Note: The following essay was written by Zain Khwaja L6B (20KhwajaZ@students.watfordboys.org)
By contrast, Schumpeter’s idea of democracy reduces the meaningfulness of voter contribution. Schumpeter was sceptical about a single, rational ‘will of the people’. Indeed, in applying such assumptions in many contemporary democracies, rationality appears to be more of a hope than a standard. It is not the voter’s role to determine directly what is objectively best for society. Instead, Schumpeter focuses on the process through which political decision-makers acquire authority. It changes the role of the electorate which, in Schumpeter’s view, should be focused on democratically electing a party or politician to office, who would then have substantial political control within constitutional and political limits, hinging on their continued support at subsequent elections. This also changes the role of politicians. Instead of being merely mouthpieces for voters as they are in the classical system, they are more independent competitors, battling against one another for power.
Though assessments of democratic theories tend to be highly Anglo-centric, the recent surge of populism in the UK does provide an exceptional and complex test of both theories of democracy. Populists routinely claim that power should be restored to the hands of the people. On 19 July 2026, Nigel Farage uploaded a video to YouTube titled ‘The People VS The Establishment’. He presented himself as the voice for the people against the political elites and vested interests. The rhetoric he uses embodies the classical doctrine to a large extent. There is, in his eyes, a recognisable popular will for change that is not being transmitted by status quo politicians. Indeed, his claims that the current parliamentary system fails to adequately represent certain sections of the electorate can be evidenced when looking at the disproportional effects of the first-past-the-post voting system in the UK . In the 2024 General Election, Reform UK won 14.3% of the vote, yet secured only five seats in the Commons. Thus, from the classical perspective, if democracy is understood as a means of converting the will of the people into political outcomes, then the disproportionality of first-past-the-post appears to obstruct that process, perhaps validating claims from the right that the current system of representation is severely unrepresentative of substantial sections of public opinion. Therefore, populist rhetoric appears to validate the classical doctrine by presenting politicians like Farage as vehicles through which popular will can be proportionately translated into policy. They are helping to, in their opinion, ‘revive democracy’ by allowing the voices of the less heard to reach deafening levels.
However, the most important flaw in the classical doctrine’s usage here is that such politicians are not simply acting as passive representatives. They are personalities. Rather than simply transmitting the will of the masses, populists are shaping it in order to actively compete for power. This is where Schumpeter’s theory can be seen to be of significantly more utility in the contemporary world, where the spread of populism is not just contained within the UK. The erosion of the traditional two-party system in the UK has left behind a fragmented political structure, which itself undermines the assumption that there is one coherent ‘will of the people’ waiting to be transmitted into policy. Instead, figures like Farage compete with rival political leaders, even rival populists like Rupert Lowe, to define which grievances matter most. They construct competing interpretations of the national interest, shaping the voice of the citizenry along the way. Populists claim to be acting for the pre-existing popular will, but are willing to battle one another to win the spot as lead actor. Populism may therefore be considered classical in its rhetoric, but markedly Schumpeterian in its operation.
While British populism reveals the tensions between the classical and Schumpeterian ideas of democracy, when looking at examples beyond established Western democracies, Schumpeter’s theory can be seen to be contemporarily superior in understanding the political frameworks of many states. Nepal offers a more direct demonstration of Schumpeter’s theory in practice. For decades, Nepalese politics has typified political instability, rife with changing coalitions and repeated competition between political elites. It had seen 32 governments since 1990, none completing a full five-year term. The 2026 elections yielded perhaps the most accurate recent representation of the ideas Schumpeter’s theory is built on. There was an enormous breadth of political competition: 65 parties contested seats in the 275-member House of Representatives. This breadth of competition, and indeed the diversity of the parties competing in regard to policy and promises, was reflective of the absence of a single political consensus. It was an election characterised by a wide range of issues, from unemployment and poverty to Nepal’s relationships with India and China. This apparent absence of a unified conception of the ‘common good’ among the electorate clashed with some of the core assumptions of the classical theory.
