Representative Democracy

Abstract

AbstractRepresentative democracy is studied using the example of the 2009 German Bundestag (parliamentary) election. Five German parties and their coalitions are analyzed from the viewpoint of direct democracy. For this purpose, the parties’ positions on over 30 policy issues are compared with the results of public opinion polls. The outcomes are summarized in the party and coalition indices of popularity (the average percentage of the population represented) and universality (frequency of representing a majority), as introduced in the previous chapters. In particular, it is shown that the election winner is not necessarily the best representative of public opinion, whereas the best representatives may get too few votes even to participate in the ruling coalition. Moreover, the actual practice of coalition formation can further aggravate the low representativeness of the parliament. Thereby it is shown that representative democracy, as it is, guarantees no adequate representation of public opinion even in Germany with its multiparty system and strong social-democratic traditions.KeywordsPublic OpinionCoalition FormationDirect DemocracyRepresentative DemocracyCoalition MemberThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.