User talk:Pablo Mayrgundter
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I hope I don't write in hasty mode, when I suggest that the suffrage-as-basis-for-legitimacy of democracies would rather belong in an article on democracy, including the neccessary discussion on legitimacy (Max Weber and half a dozen more... ;-), than in an article on Suffrage, where the discussion and distinctions would soon be about other things than suffrage. Appart from this I don't have much to object to anything.
I would however give an example: Finland is a country I visit now and then. Finland had between the 1720s and the 1770s experienced a, for its time, pretty advanced kind of Parliamentarism, which in combination with the Peasantry's representative participation in legislation and decissions on taxation (having been the rule constantly since the 1540s) must be judged as a comparably democratic government than the more autocratic constitutional monarchy which followed in 1772. The government's legitimacy seems however to have increased as the influence of the representatives decreased on executive matters. In 1809 the territory was ceded to Russia, but the legitimacy of the new government was by-and-large preserved by continuity of Finland's constitution and religion (Lutheran compared to Russia's orthodoxy). Although the representative assembly didn't convene again until the 1860s, the government's legitimacy is held to have been preserved by two factors: ¹/The government's efficiacy in achieving the goals of the expressed Public Opinion, and ²/The executive "Senate" being composed according to similar principles as the Privy Council of Sweden before 1809. Universal suffrage was achieved in 1906, but didn't much affect the legitimacy of the government. Rather the legitimacy seems to have decreased, as shown by the rebellion in 1918 by approximately 50% of the population living in the southernmost part of the country. After the rebellion having been quenched, the suffrage of the rebellous was indeed for decennias seen as decreasing the democratic government's legitimacy. Today, it could maybe be argued that transparency is a more important corner stone of the Democracy of Finland - beside the just function of the judicial system. Limitations on corruption aswell as a sense of the voter's ability to participate with a responsible informed vote can both be derived from the citizens' principial right of insight in documents of governmental agencies and beauracracies. The legitimacy of the Prime Minister Anneli Jäätteenmäki turned however out to be critically dependent on the confindence in her veracity.
I've above tried to express my point of view, that the legitimacy of a government (democratic or not) is not neccessarily primarily dependent on the suffrage or the technical power of the representatives, nor is it neccessarily co-varying with the suffrage.
-- Ruhrjung 04:24 27 Jun 2003 (UTC)
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