Power to the People

We are told, endlessly and reverently, that the legitimacy of a polity is derived from “the people”. It sounds democratic. It sounds final. It is neither.

“The people” are not a single will waiting to be expressed. They are a shifting mixture of interests, fears, habits, and contradictions. Elections do not reveal a popular will so much as compress it into a result that can be administered. Something is always lost in that compression. To then treat the outcome as a moral blank cheque is not democratic principle. It is political convenience.

The problem becomes obvious the moment an election ends. Between elections the electorate has almost no power at all. Voters cannot recall laws, reverse decisions, or restrain executive action in real time. Power is exercised continuously by a small group, while consent is frozen at a moment in the past. The idea that “the people are in charge” during this period is a comforting story we tell ourselves to avoid looking at how thin popular control actually is.

This is why institutions matter. Courts, legislatures, regulators, auditors, devolved bodies, and a free press are not irritants to democracy. They are the means by which democracy continues after polling day. Elections authorise power. Institutions supervise it. Remove that supervision and elections become ritualised abdication rather than ongoing consent.

But democracy cannot solve this by voting constantly. A system in permanent campaign mode cannot plan. Infrastructure, defence, education, climate policy, industrial strategy all require decisions whose benefits arrive long after the next headline or the next vote. Continuous plebiscite produces short-term bribery, not stewardship.

So democracy lives in tension. Too much electoral distance and power hardens into entitlement. Too little and governance collapses into populist panic. The solution is not to worship elections, but to embed them in a structure that restrains power while voters are absent.

This is where electoral systems stop being technical details and start being constitutional safeguards.

Winner-takes-all systems are uniquely dangerous because they convert narrow victories into total control. A party or individual can acquire sweeping authority on a minority of support, then claim exclusive ownership of “the people’s will”. Opposition is marginalised. Institutional resistance is reframed as anti-democratic obstruction. What follows is not a coup with tanks, but a coup by legality. Norms are bent, checks are weakened, watchdogs are attacked, and all of it is justified as democratic entitlement.

Just look at Trump.  

These systems also encourage binary politics. Winner versus loser. Mandate versus betrayal. Once that frame is embedded, anything that slows or limits the winner is cast as illegitimate. Volatility is mistaken for decisiveness. In reality, legitimacy erodes with every lurch.

Proportional systems behave differently. They fragment power deliberately. They make outright domination rare unless it is genuinely supported by a majority. Governments depend on negotiation and shared authority. Opposition is not an inconvenience to be crushed but a permanent feature of governance. Policy evolves as the balance of opinion in society evolves. That process can be slow and frustrating, but it is honest.

Crucially, proportional systems frustrate coups. Authoritarian takeovers rely on speed and consolidation. Proportional systems impose delay, bargaining, and visibility. Power cannot easily be seized all at once. When rapid change does occur, it is usually because public opinion has shifted decisively and persistently, not because a transient mood was magnified into absolute control.

Systems that concentrate executive power in a single individual are especially vulnerable. When authority is personal, indivisible, and time-locked, restraint is easily framed as sabotage. Elections become existential battles. Losing power feels like exclusion rather than opposition. Under those conditions, attempts to bypass constitutional limits become rational rather than exceptional. History shows that such systems are far more prone to coups, self-coups, and democratic hollowing-out than systems where power is shared and conditional.

The deeper point is this. Legitimacy does not flow from “the people” as a one-off event. It flows from a continuing relationship between consent, law, restraint, and outcomes. Elections provide authorisation. Institutions provide accountability. Stability makes long-term planning possible. Remove any part of that chain and democracy degrades, either into paralysis or into elective absolutism dressed up as popular will.

Those who shout loudest about “the people” are often those most eager to escape supervision. History suggests that when power starts using “the people” as a shield, the people are usually the first to be hit.