INEFFICIENCY OF DEMOCRATIC DECISION-MAKING IN AN UNSTABLE SOCIETY

The political power is said to be efficient if good results in decisio n making are achieved by moderate means. For example, if a large parli ament makes the same decisions as a given president, the power efficie ncy of the president is better than that of the parliament. We study t he efficiency of three forms of political power, president, cabinet of ministers, and the parliament, using the model from the author's earl ier publications on the mathematical theory of democracy. We define an indicator of power quality, referring to the weight of the coalition whose preference is satisfied by each decision. We prove that a presid ential power can be absolutely efficient when the society is divided b y preferences into (almost) equal coalitions, which is interpreted as social instability, because a small change in preferences breaks the e quilibrium. When the society is stable, i.e. there are predominant coa litions, the cabinet and the parliament provide a better power quality . For a model with a large number of independent individuals we derive approximation formulas of the indicator of the power quality which im ply a geometric interpretation of optimal president, cabinet, and parl iament as providing the greatest projections of their characteristic v ectors on the characteristic vector of the society. We draw an analogy to the geometric interpretation of forces in physics. From our standp oint, democratic (collective) forms of power are efficient in a stable society. In an unstable society, a parliament and a cabinet are less efficient than personal power. Linking social stability to economic de velopment, we conclude that a democratic political system is not the c ause but rather a result of economic development which makes the socie ty stable. We comment on the political development in the ex-Soviet Un ion. In particular, we justify the separation of the Soviet Union into independent states as a measure to make the power more powerful when its potential has been exhausted. However, we doubt that democratic tr ansformations can contribute to solving economic problems and that rea l democratic systems will be established in the ex-Soviet republics be fore at least major economic difficulties have been overcome. We also outline some applications of our results to Gallup polls of public opi nion and to multicriteria decision making.