David Easton Systems Model Of Democracy

In today’s world, many developed countries identify themselves to be some type of democracy where the masses are permitted to engage in the decision-making process of their governments to some extent. However, not all democracies are the same. Some democracies may have the interests of its citizens truly represented, other democracies may have all the formal mechanics of a democracy only to informally ignore the interests of the masses in the end, and many democracies may be somewhere in-between the two ends of the spectrum. I believe that there are two processes of a democracy that can be evaluated to determine how democratic a country truly is and that they are best explained with the assistance of the David Eastons Systems Model.
The first …show more content…
There are two ways democracies can perform this process: directly and indirectly. Democracies that choose between doing this directly and indirectly can be simply referred to as direct democracies and indirect democracies, respectively. Direct democracies basically let the public directly vote on policy decisions. If there was a huge bill in the legislature of a direct democracy, the government would set up some sort of referendum to allow the public to vote to pass or reject the bill. Indirect democracies, however, do not let the public directly vote on policy decisions and instead let an elected official represent their constituents when it comes to voting on policy. A drawback of indirect democracies is that the elected official may vote for his or her own interests per se as opposed to the interests of their constituents, which may not necessarily be the …show more content…
In a direct democracy, there is only one degree of separation between the masses’ votes and the government’s policy changes since they directly vote on the policy. In an indirect democracy where the masses elect officials to vote on policy, there are two degrees of separation. As mentioned earlier, this kind of democracy can be less democratic since the interests of the elected official may not always match the interests of the masses. We can take this farther to further show the disconnection between the masses’ interests and the policy changes. We could have an indirect democracy where the masses elect officials at the state level and those officials elect other officials to represent the state officials at the national level so that there’s three degrees of separation between the masses’ interests and policy changes. The masses’ interests and the state officials’ interest won’t always match and the state officials’ interests and the federal official’s interests won’t always match, so it’s safe to assume that the masses’ interests and the federal official’s interests may not match much at all. That’s not very democratic.
With both of these processes in mind, we can conclude that, in summary, the amount of democracy in a country can be measured by how well the country’s political institutions match the masses’