Who are
the 3 main decision makers in a democratic government setup
Answers
Around the world, traditional barriers to judicial engagement with the structure of democratic politics have fallen remarkably as courts increasingly entertain first-order questions about the structures of governance. This article explores judicial responses to a particularly vexing problem: who should be the polity that decides first-order political issues?
The most famous such judicial encounter is that of the Canadian Supreme Court in a case involving whether Quebec had a right to secede based on a referendum of its own population. The discussion places the Canadian Court's resolution of that issue in the context of how numerous courts around the world, including the United States Supreme Court, have addressed similar questions, though generally in cases not so freighted as the potential dissolution of the national federation.
Concluding from a review of such cases that courts forced (or willing) to engage such issues are likely to find little mooring for their resolution in either legal doctrine or political theory, the article warns that courts should be wary of following their impulses to treat such first-order conflicts about the structure of political systems as familiar claims of individual rights, even if that is the posture in which the issues are litigated.
Issue Section: Articles
Much of the literature on the legal regulation of voting turns on the issue of who holds the franchise and what institutional arrangements should control the selection of officeholders. Ultimately, democracy is the process of aggregating preferences revealed as votes. At some level, the majority should prevail and, at some correspondingly high level of abstraction, there must be set institutional arrangements that confer legitimacy on the manner in which the collective choice is adduced. Within this framework there are a huge number of moving parts, dealing with the basic rights of participation and moving outward to the complicated role of political parties, campaign finance, rules governing the aggregation of votes, and an expanding universe of strategic interactions between all of these. Taken together, these make up the complicated law of democracy, as it both channels and informs the ability of the polity to reach decisions on governance within the bounds of political legitimacy.
The question of political legitimacy provides an interesting divide in the theoretical and legal literature. There are two dominant approaches for assessing the success of a democracy in terms of basic political legitimacy. Democracy may be thought of as primarily forward looking, offering to the desires of the electorate the prospect of representation. Or it can be defined retrospectively, by its ability to enforce accountability through the capacity to hold governors to task for their actions, most critically by removing them from office for failure to discharge the public interest. The prospective view evinces a greater concern for minority access in the process of ensuring some representation for all sectors of society. The retrospective view is more concerned with the capacity of majorities to form and reform, compelling government to anticipate and respect shifting political sentiments.