How does democracy ensure the formation and respect of opinion for minorities?
Answers
Explanation:
Democracy beyond the ballot box
But a vote alone won’t give a person the ability to learn more, to have greater agency or to think more critically about the things that affect their lives. A vote alone won’t give a person the ability to go out and ask for the change they wish to see to make their lives better. And a vote alone won’t give people the agency and ability to shape their futures, rather than being limited to making a judgement about their past. For these reasons, we need to look beyond the ballot box – understanding elections and electoral democracy as one part of a wider, more complex system of democracy.
There is now a renewed sense of urgency about these issues. The appalling quality of debate we continue to experience about Brexit, the growth of populist moments across the world, the sense that citizens have fallen prey to more and more technocratic models of decision making which have locked them out of power, and the emergence of the era of ‘post-truth’, all speak to both the scale of the challenge and the pressing need for change. We also live in an era where knowledge, money and power are arguably less fairly distributed than they have ever been in history.