The reason why democracy is so unproblematically considered as the best form of government is, presumably, the fact that democracy is thought to create the best conditions for achieving a society in which justice and equity would prevail. In public discussion, democracy is offered spontaneously as a remedy as soon as decision-makers are observed to act in an arbitrary fashion or it is noted that some population segment is being discriminated—or simply when one’s own reference group fails to gain the advantages it desires. Conceptually, however, it is a pure coincidence if a democratic society obeys such generally valuable principles as justice or equality in some respect. Namely, the society being democratic means merely that each citizen has (either directly or through their representatives) an equal weight in determining the outcome of political decisions. The content and consequences of those decisions can be anything whatsoever. In particular, their relation to justice and equality can be arbitrary.
Even without practical examples it would be clear that a person or party can go against even the most elementary norms adopted in developed societies, and still come to power through a democratic selection process. The outcome of the last US presidential election offers a concrete example of this phenomenon: the majority of the population wanted to have as a president a person who talks and does a lot—ignoring such finesses as the tripartite separation of powers or the need of presenting evidence for one’s accusations. A diplomatic, political, and juridical incompetence combined with a wide popular support and broad executive powers can yield arbitrarily catastrophic results—no matter how well founded the relevant administration’s articulated goals may be, say, regarding the primacy of national interests. What is good about this example is that it may help one to understand the nature of democracy.
The voter need not motivate his or her voting behavior. It is more likely than not that the voter aims at improving his or her personal situation—it is highly unlikely that the goal is to act for the common good. Neither the voters nor those who get voted need to have any idea of the realizability of the objectives that the candidates put forward, or of the environment in which one must operate in order to work for these goals. In an extreme case a person selected through a democratic process will be as incompetent as his or her electors. In this case he or she presumably represents these people particularly well. That is, when in a representative democracy the representation succeeds optimally, it can happen that the decisions of the representatives exemplify justice, quest for equality, respect for the law, and civilized attitude towards fellow human beings to a particularly small degree. Indeed, by itself democracy is not a means for realizing any principles that can be considered valuable on general grounds. Neither is, of course, the concentration of power in the hands of a few. In fact, the number and the relative weight of the decision-makers have no direct bearing on the realizability of such general objectives. Justice does not consist of the opportunity for each pressure group to promote its own interests by collecting votes. If justice is understood as interest group neutrality, it should be an inbuilt property of a form of government—a feature that would be realized precisely because it could not be affected by political decisions, which, in turn, would be subordinated to it.
In factual democracies some sort of interest group neutrality is realized when no group happens to have radically more power than any other group. In such a case the attempts to find a compromise between the conflicting goals of the groups yield a collective decision that is watered down to the point of not being particularly bad (or particularly good) for anyone. Such a “mean value” of the goals of groups each of which seeks to maximize its own benefits is, to be sure, very far from the ideal case in which each and every political actor expressly strives for the common good, but it is quite possible that in practice, that is the closest to the ideal we can get. Crucially, however, the democratic nature of decision-making does not guarantee that justice will prevail even in such an approximative manner.
The most obvious consequence of democracy is the mutual competition of interest groups. There simply is no reason why democratic decision-making would lead to a society that could be characterized as just.
[This is an English version of my post Kansa vallassa. It appeared originally in Uusi Suomi in March 2017.]