Democracy is a procedure for competitive selection of rulers rather than a means of expressing a popular will.
Schumpeter's 1942 argument, deliberately deflationary: democracy's merit is that it removes rulers without bloodshed, not that it expresses anything coherent called the popular will.
In practice
- A government that has lost an election leaves, which is the whole of the achievement, and no coherent popular mandate needs to be identified.
- A committee chair is replaced by a vote; the vote does not reveal what the committee wants, only whom it will no longer tolerate.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works