Growing up in a democracy, that had just before my birth got rid of dictatorship, and was in fact a relatively young country, probably by default I have always had the thought that democracy is "important" and "infallible".
So how does said democracy work? The thing we have now may be called representative democracy. We elect people to represent us and they build up the legislature and are in charge of running the country. This is different from something that used to be in days old, called "direct democracy". Now, ideally, many people would maintain that direct democracy, where each person would get a vote on all matters important, would be a great thing to have. Unfortunately with such a great population, it's not possible for most nations. And we can merely try to approximate that with our representative democracy.
But let's look at the claim of righteousness for direct democracy once, shall we? The problem with any election is that, there isn't really an observable "ground truth". We don't REALLY have a right/wrong. We have different people making choices of their own. Now, looking from a social welfare perspective, this choice can either be right or wrong. As simple as that. So, what happens if we think of each voter as a binary classifier? There can only be two alternatives for a voter, either she's right or she's wrong. And we can naively assume that for each voter, there is a probability p that she is in the right. Let's call p to represent her wisdom. Now, for this simplified setting, if the average wisdom of a population is lesser than fifty percent, it can be shown that the decision the majority of these people will lead to in case of direct democracy will be the wrong one. Just like that, our argument for direct democracy sort of goes out of the window. As long as the majority of people are "unwise", or rather the average wisdom is "low", the majority decision is likely to be wrong as well.
Here, representative democracy can play a really good role. Instead of being an approximation to direct democracy, it can surpass it. How? Bangladesh is broken down into 300 parliamentary seats, right? Where different blocks of people choose a representative who would make decisions for them. Now if, IF, we can make the assumption that each block of people would choose the wisest among them to represent them, then the average wisdom of the representatives go up. And it's more likely that their decisions would be better for social welfare. So even if most people aren't able to judge for themselves, what's best, if they can at least identify the persons who can, democracy still has a saving grace.
Now comes the fun part. This result relies on the hope that the people choose well. Then again we go back to the original problem. Do we choose well? Do the prospective representatives really want us to choose well? As long as the average wisdom is still low, the choice of representatives may go wrong as well. Particularly, if we don't choose the wisest amongs us, if we choose the corrupt, the greedy, we're probably messing up our chances for the social welfare wished for anyway.
[May or may not be continued]
PS: I have used the term "wisdom" very loosely throughout the writeup. Don't consider it to have anything to do with actual intelligence or anything.
References
1. https://papers.nips.cc/paper/7720-a-mathematical-model-for-optimal-decisions-in-a-representative-democracy.pdf
2. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-note-on-the-Condorcet-Jury-Theorem-with-voting-Fey/7c95005ffa20bf35e32331c003de3b8ed578fc2a
So how does said democracy work? The thing we have now may be called representative democracy. We elect people to represent us and they build up the legislature and are in charge of running the country. This is different from something that used to be in days old, called "direct democracy". Now, ideally, many people would maintain that direct democracy, where each person would get a vote on all matters important, would be a great thing to have. Unfortunately with such a great population, it's not possible for most nations. And we can merely try to approximate that with our representative democracy.
But let's look at the claim of righteousness for direct democracy once, shall we? The problem with any election is that, there isn't really an observable "ground truth". We don't REALLY have a right/wrong. We have different people making choices of their own. Now, looking from a social welfare perspective, this choice can either be right or wrong. As simple as that. So, what happens if we think of each voter as a binary classifier? There can only be two alternatives for a voter, either she's right or she's wrong. And we can naively assume that for each voter, there is a probability p that she is in the right. Let's call p to represent her wisdom. Now, for this simplified setting, if the average wisdom of a population is lesser than fifty percent, it can be shown that the decision the majority of these people will lead to in case of direct democracy will be the wrong one. Just like that, our argument for direct democracy sort of goes out of the window. As long as the majority of people are "unwise", or rather the average wisdom is "low", the majority decision is likely to be wrong as well.
Here, representative democracy can play a really good role. Instead of being an approximation to direct democracy, it can surpass it. How? Bangladesh is broken down into 300 parliamentary seats, right? Where different blocks of people choose a representative who would make decisions for them. Now if, IF, we can make the assumption that each block of people would choose the wisest among them to represent them, then the average wisdom of the representatives go up. And it's more likely that their decisions would be better for social welfare. So even if most people aren't able to judge for themselves, what's best, if they can at least identify the persons who can, democracy still has a saving grace.
Now comes the fun part. This result relies on the hope that the people choose well. Then again we go back to the original problem. Do we choose well? Do the prospective representatives really want us to choose well? As long as the average wisdom is still low, the choice of representatives may go wrong as well. Particularly, if we don't choose the wisest amongs us, if we choose the corrupt, the greedy, we're probably messing up our chances for the social welfare wished for anyway.
[May or may not be continued]
PS: I have used the term "wisdom" very loosely throughout the writeup. Don't consider it to have anything to do with actual intelligence or anything.
References
1. https://papers.nips.cc/paper/7720-a-mathematical-model-for-optimal-decisions-in-a-representative-democracy.pdf
2. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-note-on-the-Condorcet-Jury-Theorem-with-voting-Fey/7c95005ffa20bf35e32331c003de3b8ed578fc2a
