Democratic Deficit Quotes

If there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat — if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy.

It is a monstrous imposition to be asked to put up with these treaties of a century and a quarter ago, in the making of which the people had no voice or say…

...nations have no command over their governments, & in fact no influence over them, except of a fleeting & rather ineffectual sort.

Globalization today is a globalization of markets, not a globalization of democracy.

In England, a Majority of Citizens does not elect the Majority of Representatives.

In Southern Europe, we have, of course, very bad governments.

Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy.

We can speak of the triumph of capitalism in the world, but we cannot yet speak about the triumph of democracy. There is a serious mismatch between the political and the economic conditions that prevail in the world today.

The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn't represent the people. It controls them.

The European Union, which is not directly responsible to voters, provides an irresistible opportunity for European elites to seize power in order to impose their own vision on a newly socially regimented Europe.

This Constitution does not reflect the thoughts, hopes and aspirations of ordinary people. It does nothing for jobs or economic growth and widens further still the democratic deficit.

Al Gore in 2000. He got a half a million more votes than George Bush and lost. How can that be? It's ridiculous. It's an elitist system. It's so they pick your President. You don't - the people - and it needs to be abolished.

In Europe democracy is a falsehood. I do not know where it will end, but it cannot end in a quiet old age.

There's something fundamentally wrong with a system where there's been 17 years of a Tory Government and the people of Scotland have voted Socialist for 17 years. That hardly seems democratic.

People feel that in too many ways the EU is something that is done to them, not something over which they have a say.

Our government has become a system rather than a living expression of the popular will.

The House of Lords has many fine aspects, but at its heart, it is a betrayal of the core democratic principle that those in the enlightened world hold so dear - that those who make the laws of the land should be elected by those who must obey those laws.

The EU will face problems similar to the US: an increasing gap between the citizens and decision makers in Brussels and a perceived or even real lack of democracy.

As long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period... Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression - and this is valid for South America - is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government.

We need to recognize that part our political problem is that we do not participate effectively, that we suffer from a kind of mental slumber.

Underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions.

Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.

If, then, the control of the people over the organs of their government be the measure of its republicanism, and I confess I know no other measure, it must be agreed that our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected; in other words, that the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and their interests require.

The EU suffers from … a structural democratic deficit. Of its seven institutions, just one—the European Parliament—is directly elected by the people, and it cannot initiate legislation.

In referendums in 2005, the Dutch and the French electorates rejected the European Constitution, which aimed to turn the E.U. into a genuine state. But Brussels refused to take no for an answer. It went ahead with its plans for a constitutional treaty, notwithstanding the people's opposition. Brussels thinks it knows better than the people.