Advantages Of Constitutional Democracy

In a
democracy such as ours, which has a representative form of governance, whereby we vote for
people who will make decisions on various matter for us, this is an advantage and a
disadvantage.  When we elect people to make these various decisions, it is not at all clear
whether they are elected because we want them to exercise their own intelligence, logic,
experience, and ethical values or we want them to represent our opinions.  There is no law
governing this in our democracy, and it is indeed a two-edged sword.  Should our representatives
do the former or the latter?  There are advantages and disadvantages inherent in each.  Few of
us as individuals are able to be fully informed on every issue that comes before a legislator,
an executive, or a judge.  It can be a good thing for people who are elected because they are or
can be fully informed to make such decisions for us. But it can have consequences that we do not
think of as truly "democratic" when an elected official makes a decision that does not
represent the will of the majority, even when the decision made might be reasonably construed to
be the best decision, for all, or in the long run.  We would all want to give some very careful
thought to the notion that all decisions by elected or appointed individuals should be made
through poll-taking.  If that were the case, we would have a sort of direct democracy, but what
would be the point of having elected or appointed officials at all?  And that brings us to the
next way some issues are decided.

Democracy also, though, can include the
referendum, which is a decision that people vote upon directly, for example, whether or not to
allow medical or recreational marijuana use in a particular state or whether or not to allow
same-sex marriage. This is the purest form of democracy, truly representing the will of the
majority, but this has the disadvantage of a majority making a bad decision, since, again, very
few of us are as well-informed as we could be or should be to weigh in on these matter. 
Furthermore, these are state referenda, and the American Constitution can trump any of these,
for very good reason. 

We have been speaking of democracy in a kind of a
vacuum, ignoring what might be the most important aspect of American democracy, which is that it
is a constitutional democracy, which places limits on the powers of  those whom we elect or
appoint, limits that at least theoretically protect all of us as we cede authority to those we
elect or represent.  One of the difficulties in developing democracies is that without a
carefully crafted constitution, all of the disadvantages of democracy emerge, with few of the
advantages.