Question

Difference between democratic and non democratic government in cartoons

Answer 1

Originally Answered: What is the difference between democratic and non-democratic?

The difference between democratic and non-democratic.

Democratic means that the people have control. The way typically the people have control is through elections. Democratic elections can be direct or indirect. Either United States citizens directly vote for candidates, or in the case of the President and Vice President, United States citizens (unknowingly) vote for an elector or group of electors (represented on the ballot by Presidential candidate for whom the individual is voting) whom will actually cast a vote for President and Vice President some number of days/weeks later after the votes have been counted and certified as official. US citizens directly vote for candidates for federal house of representatives and federal senate. The way that the electors are divvied out is on a state by state basis. Some states allow the party of the candidate that gets the most votes for President in that state to get all of the electors in that state. A small handful of states divvy up the votes for electors via voting district. Each state gets an number of electors based upon the number of federal house of representative members plus number of federal senate members. The electors typically are chosen the winning party. However, the electors are not bound to vote for the candidate that won the most votes in the respective state or district, though it is highly irregular to do otherwise. The votes of the electors are then added together and as this time (2018–August–01) , there are 538 electors, so 50% + 1 results in needing 270 votes from electors to win the office of the President.

In theory, the candidates voted into office directly or indirectly are held accountable to the people meaning that they must pay attention to their constituents (their voting district members) in order to get elected again in the future else risk losing the next election. This may have once been an effective way to keep elected officials accountable to the people, but IMO, it is a weak mechanism as elections in the United States typically allow incumbents to be re-elected over 90% of the time, yet the approval ratings of their jobs range far below 50% in a majority of a polled electorate