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WHY DIRECT DEMOCRACY HAS NOT BECAME A MODERN FORM OF GOVERNMENT?
Abstract
An underlying thesis of the issue is defined in the causes of the historical failure of direct democracy and on the causes of the factors responsible for the victory of the principle of representative governance in modern political system. Presented paper is based on author´s attempt to generalize the views of various authors of modern political science and practical political and historical experience. Organizational difficulty, numerousness of political community, economic or financial questions, the need for professional decision-making, cognitive incompetence and emotional acting of masses are the most important arguments against the direct democracy. An original source of the representative government creation is a process of reduction of the political community to a few tens even hundreds of individuals authorized to take decisions on behalf of the whole society realised by elections. The issue of fairness and equality in this case has been suppressed in the background. The constitution provides guarantee of rights and freedoms that citizens can use. The second source is the issue of transformation of rational responsibility of elected representatives to irrational responsibility (towards their own consciousness and conscience). This is related to the alienation of a representative from a voter, what has become an attribute of representative democracy. Another feature of the process of representative democracy establishment is a monosubjectivity of the mediation of representatives. The modern political parties have won a monopoly on representation; original general civic dimension of the representatives was replaced by the personnel policy of political parties. The selection of representatives is not performed by the people – citizens anymore. The sovereignty of the people was reduced to the assent of pre-selection, which was made by the political parties, instead of citizens. The citizen in the period between elections does not have any option to positively, but especially negatively punish the bad conduction of representatives of political parties, which he gave his voice to. The very political freedom is reduced to a few seconds of the electoral act. This also implies to the changes in the principles of the separation of powers. Parliament shall become the sole and supreme legislative body of the politically differentiated society. The creators of the modern political system of liberal-democratic type are decided to connect with each other irreconcilable principles of equality and individual freedom by the creation of representative governance principle.
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