10 - Implications for Democracy

Summary

One motivation for this volume is to question the way that academic models of the political process depict preference aggregation and public policy formation. More significantly, this analysis has implications for democratic political institutions. There is an illusion, promoted by the political elite, that democratic oversight of government can control its power and direct it toward the public interest, but the powerless cannot control the powerful, even if the powerless far outnumber the powerful. The ability of constitutional constraints to limit government power and direct it toward the interests of the masses is also questionable, because those constraints must be enforced. If public policy is designed and implemented by the political elite, ultimately the power of government can be controlled only by a system of checks and balances that enables some of the elite to control the power of others. Democratic institutions can play a role in determining who holds political power, and constitutional constraints can play a role if there are institutional mechanisms to enforce them, but without a system of checks and balances that enables some elites to control the power of others, democracy and constitutional constraints are ineffective.