Elitist Voting: Democracy collapse into Dictatorship or Slavery System

From guest blogger, Yi.

 In class, we discussed one of the suggestions on voting, which is only allowing people who know politics to vote. It is called elitist voting. I would like to divide elitist voting into two types and define different types of elitist voting. (There might be more types, but this blog will not cover.)

            The first elitist voting is positive elitist voting: elitists do the best the can to improve the society and policies. The second elitist voting is negative elitist voting: elitist’s corruption happens in this case and elitists would only vote for politicians who would benefit their own elitist groups. (It sounds like Democracy voting with small range of people)I would like to discuss how negative elitist voting could make democracy collapse into dictatorship or slavery system and what results negative elitist voting could lead.

            The huge problem for negative elitist voting is that groups of elitists might only vote for the candidate who makes the best policies for elitist groups. When political candidates realize that what they need to do for winning is just to create the best policies for elitist group, they would start making policies only to benefit these groups. Eventually there will be less politicians care about the rights and policies for the other groups cause their supporters are only from elitists. The power of elitists group will be too strong to control. The government will actually be controlled by elicits group instead. There would not be democracy anymore but just a group of elitists (dictators) to make up rules and ask other people to follow.

There might be another problem caused by negative elitist voting. There is a possibility that negative elitist voting would break the peace of the society. When elitists want to take charge of the whole society and manipulate the government, new slavery system might be formed. Politicians would set up certain rules based on elitists’ will to enslave non-elitist people in certain ways. In order to keep benefiting themselves the most, elitists group might prevent other people from learning and knowing policies. People who know politics will have privileges in the society. People who do not know politics will be forced to follow the social contracts made up by people who know politics. However, this might lead a huge disparity between elitist groups and other groups. Once people realize that the whole society is manipulated by certain group of people, they would feel unsatisfied and raise social movements. Some movement might lead to violence and wars. (These consequences only based on empirical predictions, but it is plausible if negative elitist voting really happen.)