While this headline sounds elitist and paternalistic, the main point is simply again that democracy is the worst possible system, except for all the others. And while democracy may not produce the best leadership, it should protect against the worst (for me the key feature of democracy is the feedback mechanism, by which bad leadership is ultimately removed by the system itself, at the next election). Ideally anyway :-)
Some extracts from this article :
- The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.
- Mato Nagel, a sociologist in Germany, recently implemented Dunning and Kruger's theories by computer-simulating a democratic election. In his mathematical model of the election, he assumed that voters' own leadership skills were distributed on a bell curve ? some were really good leaders, some, really bad, but most were mediocre ? and that each voter was incapable of recognizing the leadership skills of a political candidate as being better than his or her own. When such an election was simulated, candidates whose leadership skills were only slightly better than average always won.
- Nagel concluded that democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they "effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders."
