When I think about democracy I tend to see a system as meaningfully democratic in proportion to how much of a reasonable chance I have at significantly affecting the outcome in a normal situation. That is, democratic debates beyond a relatively small group of people lose almost all meaning. So I suppose there is a sense in which I see radical participation and deliberation as key to democracy, with the goal being to use consensus among small groups in as many situations as possible. From this perspective, then, it seems obvious that counting as one person in a pool of, say, ten million voters - as in a national election - is of little real meaning. Yet, in a contemporary system like Canada’s, almost all economic management is centralized in either somewhat unaccountable private organizations or are regulated by public systems that are determined by pools of millions of voters.
