Government and the Society It Serves: The Difference Between Waiting for Political Decisions and Making Them by Jean Pasquali

Author:Jean Pasquali [Pasquali, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Civics & Citizenship
ISBN: 9780990351108
Google: bAK4oQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 22963264
Publisher: Mentation Publications
Published: 2014-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

To examine how well political parties represent the whole of society includes the determination of their membership as compared with the total of potential voters. Some pertinent data are presented in Table 4. Scarrow and Gezgor (2010) give information that incorporates the variation of membership with time, which is interesting since it also measures the growing or diminishing acceptance of party members for the current system.

For Europe the percentage of voters that belong to a political party is between 9 and 5. If the candidates that are presented to the electorate were selected democratically within each party, it would mean that more than 90 percent of electors are excluded from the process of selection of candidates. In practice the situation is much worse. Candidates are commonly selected by a small number of people within the party, those that are more influential within the organization.

It is evident that a good part of existing democracies do not honor their name, the government of the people. They could be called governesscracies or nanniescracies and it would be more accurate; where the people are cared for as children that cannot yet care for themselves. It is easy to understand that there should be abstention in elections when the possibilities presented to the electorate better represent the interest of organized minorities. These circumstances are considered important for the organization of governments that not necessarily defend the general interests of the commons as their dearest goal.

It is instructive and just to think that the vote of a citizen should have the same value as that of any other citizen, and also have an equivalent power in the selection of candidates that will seek public support in an election. For a government to be called a democracy it is necessary that there be an effective way for the more than 90 percent (for the case presented in Table 4) of the citizens that do not belong to political parties to present their candidates. If this not be the case it would be an oligarchy of parties disguised as a democracy.

In the case of a single party or a party that has been dominant for a long time, government will be what the party decides; the case of the PRI in Mexico illustrates the point.

Perhaps it could be argued that there is nothing to prevent the 90 percent mentioned to organize itself in political parties. It could also be argued that the political party is not the only type of organization that has the faculty to act politically; the recent Internet-related techniques of communication have demonstrated a variety of possibilities that are not associated with the so called party discipline (Schnider, 2013).

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) of the United Nations was adopted in 1966 and went into force in 1976. Article 25 of the ICCPR establishes for all citizens the rights and opportunities to participate in the direction of public affairs of their country. The same article establishes the right to vote and be

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