Do the People or the Politicians Fail a Democracy?

We all know the old trick: if you run an autocratic dictatorship you call it “democratic”! The former DDR (Democratische Deutches Republik – East Germany), DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) readily spring to mind. It fools no-one but sounds good. Yet what happens when a true democracy fails or is degraded? Is the fault of the people or the politicians? 

I am not the first to point out that in many countries the concept of democracy as a form of government is under threat, not least from young people. In August 2025 a survey published by the Adam Smith Institute showed that 33% of 18-30-year-olds would prefer authoritarianism to govern Britain rather than democracy. The John Smith Centre UK Youth Poll 2025 shows that young people in the UK still believe in democracy but they are worried about its future. Democracy is backed over a dictatorship by 57% to 27% but young people agree ‘democracy in the UK is in trouble’ by 63% to 24%.  Alarmingly, that 27% stated that they would rather live in a dictatorship. In Europe a Berlin study showed that only half of young people in France and Spain believe that democracy is the best form of government, with support even lower among their Polish counterparts. More than one in five – 21% – would favour authoritarian rule under certain, unspecified circumstances. This was highest in Italy at 24% and lowest in Germany with 15%. In France, Spain and Poland the figure was 23%.

Democracy is so much more than plural voting in a wide enfranchised electorate. As indicated in a recent seminar by Prof. Paul Lemmens it is an environment in which there is tolerance of opposing views, a process of debate leading to informed decisions and a culture of general acceptance of and compliance with the will of the people through their elected representatives and where the rule of law predominates.

It is possible that future generations of Americans will have cause to thank their present President as he tests the constitution almost to breaking point and demonstrates where its failings may be. The founding fathers thought that they had devised checks and balances that would create a perfect democracy (despite amendments to it from the very start) but its weaknesses are now being exposed. 

Those close to, such as Steve Bannon, and advising the Administration maintain that all power flows from the elected President and that the Department of Justice and other agencies are expressions of that power to be used in furtherance of the President’s aims. That has been tested with a refusal to comply with a court ordering the return of deportation flights and the issuance of executive orders on tariffs and other matters on the basis that they are dealing with national emergencies, arguably beyond their original intention. The critics complain that turning the rule of law and the courts into mere expressions of executive power denies the ability to act as an effective constraint on unbridled power. What about the Congressional check? Unlike the UK where the executive is embedded in the Parliamentary system and can be abused as a result (although the rule of law prevails as we saw recently a Prime Minister having to reverse an unlawful prorogation of Parliament) in USA the Congress is separate from the Executive and should act as a brake on excess power – it works but only so long as the Congress is not itself controlled by the Executive in the same party system. 

We should not underestimate the effectiveness of an impartial rule of law that applies its norms to both rich and powerful as well as the poor and dispossessed: the surmounting statue on many courts is Justitia (from Isis, Themis and other deities) holding the balance but is blindfolded (from 16th C onwards) so as to show impartiality and uninfluenced by external appearance and unimportant matters. Where the rule of law fails is admirably explained by Sir Thomas More in Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons” in which he accuses his headstrong future son-in-law William Roper (who has told him that he would “cut down every law in England to get after the Devil”): “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”

The founding fathers, of course, wanted to prevent any doctrine such as that of the divine right of kings exemplified by the Stuarts and by words put by Shakespeare into the mouth of Richard II “Not all the water in the rough, rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king”. Yet they may not have fully realised that by the time of the American War of Independence Great Britain had already established a constitutional monarchy through the Act of Settlement 1688 and the Bill of Rights 1689, which established Parliamentary supremacy and limited the monarchy's powers.

So what are the hallmarks of an enduring, effective democracy that is seen to work and, in the inimitable words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, provides government of the people, by the people for the people? In may not be as efficient as an authoritarian regime (witness Churchill’s remark in the House of Commons “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”) but, usually, it is one that guarantees citizens’ rights under an impartial rule of law that can call to order even the highest political authority in the land (see the way in which the British courts ruled unlawful Premier Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament).

Many constitutional lawyers and eminent academics have sought to define democracy from ancient to modern times but for world federalists (and, I hope, others) there are certain hallmarks which are essential if this form of government is to command universal respect – the benchmarks against which to judge existing democracies.

The first, of course, has to be the franchise. Should all citizens, irrespective of their education and sentience be entitled to vote? For years the so-called Mother of Parliaments in Great Britain denied a large number of those affected by its decisions the right to participate. Magna Carta was a compromise to satisfy the landed gentry or barons, the grandiloquently named Great Reform Act of 1832 redistributed parliamentary seats to new industrial towns and took them from "rotten boroughs" as well as expanding the electorate by changing voting qualifications to include middle-class men who owned property worth at least £10 a year, although the majority of working-class men remained excluded; working-class men in towns had to wait until 1867 to be able to vote for the first time by extending the vote to all householders and some lodgers in boroughs who paid a certain amount in rent and by lowering the property qualifications for the vote in counties which, overall, significantly increased the number of voters, nearly doubling the electorate in England and Wales. In the UK women over the age of 30 had to wait until 1918 (in Sweden and New Jersey they had the vote in the 18^th Century) and it was not until 1928 that British Women over 21 had the franchise. In the 1970s both the USA and UK lowered the voting age to 18 for all and current legislation will reduce this to 16 in England and Wales (it already exists in Scotland).

