I was always a little underwhelmed by the argument that elections grant a government legitimacy—it feels like it assumes the conclusion.
A thought occurred to me that a stronger argument is that elections are a form of common knowledge building to avoid insurrections.
The key distinction with my previous way of thinking is that it isn’t the choice of elections as such which is important but that everyone knows how people feel on average. Obviously a normal election achieves both the choice and the knowledge but you could have knowledge without choice.
For example if people don’t vote on a new government but just indicate anonymously whether they would support an uprising (not necessarily violent) against the current government. Based on the result the government can choose to step down or not. This gives common knowledge without a choice.
I suspect this isn’t an original thought and seems kinda obvious now that I think about it—just a way of looking at it that I hadn’t considered before.
Fully agreed. Elections are part of the ceremony that keeps populations accepting of governance. Things are never completely one or the other, though—in the better polities, voting actually matters as a signal to the government as well.
I was always a little underwhelmed by the argument that elections grant a government legitimacy—it feels like it assumes the conclusion.
A thought occurred to me that a stronger argument is that elections are a form of common knowledge building to avoid insurrections.
The key distinction with my previous way of thinking is that it isn’t the choice of elections as such which is important but that everyone knows how people feel on average. Obviously a normal election achieves both the choice and the knowledge but you could have knowledge without choice.
For example if people don’t vote on a new government but just indicate anonymously whether they would support an uprising (not necessarily violent) against the current government. Based on the result the government can choose to step down or not. This gives common knowledge without a choice.
I suspect this isn’t an original thought and seems kinda obvious now that I think about it—just a way of looking at it that I hadn’t considered before.
Fully agreed. Elections are part of the ceremony that keeps populations accepting of governance. Things are never completely one or the other, though—in the better polities, voting actually matters as a signal to the government as well.
I think Natural Reasons by Susan Hurley made the same argument (I don’t own a copy so I can’t check)