Democracy as the Best Form of Government Argumentative Essay Example

📌Category: Government, Politics
📌Words: 912
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 03 April 2022

As defined by the Oxford dictionary, democracy is a system of government in which all the people of a state or polity are involved in making decisions about its affairs, typically by voting to elect representatives to a parliament or similar assembly. Democracy is the prefered system of nearly all of the developed world and has been since de-imperialization. There is a reason for this; governments that adopt democracy top strength indicators including the HDI, political stability, education and GDP per capita. Democracy allows for the liberty and freedom of its population while maintaining high stability and representation and for this reason, I believe democracy is the superior form of government.

The first reason that democracy is superior to other forms of government is because of the autonomy that it provides its citizens. In a democracy, the populous can vote for what representative party best matches their wants and needs. This leads to the majority of the population being able to rally for what they need, In turn, this leads to the parties providing better services to entice voters. The outcome of this is better social services such as healthcare and education, a free economy that incentivises entrepreneurial spirit and global trade, and more autonomy for citizens. For example, democratic states consistently top the HDI, an index that measures a country's education, health and living standards and equates them to a number. The top 10 countries, Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Iceland, Germany, Sweden, Australia, The Netherlands and Denmark all have one thing in common, they are nations that operate under a democratic system. These countries all utilize democracy to bring in social services to ensure high standards of living for all citizens. The use of democracy allows citizens to utilize their autonomy to create a better standard of living for themselves.

Secondly, democracy creates an environment for freedom of speech to thrive, with both regular citizens and journalists feeling secure in voicing their opinions and views or even criticizing the government. According to reporters without borders, the top 10 countries with the highest freedom of the press were all democratic states. The freedom of press index is calculated through surveys from journalists around the world, as well as acts of violence or anything in violation of a journalist's rights. The Index also evaluates factors such as the variance of opinion, media transparency, self-censorship, legislative network and media independence among others. this provides a conclusive index of the rights of reporters worldwide and their ability to report the truth. Freedom of the press is usually an indicator of the freedom of the citizens to speak freely and free speech is integral to the institution of democracy. Democracy is built on its citizen's ability to express their political views without fear of persecution and democracy actively protects that right. This fact is especially evident when we look at the bottom 10 countries on the press freedom index, this includes countries such as Turkmenistan, North Korea and Saudi Arabia. All of the bottom 10 countries have one thing in common, they are all authoritarian single-party systems that actively repress their citizens. Because these nations do not operate under a democratic system, the people can not challenge the government's rule unlike in a democratic country such as Australia, where we as citizens speak our minds by voting for the party that represents us. 

Democracy is not a perfect system, it does have its issues. In most democratic systems, there is a two-party system, this refers to two parties controlling the majority of the seats in a parliament. For example, Australia has the Coalition comprising of the liberal party and the national party and the Labor party, the US has the Republican party and the Democratic party. The reasoning behind the two-party system can be explained by Duverger's Law. Duverger's law holds that single-ballot plurality-rule elections structured within single-member districts tend to favour a two-party system. This means that in a democracy such as Australia where single-member districts are the norm, two-party systems in both national and state governments will occur. So why is the two-party system an issue? Well, having a  two-party system forces what is a vast spectrum of political ideologies into a binary system. By doing this, there are an array of people that have their views misrepresented. Due to this, two duopolistic system is causing parties to cater to more extreme views as there is no viable alternative, this can be seen from the radicalization of America's politics ever since Reagan's stint in the 80s, this especially applies to the American Republican party. On top of this, the two-party system creates inaction,  as stated by ex-Democratic candidate Andrew Yang, 'The political incentives are not around getting anything done, it's around blaming the other side, and just playing 'you lose, I lose' back and forth — while the people are losing'. By having a two-party system that incentivises total control of a parliament, it creates an environment for small insignificant changes that while may please voters in the short term, lack any staying power or long-term relevance. Instead, by incentivising a multi-party system, parties will have the opportunity to start long-term policies and changes that can be executed over a period longer than their term.

In Conclusion, democracy is the best system of government by a wide margin, it clears any metric of a nation's excellence when compared to countries utilizing an alternative system. Though democracy is not perfect, a major flaw of the democratic system is the prevalence of a two-party system in major democratic nations such as the US, Australia and the UK. Even though this issue is large, it is still not large enough to incur any doubt upon democracy's effectiveness in the governments of the present. I hope that all who are able to vote, vote wisely because 'Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.' - George Bernard Shaw.

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