Why Democracy Matters?

Mirza Fanzikri

Using the assumption of rational self-interest, Olson (1993) compared how autocracy and democracy maintain collective interest and show the morals of both these institutions in governing the society. Empirically, focusing on local government performance following decentralization in the precolonial state of Cayor, Wilfahrt (2022) expands a theory of institutional congruence to explain subnational variation between elites is more likely to factor between social preferences or their own interest. Moreover, Khrisna (2008) explains why democracy is important to the wealthy and poor. This paper tried to respond to some scholar’s work by asking why democracy matters. Does democracy matter based on considering social status?

“Individuals or groups need their property and contract rights protected from violation not only by other individuals in the private sector but also by the entity with the greatest power in society, namely, the government itself.”

Olson (1993) starts by arguing that “no society can work satisfactorily if it does not have a peaceful order and usually other public goods as well.” Therefore, the question is: how do humans create a peaceful condition and shape institutions to keep society peaceful instead of self-interest mode? Olson explains this puzzle through the story of a Chinese warlord. In short, the warlord stole from a group of victims. In turn, the group ‘allowed’ the warlord to monopolize theft, accepting that the group would be protected from anarchy. Through this story, the emergence of government due to rational self-interest among those who can organize the greatest capacity for violence. He analogies that the warlord, as the government who takes a part of total production through tax theft, will also pay him to provide other public goods whenever these goods increase taxable income sufficiently. Consequently, the larger or more encompassing the stake an organization or individual has in a society, the greater the incentive for the government to take action to provide public goods for society.

Individuals or groups need their property and contract rights protected from violation not only by other individuals in the private sector but also by the entity with the greatest power in society, namely, the government itself. In an autocracy, the source of order and other public goods, as well as the source of the social progress that these public goods make possible, encompasses autocratic ownership. Meanwhile, democracy offers the mechanism with the advantage of preventing significant extraction of social surplus by their leaders (Olson, 1993). Khrisna (2008) pointed out that accountability is essential to reduce the likelihood of domination, and minimizing domination is a central government objective. Democracy encourages government to provide access, efficacy, and participation in politics and development, not only for the wealthy but also for the poor.

According to Khrisna (2008), the original database has shown that an individual’s concern for democracy is not directly related to levels of material deprivation. Even when people do not derive significant material benefits, the people in Indian villages continue to support democracy strongly. Findings similar to those reported here have also been provided by investigations conducted in Africa and other parts of South Asia. Poor Africans condemn authoritarian regimes and overwhelmingly support democracy. Even though they are not happy with the way that democracy actually works for them in terms of material benefits, most Africans are committed to democracy.  Additionally, Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world and one where the experience of democracy has been deeply dissatisfying regarding tangible results. Yet more than three-fourths of a national sample of more than four thousand respondents, including richer and poorer citizens, “retain their trust in democracy [and] … clearly reject non-democratic alternatives.” I argue that democracy is an institution altered from embedded suffering by autocracy and colonial regimes.

Narrow empirically in the village levels, Wilfahrt (2022) pointed out that establishing cross-village social institutions enables intra-elite cooperation by disincentivizing political conflict and fostering a sense of “we-ness” in the case of the precolonial state of Cayor. Institutional congruence does not necessitate the perfect overlap of physical boundaries as long as local elites are mutually embedded within shared social institutions. Consequently, when social institutions embed the vast majority of local elites from across a local government’s many villages, elites are more likely to factor the interests of others into their own preferences. However, where such cross-village institutions are absent, politics pervades even the most basic local government investments, skewing allocative decisions from the neediest to the most politically useful or expedient. He posits that local redistributive politics is a function of the degree of spatial overlap between the formal institutional extent of the local state, created and reformed from above, and local social institutions inherited from the pre-colonial past.

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