal’ still usually excludes the insane, invalid, incarcerated, or immature.
2 - I mean no disrespect to any other person in another system of government and I do not seek to dismiss them or their system as faulty.
3 - I realise that universal democracy is greyed with mass media, oligarchies, voting methods, etc.
4 - I also note (with some amusement) that while the above is true, I am also a staunch British Monarchist. The incongruity is not lost on me and I can offer no reconciliation of my two selves.
The Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the CN Tower, the Sydney Opera House, the Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal, the North Sea Works, the Golden Gate Bridge…
J.D.G. Doesn’t your first caveat mean the suffrage isn’t universal? Especially disqualifying incarcerated and insane people (which is off course determined by infallable entities), sounds very much like limiting voting rights for a group of people with characteristics that are deemed undesirable.
From a prcatical stance I can see why there are age limits, but I can’t say I honestlysay that a 17 year old is less worthy of voting than an 18 year old. I’m quite sure there are many 16 year olds that are more interested and knowledgeable about politics than large groups of adults. But again I can see the practcality of having an age treshhold.
IMO, *acceptable *(I’m leery of saying “true”) democracy demands universal suffrage as a necessary (but obviously not sufficient) condition. It *might *still be a democracy without it, by some technical legerdemain, but it would be unacceptable.
And I don’t give up my right to vote for anything. It’s something I’ve *already *put my life on the line for before, I’m not about to give it up now.
I question your premise there. What system of government are you giving as the example of “quicker, cheaper, better or more efficiently”? This was a common statement in the 30s, in the run-up to WWII, where many people seemed to assume that totalitarianism (of either the fascist or communist verities) would be more efficient. But actually, the fall of Nazi Germany and eventually of the USSR showed how grossly inefficient they were. Speer’s book, “Inside the Third Reich” is a very interesting account of the inefficiencies in the Nazi regime, with many economic decisions being made for poorly thought out ideological reasons, or simply based on who was able to persuade Hitler to go a certain way. The totalitarian regimes may have been good at massive single tasks (i.e. - war, where central planning is necessary), but not for the multi-tasking that modern economies in western democracies handle with ease.
And, you haven’t quoted Churchill accurately. The quotation is normally given as: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the alternatives.”
Touché, sir! Well done.
I suppose I see it as universal to all practical extents. And to me that is still, effectively, universal.
My understanding of it is that the insane and invalid cannot vote because they are not capable.
The incarcerated cannot because they lose that right (along with others) upon being convicted. For committing a crime against the state you will lose your right to have a say in it.
The immature cannot vote because (a bit like the insane) they are too young to have the mental capacity to ‘understand’ it. I italicise that because there could be a whole other debate about when you are mentally capable to vote. I also agree with you on the point that there are plenty of young that are quite knowledgeable in politics.
I can only speak for Australia but I also see youth as being specially treated by the system as well. There’s a whole host of government services, on all levels, set up for protecting, raising and caring for the young. They are recognised differently in the legal system. They even have a separate court hierarchy. So while it is not fair to say that it is a trade of the vote for protection. The protection is temporary and society does not extend the same privileges once you do vote. So, for me, it makes sense practically and principally.
@Northern Piper
To my mind I see the example of ‘better’ as being shown in 2008 with London’s Terminal 3/4 vs. Beijing’s Terminal 3. T3/4 was late, over budget, had problems with baggage from day one, and, personally, wasn’t too pretty. Beijing’s T3 was on time, handled the Olympics just fine, is now one of the busiest airports in the world, one of the most highly ranked ones (according to Condè Nest Traveler) and both were built for about the same cost.
I would never say that the USSR or Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany were good at running their economy. But to my mind modern China is handling the multi-tasking of the free market pretty well and making a killing from.
I see this as an example of other systems doing it (at least in this instance) better. But my previous statement said that it CAN be better. I did not say that it always/must be better then democracy.
In regard to the Churchill quote:
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
That’s what I was trying to get at in my second paragraph. Even if democracy isn’t the better form of government in certain aspects for certain things, I would still choose it over all others because it is the one that, to my mind, has lasted (albeit for a recently short period historically). Hence is the best one to avoid violent, bloody, upheavals that have destroyed the others.
Of these only the Panama Canal comes close to being a great wonder. Yes, the others are nice, but they’re only buildings, built in modern times with commerical uses. The Empire State and Hoover Dam also have the fact they were built during the Great Depression when labor was a cheap commodity and people were eager for any kind of work.
Is there any empirical evidence for the superiority of universal over limited suffrage, and as you claim, over any possible form of limited suffrage, with a few exceptions that happen to track exactly onto what we currently have? Remember that you have to adjust for the fact that many countries became democratic during a period of modernization, but that does not mean that democracy caused modernization. Since most Western countries are democratic, there is a positive mental association with them, but this does not constitute proof that a democratic political process - or a universal democracy - is necessary or sufficient for their freedom and prosperity, and superior to a limited democracy or other forms of government. Similarly, the fact that authoritarian governments can ignore human rights does not mean that authoritarianism causes such things to happen - the same underlying cultural mindset could cause less agitation for civil liberties and less agitation for universal suffrage.
I’m being tough on you only because I see that these broad-scale debates tend to feature a lot of noble sounding ideals and applause lights, and little empirical reasoning. My view is that the evidence on which form of government is best is fairly weak. Thus, we should have a conservative view towards preserving our pretty-good political process (conservative slogan: “what we’ve got is pretty good, let’s not break it”), but we shouldn’t be overconfident in declaring it the best system.
