Conclusion: What do Elections do?

Abstract

Most research asks what decides elections. We have seen how governments try to organise elections to get the result they want. We have seen how the voters respond to the record of the government and the appeals of opposition parties. Together, these constraints and responses decide the results of elections. But the question of what elections decide is equally important. Indeed, if elections make no difference, there is no point in studying them at all. So what do elections decide? What do they do? We first touched on this question when we discussed communist and Third World elections. Now we return to it at greater length, and now with a focus on the functions of free, competitive elections. These are considerably wider than the functions of those elections without choice which we discussed in Chapter 2.