Investigating People’s Sovereignty in Democratic Systems and Its Obstacles
5. Among other obstacles are the challenges in determining the winner of the election and dividing the seats.
The people are the main body of government. In fact, every country and region exist for the people, providing them with a safe living environment and sufficient income. Therefore, in the formation of a government, the consent of the majority must be obtained. When a power enters the realm of governance with this principle in mind and organizes its affairs accordingly, one can count on its success and anticipate the positive dynamics of the land through its administration and control.
However, seizing power through force, pressure, deceit, and manipulation results in nothing but shame and disgrace. This is why we argue that democracy, as it currently stands, is not an ideal system for governing and satisfying everyone’s needs. The limited methods available within democratic frameworks for selecting an individual or party to lead the country often lack the ability to garner genuine consent from the majority.
In the following, we will explain and detail the same methods and their incompetence in selections, and we will expose and prove their ineffectiveness.
After taking the vote, it is time to count the votes, determine and announce the winner of the election and distribute the seats in the parliament. There are several ways for this purpose:
One: The majority system, which is of two types:
1. Relative majority system or “Plurality”; In this system, the winner of the election is someone who has obtained more votes than other candidates; For example: there are three candidates, one of them has won 40% of the votes and the other two have won 35% and 25% respectively.
In this system, the first person wins the election. The main criticism of this method is that if the number of candidates is more than three, the person who won the election, although he got more votes than others, but compared to all the candidates, he lost more than half of the votes. Just like the above example, the person who won the election won 40 percent of the votes, which means 60 percent of the voters are dissatisfied with him. There are several ways to solve this problem. One of those solutions is to hold a second round of elections, in which a few candidates who have won the most votes will get to it.
2. Absolute majority system or “Majority”; In this system, the winner of the election is the one who gets half plus one vote. This method also has a problem, and if none of the candidates get this number of votes, the election will inevitably go to the second round.
Both mentioned systems do not provide justice, Because a large percentage of votes are wasted. In the second method, forty-nine percent below and in the first method a larger percentage, which was sixty percent in the previous example, is considered ineffective; For this reason, most countries had chosen the system of relative representation to ensure justice and justice.
Second: the system of relative representation or representation of political minorities
The two majority systems that we talked about are used most of the time in the mode of “individual” or “constituency” elections, that is, the country becomes several small “constituencies” in terms of the number of them; For example: a city will have several districts and only one person will be elected in each district; For this reason, most of the time majority system is called individual or regional system. In the system based on relative representation, the list of parties is often presented for elections; Therefore, it is often called the list system.
In the relative representation, seats in the parliament are divided based on the ratio of votes; For example: if there are two parties, one of which has 60% of the votes and the other has 40% of the votes, and the parliament has 100 seats, the first party will have 60 seats and the other party will have 40 seats.
This system allows the parties that have won few votes to win seats so that the votes won by them are not lost. Based on this, it is said that this method is closer to justice than the majority system. For this reason, in 19th century Europe, they had a lot of faith in this system, and they used it after the First World War, but after that it was abandoned in a large number of countries.
This system is not without flaws. Its first flaw is that many parties enter the parliament, and for this reason, in most cases, no party is able to win the majority of parliamentary seats, and a coalition government of two or more parties is inevitably formed, but the coalition government soon fails, and the establishment of ministers does not take place, this situation affects both the legislature (Parliament) and the executive. Such was the situation in France, and because of this, the French system became a full-fledged example of this system’s flaws, until from 1958, the executive branch was strengthened, and more powers were given to the president. We can see the situation in Türkiye today, how chaotic the parliament and its government are.
In other words, in order to provide justice for political parties and in the way of democracy, a chaotic parliament and a weak government are formed, and this is another reason for the fact that if we want a strong government to create, we need less democracy.
Therefore, according to what has passed, it seems that the sovereignty of the people in democracy is a baseless claim to deceive the public opinion, that every person or party only uses the votes of the people as a tool to put themselves in the seat and to implement their specific and purposeful goals, and after Victory does not depend on people’s wishes.
