Alright, so now the task is to choose the best representative. It may seem simpler than to actually solve problems in the public sphere with your own hands (and probably it is). But that doesn't make it easy.
As I said in part I, in democracy theoretically you don't need to bother thinking about others. They can take care of their own interests, right? Yes, theoretically. But then comes the other tricky part of the deal. People have different education levels, which means that the knowledge about the political process itself can be deficient. In other words, some people might not be prepared enough to choose their representatives to defend their interests later on.
The answer to this imbroglio was supposed to be political parties. If you check out their roots, you'll realize things shouldn't be that complicated. Political parties are usually organized in two possible ways. First one is an ideology like Socialism, Social Democracy, Liberalism, etc. In these cases, a party will represent a mindset and an opinion on how public issues should be approached and solved. The other type of party organization refers to a particular social group, like the labor party. These doesn't necessarily perfectly align with any specific ideology school. These parties will act in the best interest of the social group they represent. This allows for a further degree of freedom to common people, since they don't need specific theoretical knowledge to make their political choice. In theory, this is a basic assumption to choose a party by ideology.
Alright, there we have it. The instrument for political engagement is in place and decision making theoretical frameworks are outlined. Let's add one more layer of complexity: in any given group of people, even those closely aligned ideologically, there's still room for disagreement. Not every factory worker will feel exactly the same about life, in the private or the public spheres. And although the other path has united people exactly around political principles, it turns out that they can also disagree about a number of things.
Results of that are a bit discouraging. It's fantastic to be able to influence the public sphere and to choose our representatives among those who uphold our principles and interests. But apart from the fundamental interpretation problem, you might not agree with anyone in terms of government principles. One of democracy shortcomings is that in this case your views won't be taken into account. So one can say that a precondition to be represented is to find a party which has similar interests in their agenda. But since numbers are in the core of the democratic process, likelihood of unique views to be represented is very low, because of their uniqueness. This is particularly bad if the majority is wrong about something.
But lets suppose you're one of the lucky ones to find a party that actually represents your interests and worldviews. Cool! Game over! Next! Not so fast.
Because of size and complexity, the same logic used to determine who would be representing people in the government is applied to government decisions themselves. What that means is that in order to relevant measures to be executed, they must also win elections, when they are judged by all the elected representatives of the parliament. Again in life we get to the point where things are rather probabilistic, not deterministic. Even if your candidate to the government has won the elections, the measures to be taken still need to go through a similar process in parliament. Then, on average, it's possible to expect that the party with most elected representatives tends to be able to get most projects approved and executed.
I'm sure you've already noticed the game has become extremely complicated already for your decision to travel from your head to concrete reality. Well, there's much more!
Complexity and size of both the matters to be managed, the mechanism to get it done and the population to be represented, create additional challenges. Politicians are not robots (although some of them act like machines). That means besides public interests they were chosen to defend, they also have their private affairs. With governments getting larger and larger and more complex, average voter visibility of what's being done on her behalf is very limited. So these politician folks are dealing with huge amounts of resources that are public and the owners of these resources can't really see how these are spent.
This creates one of the most perverse system fragilities. Democracy is about numbers, and it's not possible to mess with them, right? Wrong! If the elections are clean, it indeed has this arithmetical flavor to it. But even in these cases, brute force, or money in modern terms, still have many options to have it its way. One of their options is available before elections. Capital can approach both voters and candidates, offering advantages in exchange for favors. This can be done legally or illegally. It actually also depends on the context.
It's interesting to note that the possibility capital has to influence political decisions doesn't end there. After the elections, people with lots of money can still explore politicians individual desires to have decisions made in their best interest. Corruption is the name of the game when it comes to overcome democratic barrier. Then what? See you in part III.
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