The Ghost in the Ballot

The act of voting remains democracy’s central gesture. A citizen enters a booth, marks a box, and adds their voice to the collective. Yet beneath this ritual lies estrangement. The process works, while belief in its meaning weakens. People vote, but often without the sense that their decision truly steers the course ahead.

Rousseau imagined democracy as the expression of a general will — not a count of opinions, but a shared moral direction. In his Social Contract, freedom meant obeying a law one had willed together with others. It was demanding, because it required citizens to see themselves as co-authors of their society. Yet within that vision lay a tension that would later undo it, for the ideal contained its own shadow. Representation would replace participation; moral self-rule would become administration.

That shadow has grown. Today’s democracies function with admirable precision, yet their substance has thinned. Representation has become an end rather than a means. Institutions operate, elections proceed, but the space for genuine authorship has narrowed. Citizens are invited to choose between options pre-set by machinery they no longer control. The language of sovereignty survives; the experience of it does not.

Recent events show how fragile this balance has become. In the Netherlands, a coalition collapsed within a year of forming — the third to do so this decade. Government continues, but merely as routine maintenance.

Democracy has thus divided into two modes. The first, substantive democracy, echoing Rousseau, treats self-government as a moral act. The second, procedural democracy, treats it as the reliable management of disagreement. When the latter dominates, democracy still functions, but its heart beats faintly. The system endures, yet few feel it as their own.

Be all this as it may, the ritual matters. To vote is to rehearse the belief that collective will might one day recover its force. Even hollow gestures can keep memory alive. Democracy’s procedures are not empty; they are vessels waiting to be refilled with meaning. The challenge is not to abandon them, but to reconnect them to the human needs they were built to serve. 

We may never have lived Rousseau’s dream, but we still inhabit his language. Within that language lies a chance for renewal: to remember that democracy, before it became a system, was the belief that free individuals could still decide their shared fate.