Does Gen Y needs a smart democracy?

Last year, we witnessed a global rebellion. Young generation, with their smart networking devices were at the core of these rebellions. London Riots, Arab Spring and then Occupy Wall Street Movements that are now moving to other parts of world were the demonstrations of a generation that feel things are not going "right" for them and they had no other means but to go to streets to voice for it… If Arab youths ask for democracy that is quite understandable (Because of dictatorships) but what about youths in UK and USA that are the forefront of two different models of democracy (If there are institutions that represent people then what these people are doing on the streets?)?

One of the biggest problems in democracy is the participation of citizen. It is the participation of people in the democratic processes that give a government legitimacy. What makes me wonder by reading the charts of voter turnouts is the lowest turnouts in US presidential elections... In last US presidential election (2008), despite of a new popular face (That created a global buzz), the voter turnout was only 53.37%. That means 46.63% population didn’t care about voting or was not interested about the results of election. Following is a chart from Wikipedia about US election turnouts,

As you see from chart only 10 past presidential elections had more than 75% turnouts while 37 elections had less than 75% turnouts. In past 18 presidential elections in US, the median turnout of voters was 48%. That is really a Big Question Mark about the rule of people on the people by people. That is rather the rule of politically active people over passive people. Don't believe it? Let's have a look on the following chart from Wikipedia which shows a declining trend in voter turnouts in Americas (South and North America) and Western Europe... It seems passive people are slowly becoming majority. This is the beginning of fall in traditional democracy... This under-representation of people ask for some serious changes in the democratic processes...

Why there is a general trend of decreasing participation of people in democratic processes, despite of so much advertisement and the buzz that popular media create?

The large minority of people don't go to vote because they don't think that their vote has any impact or change anything. Things will go as influential people want to be. That is a great trust deficiency in part of elected representatives and democratic governments...

OK, what will happen, if there are great trust deficiencies? Well, that is really obvious... As we have witnessed, the trust deficiency cause Arab Spring, London Riots and Occupy Wall Street Movements... When people do not go to vote, they go to streets...

As we have seen from above statistics, it seems that "The rule of people over people by people" leave a large part of populations without any representations in the government...

In a time, when people love smart devices and governments love smart power, smart policies and smart sanctions then why not there should be a "Smart Democracy" that both people and government benefit from it...

This knol will become lengthy if I go to talk about other generations ( I have posted the following video, if you like to have an introduction about other generations....Although, it is about different generations in US but I think by slight changes, it fits most countries... At least each generation has its own characters in all countries and here is one documented example from US) but I am confident that Gen Y would definitely participate in greater numbers if a large part of democratic processes go hybrid, meaning allow people who want to express their opinions online besides traditional methods (There are people who prefer traditional methods)...



But I don't think, that a democracy becomes smart only by inclusion of smart networking that Gen Y prefers. It needs to allow the participation of neglected and underprivileged segments of society who by no means can compete openly (even if they are politically active) to get enough votes to have a voice in policy makings... Rule of "Politically Active People" may become more problematic in future when people become more active on social media and less active in democratic process. That will bring Chaos...

We are already witnessing the process of develop or die and let's see if systems choose dying over labor of developments....