Out of the three theories of democracy, I believe the most appropriate one to describe our elections would be pluralism. I believe our government elections are more like pluralism than majoritarian and elitism in many various ways. Pluralism is a democratic belief, a belief that can be achieved in a large society by bargaining, competing, and compromising among organized groups. I strongly believe elections would be best described as pluralism because our society is very diverse, meaning we have a lot of different interests. With having so many interests, different groups have different powers over them. Which pluralism is described as groups that govern the United States. Pluralism includes unions, trades, environmentalists, civil rights activists, business and financial lobbies, and influences the making of laws and policy. All environmental groups are incorporated with pluralism. In this theory, people act more bystanders, and the main problem with that is that it’s dominated by multiple small groups, some that are well organized and funded, and some that are not. Another problem with pluralism is pluralists judge their society by its equality of political opportunity. The public also chooses leaders, and most of them are backed by organized groups. In pluralism “politicians compete for the support of voters in the electoral arena”. There are different types of pluralists and elite pluralists and classical pluralists are on the same page.
Majoritarian, this theory is best described as the government’s development because it’s what most people want for our government. Majoritarian isn’t like our elections because they approximate the people’s role in democracy. It was presumed that a majority of the population was poor and ignorant. It was also argued that any individual or group less than the majority was also capable of tyranny. Tyranny is a group of people who are treated very poorly because of their individual situations. Majoritarian leads to tyranny. Another flaw of majoritarianism is that they have large parties that represent our society badly.
The elite theory holds all societies that are divided along class lines, in which upper class will hold more power as always. There are two perspectives of elitism one “ a community’s affairs are best handled by a small subset of its members” and two “ in modern societies such an arrangement is in fact inevitable. These two tenets are ideologically allied but logically separable.” The main idea of elitism is power concentrated in the hands of very few leaders. This theory opposes pluralism. Elitism assumes that everyone balances everyone out in contributing to democratic political outcomes. Most elite leaders aren’t good leaders and we can’t have a good society without one. I disagree with elitism not only because it contradicts pluralism but they argue to control by minorities. Elites tend to only have power because they have money or inheritance.
The way we elect representatives, senators, and the president are all different. Representatives are elected by the people of several states, the electors in each state, and in the congressional district. Congressional districts are divided every ten years based on population to the states. People vote for representatives, not for specific policy alternatives. There are 435 representatives, and they are elected for two years. The number of people representing each individual state is depended on the population of the state. Members of Congress in both houses are elected by direct popular vote. Senators are elected by a statewide vote. Since every state has a number of electors, which is also based on the number of representatives, every elector has one vote for the general election which decided who’s elected as president.
In conclusion, one change that should be changed to each way we elect representatives, senators, and the president to bring the systems more in line with your preferred theory should be that power is distributed equally throughout the different interests and groups. For example, in pluralism, if somebody has more money they can pay to put their opinion out better than someone with less money. I feel that power should be distributed equally throughout all groups. Also, our political system should be more willing to give more access to people.