Essay On The Role Of Election In Democracy

Many people believe that the election plays the most important role in democracy. Because a free and fair election holds the government responsible and forces it to behave on voter's interest. However, some scholars find evidence that election itself is not enough to hold politicians responsible if the institutions are not shaping incentives in a correct way. In other words, the role of the election on democracy, whether it helps to serve the interest of the public or specific groups, depends on other political institutions.

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In an ideal democracy, voters will vote for the politicians and policies that can bring the most benefit to themselves, while the rules of the society cares about how to maximize the social welfare as a whole. However, in reality, people find

In his assumption, parties do not really care about the policies they make, all they want is the votes that enable them to stay in office. Then if the information is complete and costless to everybody, the voters compare policies offered by different parties and vote for the one that serves their best interest. The politicians will treat people equally because everyone has and only has one vote. The best strategy for parties is to choose policies that they believe benefit most of the voters. However, if the information is not easily available to all, things are much different. For the voter, because there are so many other voters, one vote can hardly make any difference, at the same time, if the "correct" policy wins, the voter will benefit from it no matter he voted for it or not, which suggests that the marginal benefit from correct information is zero. Therefore the rational choice of every voter is to spend no extra effort in getting correct information at all. While voters are not informed, it leaves space for politicians to cheat and lobbies to persuade. For somebody can persuade others and get the parties more votes, they are treated with higher priority