[Bruxelles, 2012] ©António Lucas Soares
Democracy is supposed to provide a mechanism for making collective decisions that serve the best interests of the community. It is meant to achieve the same objective for collective decision making as the market mechanism does for individual decision making. Citizens elect representatives who gather in assemblies to make collective decisions by voting. This is the principle of representative democracy. It presupposes a certain kind of relationship between the citizens and their representatives. The candidates stand up and tell the citizens what they stand for, and the citizens then choose the person whose ideas are the closest to their own.