Elections period is an interesting one. Not only because since 1984, Brazilians have the privilege to choose the ones to represent them in the parliament and government. There's something quite interesting in the very way people make their decisions and position themselves politically.
Because of that, my goal in this series is to outline a simple and short guide for a rational political decision. I'm not probably qualified for doing so in large depths, so I'll concentrate in the process as a sequence of steps leading to a final decision.
But in this first part I think I need to tackle a hard question: what does it mean to make a political decision? As much as I like history, I don't want to go back in time too much because then people will lose interest. After all, history books are there for anyone to read from, but people usually don't. A political decision depends on context. There are common principles that tie political realities in every democracy, but the process is seldom identical. Let's summarize as much as possible.
Humans have liked to live together since quite early existing as such. That might have to do with the fact we are rational, and it's not hard to conclude it's better to live in community and in peace than fighting everyone else all the time to satisfy our basic needs.
Despite that being definitely a good thing, it comes along with some hard challenges. People want to live together and share a number of things because that can bring benefits to everyone involved. Public goods are the ones that only make sense if shared by the entire community. However, reality is not perfect, and there will be times in which a public decision will be more beneficial to some than to others. It's very intuitive that the more diverse society is, the more this kind of discrepancy in interests will occur.
The matter can be solved in two ways: either we reproduce wild life conditions within society and let the stronger decide and benefit themselves (which will always happen to a certain degree) or we come up with mechanisms that allow everyone to participate in decisions, so there's more balance in who gets more benefits from public decisions (and hopefully) a maximization of common good. The word politics comes exactly from the word polis, which means city. Politics means the issues from the polis, or the issues arising from living in community.
If we lived in a community with 20 people, it would be fairly easy to take everyone's opinion into account in public matters without compromising the speed or feasibility of the decision making. But when numbers increase, it becomes impractical to consult everybody on every decision (even if we still agree that decisions affecting everyone should get everyone's input to make them fair). Apart from the numerical issue, the world has indeed become very complex and specialized. This basically means that it has become impossible to be knowledgeable about everything public that's going on all the time.
Democracy was the best mechanism to solve the numbers part of this dilemma. Society needs different people getting busy with different things. In the current state of affairs, we've decided that people will allocate their time the best way they can, thus maximizing their individual return and also the social one. But that also mean that a huge chunk of population will be occupied with matters that are far away from managing public interests. Someone has to do it on their behalf, and democracy makes that possible.
The genius idea about democracy is that the mechanism to choose representatives theoretically determines the opinions of the majority will naturally prevail, thus distancing society government from the wild jungle. It also theoretically eliminates the indicidual need to think about others in order to make better collective decisions. You can think exclusively about your own interests but the public resources will only benefit you if the needs you're expressing are the majority ones. In democracy, a very powerful and rich person's vote is worth exactly the same as the one from a humble and poor person. In the jungle-like scenario, the poor person would never have any voice. But in democracy, if the majority is indeed poor and humble, public decisions will benefit them, not the rich guys.
This simplifies life a lot. Because instead of being directly involved in all the public matters, individual decision is limited to choosing the best representative. The latter is the one responsible for studying the matters and making a sound decisions. But of course this is not as easy as it may seem. I'll cover this part on the next part.
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