Democracy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 3

Democracy - Essay ExamplePlutocracy is less idealistic than republic in that it is not the peoples voice but the will of the institutions that holds sway over policy. But plutocracy is still better than a totalitarian beau monde where power is concentrated in the hands of small ruling elite with no accountability. Dahl classifies governmental systems under a spectrum of five gradations. At the filch of the scale are the fairest systems that employ rational persuasion for gathering public consensus. At the bottom of the scale are brutal autocracies that regularly resort to somatogenetic force to keep the population under make. But Dahl admits that horizontal in the most fair of existing systems the power is wielded from top-down. This means that the notion of res publica as a people-inspired and people-regulated governing system does not exist anywhere today. Professor Charles Hauss understands res publica in terms of functioning electoral politics. Any nation-state that cond ucts let go and fair elections periodically would qualify as pop under this view. In Hauss own words free, open and competitive elections are central conditions for a republic. (Hauss, as quoted in Edwards 2010) Also important to this setup is the credibility of rule of law. ... To this extent this latter category of countries would only be nominal democratic societies. When we analyze the American political system in the backdrop of the definitions of Hauss and Dahl, we can note a few divergences. What Dahls list of options for population control does not mention is propaganda. The Chomsky-Herman propaganda model fills the gap left by Dahls conceptualization. Given that America is the birthplace for modern advertising and the Public traffic industry (PR) in the country is billions of dollars worth, it is fair to claim that PR is the foremost method here for the control of public minds. It is difficult to place the American genius of governance in the gradation offered by Dahl. The most benign method of generating public consensus proposed by Dahl is rational persuasion. America is an exception to even this benign form of manufactured consent, for what the PR industry does is irrational persuasion. As Chomsky-Herman note, advertising is all about misinforming people so that they make irrational choices. (Chomsky, quoted in Wilson 2010) There is less divergence with Hauss understanding of democracy, for he links it with the capitalist economy. America being the leading practitioner of capitalism qualifies under Hauss classification. Moreover, there is satisfactory enforcement of law within the country, although America is well-known for breaching international law, especially under the auspices of the United Nations. Seymour Martin Lipset, on the other hand, would have found the American political system disappointing in terms of how democratic he found it to be. He believed that the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain d emocracy. (Lipset, quoted in Edwards