So, I am currently inspired by an interesting post @Morgrim made over on another thread (
) to explain something about the impulses in Imperial government that apply a stamp of approval to both meritocratic rule and to the consensus of town meetings and sortitional, etc., assemblies but to disdain representative democracy.
Specifically, each one reflects a different impulse in their systems theory: the former, the Aristocratic¹ impulse, in which it is taken as obvious that the res publica are best managed by the person most fitted by talent, education, and character, demonstrated by proven performance, to do so, and that introducing the ungifted into the process can do nothing except degrade the results; and
the latter, the Consensualist impulse, in which it is taken as equally obvious that since the res publica belong to everyone (even if everyone is neither supremely nor equally gifted to manage them), all must have equal input into the process of managing them and equal say upon all matters that are not matters of fact.
The normal squaring of this circle, as the Imperial Charter prescribes, is that the res publica are managed by the runér, but each and every one must and shall be provided with an advisory assembly (usually, although not necessarily, assembled via sortition) with the power to veto what the former does with a substantive vote.
Representative democracy, on the other hand, is basically the compromise which - as is the reason that compromise is a dirty word in Eldraeic - manages to incorporate the worst features of each. It loses the advantages of the latter because you’re putting one guy in charge who represents the consensus without being bound to it, and it loses the advantages of the former because the res publica aren’t being tended by an expert in the field, but by some schmuck with good hair, a silver tongue, and the willingness to make non-binding promises.
- Meaning “meritocratic”, which is what aristocratic actually means anyway if you overlook a couple of thousand years of linguistic degradation in which people said “aristocracy” but meant “oligarchy”. Bloody humans, can’t even speak their own language right. Mutter, mutter, harrumph.