I’m not sure I understand what question you are asking or what alternative you’re comparing democracy to.
Ultimately, a government is an organization that claims a right to compel obedience, and in practice, has the ability to compel. Some person or persons is ultimately going to be in charge of wielding that power. That means there has to be some means of choosing them.
To be more concrete: a government needs a military or at least a national police force. Those forces work much better with a unified command structure, which means there needs to be some supreme authority that can ultimately direct the coercive machinery.
In practice, it’s not possible to completely constrain the government by law and custom: presidents and prime ministers (to say nothing of monarchs and party secretaries) routinely do things that would have been thought illegal, before they were done. So being head-of-government comes with authority and power, and is therefore going to be attractive to people who value such things. As a result, there will be many people who want to be in charge.
Stable government requires having a reliable way to pick those leaders, that doesn’t result in coups, civil wars, or chaos. Elections seem to work well for this. The competing systems am aware of rely on leaders picking their successors, having an oligarchy to pick the leaders, or some combination of the two. (China and the Roman Catholic Church fall into this broad model.) This alternate system can be very stable, but is bad at incorporating shifts in public opinion, and lacks the cathartic benefits of mass elections. It doesn’t seem to work better in practice.
It might be useful if you gave a succinct explanation for what you mean by “democracy”. People use the word to describe just about every system in which the government is de facto elected on a regular basis by a large fraction of the population. That covers a lot of ground. It might be that you could do very much better than current parliamentary or presidential democracies, while still having something recognizable as elections.
I’m not sure I understand what question you are asking or what alternative you’re comparing democracy to.
Ultimately, a government is an organization that claims a right to compel obedience, and in practice, has the ability to compel. Some person or persons is ultimately going to be in charge of wielding that power. That means there has to be some means of choosing them.
To be more concrete: a government needs a military or at least a national police force. Those forces work much better with a unified command structure, which means there needs to be some supreme authority that can ultimately direct the coercive machinery.
In practice, it’s not possible to completely constrain the government by law and custom: presidents and prime ministers (to say nothing of monarchs and party secretaries) routinely do things that would have been thought illegal, before they were done. So being head-of-government comes with authority and power, and is therefore going to be attractive to people who value such things. As a result, there will be many people who want to be in charge.
Stable government requires having a reliable way to pick those leaders, that doesn’t result in coups, civil wars, or chaos. Elections seem to work well for this. The competing systems am aware of rely on leaders picking their successors, having an oligarchy to pick the leaders, or some combination of the two. (China and the Roman Catholic Church fall into this broad model.) This alternate system can be very stable, but is bad at incorporating shifts in public opinion, and lacks the cathartic benefits of mass elections. It doesn’t seem to work better in practice.
It might be useful if you gave a succinct explanation for what you mean by “democracy”. People use the word to describe just about every system in which the government is de facto elected on a regular basis by a large fraction of the population. That covers a lot of ground. It might be that you could do very much better than current parliamentary or presidential democracies, while still having something recognizable as elections.
This post was mostly about seeing if I’m getting the pro-democracy argument right.