When Participation Has No Consequences

Democracy becomes a strange performance when participation is celebrated right up until people decide something inconvenient. Vote, sign, organize, show up, make your voice heard, and then discover that the actual decision still belongs somewhere else. Of course a majority should not be able to vote away somebody else’s rights. Constitutions, courts and minority protections exist for very good reasons. But there is a considerable distance between limiting majority power and treating democratic participation as an elaborate opinion poll that can simply be ignored.

We talk a lot about declining trust in democracy as if citizens have developed some mysterious psychological defect. Perhaps people are also learning from experience. If participation repeatedly changes nothing, if consultation means being heard but not having leverage, if decisions are only respected when they produce acceptable outcomes, people eventually understand where power actually sits. Political disengagement is not always a failure to appreciate democracy. Sometimes it is a fairly accurate reading of how little democratic participation is allowed to decide.