Advantages and Disadvantages of Representative Democracy
What are the advantages and disadvantages of representative democracy?
Representative democracy is where the public people vote for and elect a person (called an MP, Member or Parliament) to portray and voice the opinions of the area the MP was elected in. They will take the views of their constituency on board when speaking in the House of Commons. A country which uses this is the United Kingdom.
One of the advantages of representative democracy is that even with over 60 million people in the UK the system of representative democracy works very well. This is in comparison to direct democracy where things are unworkable. Even though Direct Democracy is the purest form of democracy it is extremely expensive to run and cannot be done regularly. AV referendum 2011 (Alternative Voting) cost £75 million, whereas MP’s average salary is £60,000. However the downside of this is that all elected MP’s will have their own and their party’s agenda to look to too and therefore might overlook the wishes of the people that voted them. Also any new parties and pressure groups that there may be are given the freedom and the right to operate how they want and are allowed to pressurise the government into looking at their views and beliefs. Although with representative democracy parties get off and do not get to have their voice heard it does create a pluralist society
Although representative democracy is good in the way that MP’s get chosen by the public it is still a very selective process. MP’s are usually white, middle class, middle aged men. This does not give an accurate representation of the UK as there are a lot of ethnic minorities. However there are very few MP’s who actually represent these minorities. For example, in the UK there are 8% BAME’s (Black Asian Minority Ethnics) however only 4% of those are represented in parliament. Likewise with women, there are 50% of women in the population of the UK, however only 23% of parliament are women. Again this doesn’t show
Representative democracy is where the public people vote for and elect a person (called an MP, Member or Parliament) to portray and voice the opinions of the area the MP was elected in. They will take the views of their constituency on board when speaking in the House of Commons. A country which uses this is the United Kingdom.
One of the advantages of representative democracy is that even with over 60 million people in the UK the system of representative democracy works very well. This is in comparison to direct democracy where things are unworkable. Even though Direct Democracy is the purest form of democracy it is extremely expensive to run and cannot be done regularly. AV referendum 2011 (Alternative Voting) cost £75 million, whereas MP’s average salary is £60,000. However the downside of this is that all elected MP’s will have their own and their party’s agenda to look to too and therefore might overlook the wishes of the people that voted them. Also any new parties and pressure groups that there may be are given the freedom and the right to operate how they want and are allowed to pressurise the government into looking at their views and beliefs. Although with representative democracy parties get off and do not get to have their voice heard it does create a pluralist society
Although representative democracy is good in the way that MP’s get chosen by the public it is still a very selective process. MP’s are usually white, middle class, middle aged men. This does not give an accurate representation of the UK as there are a lot of ethnic minorities. However there are very few MP’s who actually represent these minorities. For example, in the UK there are 8% BAME’s (Black Asian Minority Ethnics) however only 4% of those are represented in parliament. Likewise with women, there are 50% of women in the population of the UK, however only 23% of parliament are women. Again this doesn’t show