Democracy and stability: Counter-example

To start off, I will first agree with Tak Wei’s definition of stability, where a country which has achieved stability is one which society’s social, economic, and political aspects are not threatened or weakened by the various acts of democracy, which Bao Ju has identified in the previous post.

It is hard to decide on a stand as to whether democracy can create and maintain the above mentioned ‘stability’, as stability itself is mainly brought about by the people of the society and their opinions on certain policies. However, I generally agree that democracy can indeed create stability in a society, but to different extents in various nations.

As the case about the Tsar has been brought up earlier, I shall not further dwell into it. We are obviously able to identify with the socio-political instability in Russia caused by the Tsar. Further elaborating about the point on Singapore, we Singaporeans do not actually make the decisions or vote for the policies directly, but instead, we cast our vote for the appropriate party which we think is most able to express our views to the entire country, or share the common beliefs as to what we want our country to achieve. As such, we are actually electing a political party to indirectly make decisions on our behalf, instead of individually balloting about every single policy to be implemented. We can see the importance of general elections, as the Singaporean government makes them compulsory for Singapore citizens aged 21 and above.

Instead of furthering the discussion about how democracy can cause stability, we should also touch on the opposing side.

We would also have to consider the fact that democracy is only a familiar term to those who are citizens of the state. What about those who are denied citizenship? An example of this would be Sri Lanka, where citizenship rights (includes voting!) are only awarded to those who lived in Sri Lanka since 1964 or their descendents. It is obvious that the government is restricting certain groups of people from participating in so-called “democratic” elections, due to certain reasons. Socio-political instability can surface as a result of unbalanced “democracy”, where the cause is the inability of some people to be included in elections. However, the problems are not surfacing from the principles of democracy itself, but rather the way in which democracy is implemented in the country. To one who is denied citizenship to a country, there would probably be no difference between a communist government and a government which practices democracy but refuses to give voting rights to certain people. Democracy is flawed in a way, as there is no one defined way in which the form of government named democracy must be carried out and can be easily manipulated.