Question

Write an article on democracy is the best form of government in about 200 words

Answer 1

Democracy is the best form of government from the devel­opment point of view. It provides every individual equal opportunity for his/her progress and guarantees freedom to everyone to take up any enterprise and activity of his/her choice. But state protection and security is also important for the development of entrepreneurship and economic development.

Therefore, it is important for development that the government be stable. The instability of the government creates the feeling of insecurity in the minds of manufacturers and workers, traders and consumers. In spite of the privatization policy, the state continues to monitor prices of commodities and wages of workers so that they are not exploited by the economic players in the market.

Rudolph and Rudolph (1987) have attempted to find corre­lates between the nature of polity of the state and economic characteristics. In a democratic country, there are two competing sovereignties: state sovereignty and voter/citizen sovereignty. Heuristically, they use two polar type ideal concepts to represent these sovereignties: demand polity and command polity.

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The demand polity refers to the situation when the government’s policies and programmes are for the short-term benefits of people. The allocations and welfare activities are carried out keeping elections in mind. The model of command polity refers to that political set-up in which allocations and distributions are oriented to the long-term goals and sustainable benefits to people. The role of the state in command politics is monopolistic and oligopolistic. In the existing world, both these polities are found in a mixed form to varying degrees.

Which one of the two polities is more viable and acceptable would be decided by our experiences and the conclusions arrived at by the scholars. Rudolph and Rudolph conclude that “the consumption and welfare expenditures that demand politics generates can improve the productivity of human capital and enhance legitimacy; the voter sovereignty that demand politics expresses can promote governability by enhancing the legitimacy and efficiency enabled by citizen and producer commitment” (ibid.: 211-14).

The command politics relates to the postponement theory, which believes in investment for ensuring future development at the cost of the present needs and necessities of the people. Amartya Sen has attempted to estimate the cost to present gener­ations of postponement-oriented development efforts.

For example, in China and Sri Lanka, where short-term policies directly benefiting the poor were more visible than they were in India, the average life span in the late 1960s was 69 years, compared with 52 in India. Sen, in asking how long it would have taken the Sri Lankan economy to reach an income level likely to support an average life span of 69 years if it had invested in capital formation and less in social expenditure, concludes that it would have taken somewhere between 58 and 152 years.

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This kind of estimate has given certain concreteness to the costs implicit in postponement theories ( Rudolph and Rudolph, 1987: 216; see also Sen, 1982 and 1983). The demand politics is preferable to command politics because the former takes care of welfare, social justices and immediate dire needs of the public – the voters.