ENG ELC 220 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Parliamentary Sovereignty, Open Government, Direct Democracy
14 Oct 2020
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Document Summary
Dalton, scarrow, and cain: advanced democracies and the new. Decreasing confidence in the institutions and processes of representative government (decline of electoral turnout and party membership) Positive trend: signing petitions, joining lobby groups, engaging in unconventional forms if political action. Shift from representative to direct democracy search for new institutional forms to express conflict of interest. Citizens demand: more transparency, accountability from their governments, greater public participation in shaping policies that affect their lives. Three different modes of democratic politics: representative democracy, direct democracy, advocacy democracy. Representative democracy: citizens elect elites, transformations (such as introduction of primaries in us, compared with 4 decades ago, electoral turnout is generally down by about 10% in the established democracies, general expansion in electoral choices. Direct democracy: bypass or complement the processes of representative democracy, referendum: only a single policy is decided, parliamentary sovereignty no longer absolute. Dahl: 5 criteria for a generally democratic system.
