Political democracy, where the people select their government leaders through free and open elections, holds a vital place in society, offering a framework for collective decision-making, accountability, and the safeguarding of individual rights. However, democracy in its current form often falls short of its ideals due to a lack of informed participation, structural fairness, and ethical leadership. To truly empower citizens and make democracy meaningful, several improvements are essential.
Three key aspects of political democracy
Firstly, educating the populace politically, economically and socially on matters is foundational. A politically literate population can more effectively scrutinize policies, challenge misinformation, and hold leaders accountable. This type of education enables people to understand how policy affects their material well-being, and also their mental well-being, and encourages them to engage critically with issues such as taxation, public spending, and job creation. Educational curricula up to high school leaving age in all schools that cover these matters are essential for future informed voters. When people are informed, they vote not just out of emotion or habit, but from a place of reasoned judgment, contributing to more effective and equitable governance.
Secondly, ensuring that political leaders are ethical and adhere to their campaign promises is vital to maintaining public trust in policy-making and legislative institutions. Mechanisms such as mandatory transparency in political donations, ability for people to publicly assess performance of political representatives, and accountability measures to help bridge the gap between promises made during campaigns and actions taken once in office, including reasons for divergence, are some examples of what is necessary. They help raise ethical leadership and set a standard for political culture, which in turns promotes a system that serves people rather than power.
Thirdly, preventing politics from being controlled or unduly influenced by moneyed and other vested interests is necessary to preserve the integrity of democratic institutions and systems. In many democracies, corporate lobbying, campaign financing, and media control by a few wealthy elites can distort public policy in favour of private interests. Strong campaign finance reforms, public funding for elections, and caps on political donations can reduce this distortion, enabling the democratic process to serve the broader population rather than a privileged few. Public lobbying and public involvement in consultation processes around policy development and legislative proposals do provide for public input into decision-making, but it has to remain an open process that all interested persons can participate in.
Economic democracy
Yet, in order to improve people’s lives more directly, we also need to emphasize economic democracy. While political participation occurs sporadically—typically every 2, 3, 4 or 5 years through voting—economic engagement is a daily reality. People interact with the economy through work, production, distribution and consumption of goods and services every single day. Economic democracy offers a direct avenue for empowerment by giving individuals and communities meaningful control over their economic lives.
In the workplace and in the local economy, economic democracy allows people to participate in decision-making processes that affect their livelihoods. This could include cooperative ownership of businesses, local control of or input into development planning, and the decentralization of economic power. Local economic planning becomes a tool through which communities can shape their own futures, counteracting the top-down control typically exerted by national and multinational corporate interests.
Through such involvement and planning, communities can also ensure that the minimum requirements of a particular age—such as food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and education—are guaranteed to all. This fulfills the moral and practical obligation of any society to provide for its members, especially the most vulnerable. It also reflects a shift from reactive welfare models to proactive economic empowerment.
Moreover, people’s purchasing power should increase over time, not decline. As technology advances and productivity grows, the benefits must be equitably shared, allowing goods and services to become more affordable. This raises the standard of living for all, not just the wealthy, and ensures that economic progress translates into real quality-of-life improvements.
Local forums
Importantly, economic decisions at the local level should rest in the hands of local people through local planning boards, which may be transparent local councils. These bodies, composed of elected representatives from various sectors of society, should be tasked with planning resource allocation, development projects, and economic priorities at their local level. This decentralization strengthens community engagement, ensures relevance in policy-making, and protects against exploitation by external interests.
Local councils could become more like, or incorporate, people’s planning assemblies. The core shift would be from merely representative to participatory democracy — giving regular people more direct say in shaping local policy and development decisions. This would involve open, deliberative forums, say a people’s assembly, that emphasizes inclusive dialogue. Or councils could hold citizens’ assemblies on key issues like housing, zoning, transport, or climate. Sortition could also be applied to choose a diverse group of residents to deliberate on and make recommendations. These forums would have more real decision-making power, not just consultation status.
This can extend into a process of participatory budgeting. Residents deciding more directly how to spend part of the local budget. Or community members proposing and voting on projects, such as playgrounds, bike lanes, greening, etc. Similar approaches are already successful in parts of Brazil, New York and Paris. These are systems of bottom-up planning, instead of top-down master plans. They encourage neighbourhood-level planning groups to develop visions for their areas. They also provide meaningful access to professional planners so everyday people can meaningfully engage on proposals and shape them.
What is ‘local’ and subsidiarity?
An interesting question arises as to what is meant by ‘local’, because decision-making really takes place at various levels, which is common in subsidiary governance (including government) systems. The goal being to empower the most immediate level of government and community to handle issues that they are best placed to deal with. At its core, subsidiarity is the principle that decisions should be made as close as possible to the people affected by them, and that higher levels of government come into the decision-making process when lower levels cannot effectively handle an issue.
For example, In the European Union (EU), subsidiarity is a guiding principle that determines when the EU should act versus when individual member states should take the lead. It ensures that decisions are made as closely as possible to citizens, and that the EU only intervenes when action at the EU level is more effective than at the national, regional, or local levels. Similarly, the national government of a country only acts on matters when internal state governments cannot take the lead, and state governments only act when regional or local governments cannot take the lead. Any higher government must justify its involvement in matters that could be better dealt with or within the scope of the a lower level of government.
Subsidiarity promotes efficiency, accountability and democratic participation by ensuring that power is not concentrated unnecessarily at higher tiers of government. It is a foundational concept in federal systems and participatory governance models, emphasizing bottom-up decision-making and the delegation of authority in accordance with local capacity. On this basis ‘local’ may not necessarily mean at the local government level, but more that the next level of government which could be regional or state, so that all citizens affected by a decision across the region or state have input (even if via elected representatives).
Outside interference
To further protect community autonomy, individuals or businesses from outside the local area should not interfere with decisions of the local economy. This does not mean cutting off all cooperation or exchanges with others outside the local area, or outside the regional area, or outside the state area, as the case may be, but rather ensuring that local priorities and long-term sustainability are not overridden by extraneous motives. For example, the short-term profit motives from outside actors. Priority must be given to local involvement, local employment, local ownership, and community-focused development.
In a truly democratic economy, resources must be used sustainably and optimally (maximum per time, place and society), respecting not only the needs of current and future human generations but also the rights of animals, plants and the broader ecosystem. Resources must also be rationally distributed. Local decision-making is critical to achieve such outcomes.
These approaches foster harmony with nature and addresses the ecological crises exacerbated by exploitative economic systems that prioritize profit over planet. Of course, a profit has to be made by a commercial enterprise to sustain its existence and indeed for its good management, but a focus only on the profit motive disregarding other factors and stakeholders is not going to be the future way of doing business.
Conclusion
In conclusion, political democracy does not need to be abandoned but should be redefined. One of its roles has to be to support the goals and objectives of economic democracy. A truly representative political system should facilitate the implementation of decentralized economic policies, empower local communities, and ensure that human and ecological well-being are central to development. Rather than being ends in themselves, political institutions become the means through which a just, balanced, and participatory economic order can be established.
