SHORTCOMINGS OF DIRECT DEMOCRACY

Abstract

The article deals with the main problematic issues related to the effectiveness of the results of the functioning of the established system of democratic institutions and procedures. Full trust in democracy as an ideal of governance, where the highest supreme power and the highest controlling powers belong to the whole society and every citizen, cannot be realised in practice, but is reduced to the requirement of participation in the governance process of all those to whom this governance applies and strengthening the role of public interests in the process of application of state power. Democracy does not exist in isolation from society; it is implemented in a particular society under specific circumstances, since it is the way society and the state interact.

Direct democracy has a number of disadvantages that create obstacles to its practical implementation. The theoretical concept of direct democracy as the power of the people as a homogeneous entity with a single will, consciousness, interests and needs remains rather ambiguous. Realising that direct democracy is a democracy of a homogeneous majority, it should be noted that it does not take into account social differentiation, which is manifested in the presence of a complex conglomerate of individual citizens with diverse interests and forming separate associations with varying degrees of influence, so their will becomes private in relation to the state as a whole, and these citizens themselves become representatives of separate strata and groups.

In the course of the study, the author points out that there are a number of problems arising in the course of functioning of the direct democracy model, which are caused by both the specifics of the form under study and the practical way of implementing the ideas inherent in it. Given the problematic issues of the theoretical development of direct democracy and certain shortcomings of its practical implementation, it can be assumed that it is not the optimal form of exercise of power.