5 - Choice and Participation

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Self-government is exercised through elections. The collective decision-making process operates indirectly: Citizens choose parties or candidates, authorizing them to make decisions on behalf of the collectivity.

Even when electoral competitors present clear policy proposals, to which I refer as “platforms,” the alternatives from which voters can choose are only those that are proposed. Not all conceivable and not even all feasible options become subject to collective choice. The choices presented to voters in elections do not include the ideal points, the alternatives they like most, of all citizens. The number of options is necessarily limited, so that if voters are sufficiently heterogeneous in what they would like most to occur, some may find that their preferences are far away from the closest platform that is being proposed. Moreover, electoral competition inexorably pushes political parties, at least those that want to and have a chance to win, to offer similar platforms. The result is that the alternatives presented in elections are meager: Choices are few and the range of decisions they offer is paltry. Indeed, if elections were truly described by the model that serves as the workhorse of electoral analysis – the median voter model in which two parties converge to the same platform – individual voters would have no choice at all.