Toward New Democracy

Abstract

As Anthony Giddens told: "The crisis of democracy comes from its not being democratic enough." The central problem exists in that the traditional representative systems in political systems are faced with some severe dead locks today. The traditional representative system was institutionalized in the early modern days when most of the masses could hardly read or write. So, the masses elect the "elite" and leave the elite in full charge of all decisions. But, this system is not fitted for making right decisions in the present time when all of the masses have enough intellectual ability to participate in making political decisions. We call this incongruent situation "the representation failure". We do not deny representative democracy, but demand the activation of representative democracy by reflecting constantly citizens' opinion through various methods and raising wide participation of citizens into the deliberation and decision processes in various institutions from the Diet to local governments. The necessary policies are (1) throughgoing decentralization, (2) various utilization of national referendums, inhabitants' polls and other polls, (3) wide participation of citizens into various governmental institutions, and so on.