There is a constant debate over whether there should be some qualification of understanding of politics to earn the right to vote (and in most democracies much more needs to be done in schools to equip young people to understand their political systems) but generally this is seen as discriminatory and the simplest is to allow a universal franchise. A further controversy is whether its exercise should be compulsory (as in Australian federal elections) or voluntary but several countries that had a compulsory requirement have moved from compulsory to voluntary voting. It can be frustrating when so much blood and effort has gone into securing the right to vote in the past that many people do not exercise the right but, ultimately, that should be their choice (on 28 March 1979 during the vote of no confidence in the Labour Government which it lost by one vote and so brought down the government an independent republican MP Frank Maguire, who seldom attended anyway, famously remarked “I have come over here to abstain in person"!).

A critical aspect of any democracy is the voting system. Although we British like to describe our Parliament as the “mother” of all others I rather fear that such an accolade may not now be justified. Our Second Chamber (House of Lords) is unelected and its members are there through patronage and or main legislative body, the House of Commons, is elected on a system of first-past-the-post which is increasingly anomalous. Every new legislative assembly in my lifetime in the British Isles is elected by PR/proportional representation (Northern Ireland Assembly, Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly/Senedd); in Scotland local government elections were changed to a proportional system and in Wales each local authority can ask the people if they wish to have a different system. We may yet see change: both local Labour Party constituency associations and their national Conference have passed motions in favour and if things go badly for them in the May local elections they may see PR as a way of saving some of their Parliamentary seats in the next General Election. PR has been derided in the UK by some who are wedded to first-past-the-post and claim that it is a “foreign” concept but often in ignorance of both our own electoral history and that PR was conceived by Thomas Hare a 19^th Century British lawyer who invented the single transferable vote system which is now used in national elections in Ireland and Malta, in Australian Senate and state elections and in city elections in Northern Ireland, the U.S., New Zealand and Scotland. It is a system of PR which ensures through second and subsequent preferences that the electorate end up with a politician who commands broad support (whereas under first-past-the-post many are elected on a minority of those voting). Disillusion only grows if people do not get the representative of their choice and leads to a negative attitude ie people vote against political parties to stop them rather than for them.

All democratic systems should have a constitution or a basic law which determines how it can be changed (usually via an entrenched provision requiring a specific majority of the legislature for approval) and which sets out its constituent elements. The UK famously has no written constitution (although much has been codified into law) as against the written US Constitution with its various amendments. Germany has its Grundgesetz or Basic Law against which all legislative proposals are measured. There are many other examples all of which, nevertheless, subscribe to the concept that a constitution is a supreme law that cannot be changed with impunity. In a High Court ruling against the UK’s Attorney-General in January 1977 one of Britain’s most famous judges Lord Denning (before whom I had the privilege to appear as a barrister) stated “To every subject of this land, however powerful, I would use Thomas Fuller's words over three hundred years ago, ‘Be ye never so high, the law is above you’” in reference to the English writer and physician Thomas Fuller who used the phrase in 1732. This echoed a more famous occasion when the English jurist Sir Edward Coke famously told King James I that the King was "under God and the law". This occurred during a significant confrontation around 1607, when Coke was the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and King James I, who believed in the divine right of kings, felt that he had the right to personally adjudicate legal cases.

It is an essential element that no Minister or government official should be above the law. In recent memory a British Prime Minister has been found to have acted unlawfully against the constitution (see above) and had to comply. Such a provision is not only a safeguard for the citizen against abuse of power but is also critical to the maintenance of confidence in the system. We must wait and see what measures may be taken in the light of the extensive use of Executive Orders without Congressional agreement by President Trump. In the UK we call them Henry VIII orders (because that monarch used them extensively) and a worrying trend in legislation is to leave detailed provisions not in the body of the legislation itself but delegated to secondary legislation or Orders in Council which do not have the same Parliamentary oversight.

There is another aspect of illegality which needs to be addressed and which, sadly, confronts many countries whether democracies or not: corruption. It is a cancer at the heart of any government and undermines trust in not only individuals but also in institutions themselves. Personal enrichment and lack of accountability are fellow travellers – so any system has to have a rigid process of accountability, declaration of interests, disinterested investigation into allegations and strict enforcement. The principle has to be that even minor breaches are unacceptable and will result in dismissal from office. Corruption is not restricted to financial impropriety but also to abuse of power and extension of authority beyond established limits.

What system of Government is best? Very much depends on the history, geography and culture of a country. There are those which have become unified from previously separate parts – such as Germany or, arguably, the USA. These are federations from the bottom up. It is much less common to see a devolution from an existing central power into newly created semi-autonomous bodies. Some countries like India and Russia are so large and diverse culturally, ethnically and linguistically that a federation is a natural choice (even though some such are subject to powerful central control). The principle of a federation, however, is central to public confidence in the system of government because it relies on the concept that decisions are taken at the lowest level closest to the general public as possible and that only decisions which transcend local issues are transferred upwards to a higher authority.

A democracy that does not attend to these issues is one that is likely to fail or need reinvigoration. When that happens should we blame the people or the politicians? It will depend on the circumstances but it is usually a combination of both: complacency or apathy on one part and inactivity on the other. The people deserve better.

Keith Best TD, MA is a former Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Anglesey/Ynys Môn and served as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Wales. Major in airborne and commando (artillery) forces, practising barrister, liveryman (Loriner), and Freeman of the City of London, Keith was named one of the 100 most influential people in public services in the UK by Society Guardian. Keith has made significant contributions to international refugee and human rights initiatives, including serving as Vice Chair of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles and as a member of the Foreign Secretary’s Advisory Panel on Torture Prevention. He is the Chair & CEO of the Wyndham Place Charlemagne Trust, Chair of the Universal Peace Federation (UK), patron of TEAM Global, and a trustee of several national and international organisations. 

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