User:FlaresofCryo/Election

Elections as aristocratic
Scholars argue that the predominance of elections masks the fact that they are actually aristocratic selection mechanisms that deny each citizen an equal chance of holding public office. Such views were expressed as early as the time of Ancient Greece by Aristotle. According to French political scientist Bernard Manin, the inegalitarian nature of elections stems from four factors: the unequal treatment of candidates by voters, the distinction of candidates required by choice, the cognitive advantage conferred by salience, and the costs of disseminating information. These four factors result in the evaluation of candidates based on voters' partial standards of quality and social saliency (for example, skin color and good looks). This leads to self-selection biases in candidate pools due to unobjective standards of treatment by voters and the costs (barriers to entry) associated with raising one's political profile. Ultimately, the result is the election of candidates who are superior (whether in actuality or as perceived within a cultural context) and objectively unlike the voters they are supposed to represent.

Additionally, evidence suggests that the concept of electing representatives was originally conceived to be different from democracy. Prior to the 18th century, some societies in Western Europe used sortition as a means to select rulers, a method which allowed regular citizens to exercise power, in keeping with understandings of democracy at the time. However, the idea of what constituted a legitimate government shifted in the 18th century to include consent. From this point onwards, sortition fell out of favor as a mechanism for selecting rulers. On the other hand, elections began to be seen as a way for the masses to express popular consent repeatedly, resulting in the triumph of the electoral process until the present day.

This conceptual misunderstanding of elections as open and egalitarian when they are not innately so may thus be a root cause of the problems in contemporary governance. Those in favor of this view argue that the modern system of elections was never meant to give ordinary citizens the chance to exercise power - merely privileging their right to consent to those who rule. Therefore, the representatives that modern electoral systems select for are too disconnected, unresponsive, and elite-serving. To deal with this issue, various scholars have proposed alternative models of democracy, many of which include a return to sortition-based selection mechanisms. The extent to which sortition should be the dominant mode of selection or instead be hybridised with electoral representation remains a topic of debate.