Representative Democracy

Abstract

Representative democracy is studied using the example of the 2017 German Bundestag (federal) election. The representative capabilities of 31 German parties that took part in the election are analyzed from the viewpoint of policy representation, or virtual direct democracy. For this purpose, the parties’ positions on 38 topical policy issues are compared with the results of relevant public opinion polls. Then the parties’ indices of popularity (the average percentage of the population represented) and universality (frequency of representing a majority) are computed, as described in the previous chapters. Similar indices are also computed for the Bundestag and the Bundestag coalitions. A special attention is paid to processing cases with missing data. Among other things, it is shown that the election winner is not necessarily the best representative of public opinion, whereas the best representatives may receive too few votes to be allocated Bundestag seats. The same election failure is also observed in the 2009 and 2013 Bundestag elections considered in [Tangian 2014] and the following Chapter 13, respectively. Thereby it is shown that representative democracy, per se, guarantees no adequate representation of public opinion — even in Germany with its multiparty system and strong social-democratic traditions.