3. How is equality important for
democracy?
Answers
Answer:
In some countries, freedom of political expression, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and internet democracy are considered important to ensure that voters are well informed, enabling them to vote according to their own interests.
Explanation:
Answer:
Equality of the individuals is essential to democracy, each individual regardless of their advantages and disadvantages in society being on equal footing based upon the merits of their ideas and their majority held values (while at the same time being respectful and defending of the minority, treating them as equals despite hold an opposing view) to determine the direction the democracy should proceed.
If equality wasn’t a part of democracy, and individuals who were given an out sized influence because of some other attribute (wealth, inherited title, caste/class, religion, left-handedness, etc) then the political will would be unfairly distributed towards those that had a predetermined influential attribute to determine the direction of the society. Though that would seem to be great for the benefiting subset of people, but it is in fact not sustainable to maintain inequality in society. If a large enough segment of society doesn’t buy-in into the decisions that directly affect them, then they will grow to feel resentment and no longer are incentivized to remain within the hegemony of the society leading to both unintentionally and intentionally sabotaging the society that excludes them. This was main criticism in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (a.k.a. the original document of Capitalism) of the economy of the Roman Empire, that those affected by the decisions of the society/economy didn’t have influence on those decisions. Societies that strives to maintain inequality, eventually will put more and more effort to divert resources to maintain unnatural inequality. Think about Slave Patrols in the antebellum South and necessity of the economic powerhouse of the Free North to enforce the Runaway Slave Act to maintain the counter productive chattel slave system; or think of the East German Stasi needed to keep the ideological purists in an unequal status over everyone else was stagnating their economy and cultural development while being incredibly expensive to maintain.
Equality and liberty go hand-and-in-hand, a society can’t have one without the other. There those on the right that believe that liberty can be had without equality (universal access to healthcare if you have a million dollars in the bank, you can have continuation of life), while those on the left believe that equality of opportunity can be thrusted upon an unwilling population and regardless of the people’s choosing to participated in such society as well as using their own agency to determine what opportunity is for themselves. This is a delicate balancing act between equality and liberty, but it is also what makes politics so subjective for each individual.