As an example, the best research shows that authoritarian regimes are correlated with higher variance in economic outcomes, but nothing more definite than that. No definites on causation, and we’re not even touching the hard-to-quantify civil liberties issues.
Without postulating a plausible mechanism, saying things like “The Middle Ages were authoritarian and bad; modernity is democratic and better” is like saying “The Middle Ages were bad and people wrote with quills; modernity is good and we write with ball-point pens.”
I don’t agree with your standards of demarcation, but I hope you’ll acknowledge that every single one of those structures has proven far more beneficial to humanity than any pyramid or cathedral, the lack of which the OP rather bizarrely laments. Heck, the Eiffel Tower was intended as a useless (and temporary) showpiece, demonstrating the state of French engineering, but it luckily and quickly proved extremely useful once it occurred to someone to stick a radio antenna on it.
:shrug: I don’t believe in democracy as The Good in any case. Our priority should be good government, not democratic government. The value of a democratic custom should be judged on how good its effects are.
That said, I think there are differences between* faux* democracy, where one is really ruled by a political party & set of traditions, & responsive multi-party democracy. Which one is better depends on the parties involved.
I just wanted to point out that the guys who invented the term democracy did not have anything like universal suffrage and would have been horrified by the suggestion. Also, they would not have admitted any existing polity to be a democracy–they are all too big by many orders of magnitude.
I am so tempted to descend into semantics, although I note on reflection that you put ‘Democracy’ in quotes. It is possible, I guess to have somethinkg akin to democracy in a small group, such as the proverbial New England town hall style.
As a practical matter, we live in a republic, i.e. we vote for representatives and hand over the responibility and power of making governmental decisions to others (representatives), at least for 2-6 year periods. In many respects, I suggest that such a thing is not so different from ancients voting for ‘tyrants’ (in the less onerous versions of the term) On top of that, we do pass some power over to the Supreme Court with lifetime tenure justices, who provide a backstop against majority (mob?) rule
In a way, I do give up my vote after each election for limited periods of time.
Canada has actually had this debate, and the incarcerated now have the right to vote, even while still in prison. As your couple of comments tend to suggest to me, the reasoning behind disenfranchisement of criminals (felons, in the USA) lacks a why —sure, we can say they lose that right, but why? After all, they are subject to the laws they create in a far more immediate way than anyone else.
A bit more detail: the issue in Canada was decided by two Supreme Court cases, Sauvé I and Sauvé II (the same inmate brought the issue to court twice, after the government redrafted their laws to be in possible compliance with the first ruling.) The ruling for Sauvé II is much longer than I intend to read, but here’s a relevant quote:
Okay, hijack aside, the answer to your first question is, “Of course!” Your caveats, in and of themselves, answer the question for you. And anyway, if we contend that there has ever been a democracy, we must answer “yes” unless we can find a case in which every single person subject to the law has been represented in the law’s creation, e.g. by voting for the lawmakers.
I suspect the question you really want answered is, “Is it ‘representative’ if not ‘universal’?” The trouble with this question (and the one you asked) is, neither representation nor democracy have to be complete for us to say that they exist. We can say, for example, that a photograph represents an object, even though the object has attributes —perhaps important ones —that are not visible in the photograph. We can say that a lawyer represents his client, even if he occasionally misinterprets his client’s interests. Hence, having people left out of a representative system makes it less representative. Substitute “democratic” for “representative”, and the statement is still just as true.
This. “Applause lights” is a nice turn of phrase.
Not sure. It might be demonstrable that democracies with rule of law are pretty good with property rights. The reasoning is that democracies manage social frictions better and that when one sides overthrows the other (a higher risk in authoritarian systems) private property tends to be endangered.
I agree though that authoritarian regimes have delivered growth (South Korea, Chile, China) as well as deprivation or stagnation (North Korea, parts of South America, Africa, China). And democracies have their own governance problems: Amazon.com
I think that extremely large countries have their own challenges that broad democracy may not be very suitable to address. eg, comparing the US with China for example.
Small sample size but can compare India (democracy) with China (totalitarian).
a) We don’t have universal suffrage right now. “We” being any of the western nations of which I have any familiarity, such as the US. Whether you think some kind of weighted voting, representational or proportional collective formula voting, etc is superior, think that voting should only be a privilege of the appropriately enlightened, or you think one person one vote for everyone is the way to go, let’s get the sanctity of pure universal suffrage off any pedestal it might otherwise occupy: we dont have it now. Eight year old children don’t vote. In at least some venues convicted felons don’t vote. Etc.
b) I do believe true total democracy is possible. It would be a drastically different structure and would be incompatible with law enforcement, the economy as we know it, and hierarchical authority as we know it, and this is not a view widely shared by others on this board; but arging that “well we can’t, after all, have pure total perfect democracy” doesn’t work as an argument for me when discussing what is and what is not democracy.
c) We could have more democracy than we have now, and I don’t think extending the vote to more people is even the first priority. It’s certainly not the end-all and be-all of how one increases democracy. (I do think democracy is a word to which “more” is an appropriately applied adjective, not a word such as “unique” that either is or ain’t). It will soon be time for me to pick between professional blatherers and fools who will for the next 2 or or other term of years act in my stead, representing me. Not once between now and the next election will I be called upon to participate. To walk in or log on and cast my vote. We have the technology to include citizens in more of the decision-making. I am not at this point saying that doing so would be an uncompicated thing or an unattenuated positive in every respect, but we should be thinking about such things and trying to extend participation out beyond our elected representatives.