By Juyoung (Kirsten) Pak, V Form

My Election, My Will

Student-Submitted Note: Inspired by my US Government class, I decided to enter in the John Locke competition. I answered the question, “Do the results of elections express the will of the people?”. The parameters of the competition was to write an argumentative essay while incorporating elements from a traditional research paper.

Introduction

In most modern democracies, one of the few outcomes people can directly influence are elections, meaning that elections are a critical conduit for the people’s will. But what exactly is the will of the people? “The people” is a nebulous term that encompasses a wide array of interests, views, and preferences, making it nearly impossible to cover the innumerous wants and needs of specific groups. As such, elections are imperfect systems that stitch together different voices in majoritarian fashion, delivering the ‘people’s will’ through general consensus. The results, however, are undermined by the complexities of modern democracies, diluting the purity of what can be broadly defined as ‘the people’s will’.

Will of the People: Majoritarian at Best

The inherent flaw with equating a bare majority as the people is that large swathes of the population are actually not represented, and candidates that most likely hold opposing beliefs to these people are elected into office. Take, for example, South Korea’s 2022 Presidential Election, when the People Power Party’s (PPP)Yoon Seok-Yeol won by just 0.73%. As a result, the voices of the 16.3 million supporters of Democratic Party’s liberal policies, which are antithetical to the conservative PPP’s, were effectively mollified. In the same year in Brazil, left-wing Lula da Silva defeated right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro by 1.8%, and the last six US presidential elections have been won by single digits. In these cases, nearly half of voters selected the losing candidate with polar opposite views to the winning candidate, meaning that nearly half of people’s views were not represented by the results. Though not all elections are so close, these extreme cases illustrate that election results are the will of the majority, not the people as a whole. Even for larger margins, elected officials can never capture the nuanced, and often contrasting, shades that wholly represent the people; elections simply do their best to corral as many votes as possible.

The same runs true for multi-party systems. While in two-party systems, parties aggregate votes from different groups, coalescing groups of voices under the same banner, coalition governments usually have to mix-and-match parties into a majority, weaving groups together into a patchwork quilt. For example, the 2021 German federal elections yielded a SPD-Greens-FDP coalition, a group with many differences, such as the FDP’s staunch support of neoliberalism that is in direct opposition to the Green’s support of strict regulation and the SDP’s socialist policies. In this sense, multi-party systems are intrinsically the same as two-party systems, but tents are built post-election and in a more complicated fashion. And just as in two-party systems, non-coalition votes are effectively negated, meaning that large swathes of voices are not represented in the final outcome.