Can democracy create stability? It depends on various factors By Wang Zhengli

As I have mentioned in my previous post, whether democracy can create stability in a society depends not on the situation of a country itself . I will try to further substantiate my point in this essay.

To begin with, democracy can create stability in a society. The ideal of democracy is that the all the people in the country have a chance in deciding what they want and the majority of the preference decide how the policy will perform. It also gives opportunity to people to let off their resentment as it acts as a channel to dispel their dissatisfactions. Take Switzerland for example, which is widely considered one of the world's most stable countries, is a direct democracy where elections as well as many other things are also decided by public votes. It is the closest existing form to the ideal democracy. Switzerland is famous for its economic stability in terms of prosperity, growth figures and GDP. It is a perfect example to prove that democracy can actually bring stability to a society.

Another form of democracy, liberal representative democracy, is slightly different from direct democracy that the representatives elected by the populace will represent them as their voice. In the case of the United States, which uses this form of democracy, there is also economic stability in that it is a world super economy; politically stable because there are no multiparty conflicts since there are only two parties; and social stability because the people there lead a very comfortable life. Here too we see that democracy allows for the society to have stability.

However, democracy may not create stability in a society. Let’s take a familiar instance, Sri Lanka, which is a democracy country that has been plagued by ethnic collisions between Tamils and Sinhalese. There is little social stability with so many conflicts. In addition, the LTTE and other Tamil activists are always acting against the Sinhalese government. Because of so many problems, there is also no stability. One of the causes of the conflict is the elected government itself. From the very beginning, the Sinhalese and Tamils voted for parties of their own ethnicity in the elections. Because the Sinhalese are the majority, the Sinhalese parties always win. This resulted in permanent resentment in the Tamil groups. From this, we can see that democracy may not create stability in a society. In a situation like this, democracy only adds fuel to the fire of instability.

While democracy may or may not create stability in a society, I want to emphasize that conditions may not be suitable to implement democracy in some countries. For instance, it could not be implemented in China after the fall of the emperor because of the state of despair at that time. Someone had to come down and make things work, or conflicting opinions will aggravate chaos. China-Special Socialism helped to consolidate and lift the society as well as greatly improving the economy and the international status of the country.

The largest democracy in the world, India, is a good example to argue on the pros and cons of the democratic system. While democracy and its companion capitalistic beliefs have just propelled India into a super economy and given it economic stability, this increased capitalism has widened the income gap at the same time. Thus the socio-economic status of the bottom half of the society degrades while the upper half make even big progress. This is expected to impact the social stability and might lead to things getting out of control. Too much freedom also wreaks havoc because there are so many different parties with different ideals, which paralyses the functioning of the government sometimes, and often results in hung decisions.

As I have mentioned above, democracy works very well in Switzerland and US, but fails terribly in countries like Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland and is in a limbo in countries like India. Therefore whether or not democracy creates stability in a society is a subjective development and can vary depending on various factors that surround each situation.