Vote, or don't
"I argue in this book that politics matters more than most people in democracies give it credit for, and it is more demanding of them than they fully realize. You can have politics without demoncracy -- that is, you can have authoritarian government with people making collective decisions on your behalf without accountability to you -- but you can't have democracy without politics. There is no form of collective decision making that can be described as 'democratic' that does not rest on a process of engaging those affected by a decision in the making of that decision. Yet thinking about politics for many citizens of democracies goes along the following lines:
Politics is not intrinsically interesting. Ideally, what I would want are politicians who know instinctively what I want. I do not really care much about most issues and indeed I am happy to see someone else with more interest make the effort of sorting things out. What I do want should I deign to participate, because something grabs my attention or affects me in some way, is that the political system then responds to my demands with courtesy and attentiveness.
Now I hope that you are laughing at this point, because you recognize that this kind of reasoning about politics contains aspirations about the way democracy should work that are hopelessly and spectacularly unrealistic.... Romantic thinking about community and civil society should not blind us to the reality that because we are human we disagree and seek different things and we need politics not only to express but also to manage those disagreements and if possible find ways to cooperate."
-- Gerry Stoker, Why Politics Matters: Making Democracy Work
Politics is not intrinsically interesting. Ideally, what I would want are politicians who know instinctively what I want. I do not really care much about most issues and indeed I am happy to see someone else with more interest make the effort of sorting things out. What I do want should I deign to participate, because something grabs my attention or affects me in some way, is that the political system then responds to my demands with courtesy and attentiveness.
Now I hope that you are laughing at this point, because you recognize that this kind of reasoning about politics contains aspirations about the way democracy should work that are hopelessly and spectacularly unrealistic.... Romantic thinking about community and civil society should not blind us to the reality that because we are human we disagree and seek different things and we need politics not only to express but also to manage those disagreements and if possible find ways to cooperate."
-- Gerry Stoker, Why Politics Matters: Making Democracy Work