I guess to make myself clearer I should just define what I mean by stability and democracy. As for stability, there is social, political and economic stability. Democracy itself would have many different interpretations as there are many different types of it but in general democracy means that the power is given to the majority, that is, the people of the country. By investing the power in the people, the chance that they will revolt or go on strikes is much lesser than when the power is invested solely in the government. However, along with democracy will also come a small minority of people who are not content with the direction the country is developing towards. It is hard to expect what they might do when facing such a problem. If the country is lucky the minority will not be violent and will merely voice out its opinion but as we can see all over the world many organizations representing minorities often resort to violent means to their own ends. One such example would be the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. The Tamils, if I am not wrong, represent approximately 8-9% of the population in Sri Lanka while the majority would be the Sinhalese (80+ %).
By saying this however I must acknowledge the fact that such a thing as consensus democracy exists, that is, a kind of democracy that requires various degrees of consensus rather than just a mere democratic majority. Basically consensus democracy aims to protect the minority rights from majority rule.
There are some examples of democracy bringing stability to countries and one major one would be the United States. Due to the fact that equality is one big pillar of democracy itself, the Blacks managed to eradicate racism and gain an equal status as the Whites. This resulted in stability but the process however definitely did not so… I’m not too sure about whether the U.S would be a good example haha. I guess I should use another example to give you guys a better overview.
Singapore is also an example of a democracy which brought about stability. Though Singapore is not a “true blue” democratic state, I guess socialist democracy wouldn’t be too far off.. For Singapore, the power is vested in the people in the sense that we vote for a certain group of people to be our leaders and therefore it is assumed that whatever they choose for us would be what we want. Sometimes it doesn’t really work out, like for the old National Library issue where it was demolished despite numerous attempts to stop it. However, if you look at Singapore from the economic, social or political point of view, she can be considered stable. Our economy is strong and still growing. The people are content with the government and events like riots have not happened for quite a while. There is no or little tension between the different races and politically we have no problems either.
I personally think that there is no form of government that can possibly fulfill the wishes of every single person in their country and therefore total stability cannot be achieved. However, democracy does, to a large extent bring countries to stability, mainly because it satisfies majority of the people in the country.