Born in April 1990, Balendra Shah only entered politics four years prior to being elected Prime Minister of Nepal in 2026. Shah epitomises Schumpeter’s idea of a political entrepreneur. He was a young outsider whose rapid growth in popularity was more reflective of his personal appeal and not voters simply appointing him to transmit a settled popular will, as there was an aforementioned lack of a settled popular will in Nepal. The one point of reasonable consensus was that the current government was believed to have been built on corrupt foundations, and thus, by extension, the voters placed their trust in Shah, not solely because of his policy promises, but also his character and presentation. The 2025 protests in Nepal that preceded the election also demonstrated the broad agreement that the status quo was failing due to the failures of the people making the policy decisions. It was a landslide victory for Shah and his RSP party, winning 182/275 seats. The Nepalese citizens had produced a government which they thought would act honestly and openly. Nepal therefore illustrates Schumpeter’s model with unusual clarity: the electorate exercised democratic power not by determining policy directly, but by choosing which competing political elite should be entrusted with doing so.
Yet Mongolia, lying to Nepal’s north, provides a striking counterexample which appears to show that the classical doctrine is still of high utility when looking at contemporary democracies. In 2017, the Mongolian legislature passed a Law on Deliberative polling, and since then, deliberative polling has been legally required prior to Parliament considering specific constitutional amendments. Since 2017, it has seen repeated usage. Notably, in February 2023, Mongolia held its second national deliberative poll, where over 800 citizens, selected through a nationally representative stratified sample, met in the State Palace to discuss a number of key political, economic and social questions. They considered an array of proposals which had been filtered from roughly 600 expert suggestions and 500 submissions from public bodies and civil society. Such proposals covered a range of key constitutional topics, from parliamentary democracy to political and civil rights. The Mongolian citizens were not simply being asked which politician they preferred; they were actively being asked to consider substantive political questions.
This strongly supports the utility of the classical theory. The classical doctrine assumes citizens can receive and interpret information in order to reason about political questions in order to determine what is best for the citizenry. The results of the 2023 deliberative poll provide excellent evidence in support of the strength of the classical chain of political influence from the people in a contemporary setting. Two proposals emerged with particularly strong support. Firstly, a proposal supporting increasing the size of the Mongolian Parliament was supported by 82% of the participating deliberators. Secondly, 71% of the 800 supported introducing a mixed electoral system, in which there are representatives both from constituencies and from proportional representation corresponding to party votes. Both these suggestions were subsequently embedded in Mongolia’s constitutional arrangements, with the supreme legislative body increasing in capacity from 76 representatives to 126, and of those 126, 78 were now to be elected by majority vote in constituencies, with the other 48 to be elected by proportional representation.
Thus, this shows the classical chain of democracy, in which citizens actively participate in policymaking, and where there is a sense of unified support behind policy, such policy is promptly implemented by representatives. Furthermore, the deliberative nature of the poll reinforces the classical assumption that citizens are capable of forming rational and considered political preferences, not because of the inherent rationality of each separate citizen but rather because of the way in which the 800 citizens deliberated and decided. They were given information, exposed to various expert arguments and given the opportunity to debate complex constitutional questions before reaching a judgement. It created an environment of decision-making based on reasoning and logic, rather than instinct.
However, while this does show how the classical doctrine can be useful when looking at politics through a microscopic lens, ultimately it is clear that the Schumpeterian doctrine remains more useful than the classical doctrine, even in more exceptional cases of classical cogency in states like Mongolia. Although citizens were able to influence the direction of constitutional reform, this does not necessarily demonstrate that citizens possess a similarly rational and unified will across the much wider range of political decisions governments must make. For most issues, citizens do not continuously determine policy in this way, but instead elect political leaders who exercise substantial independent judgement once in office. So, Mongolia demonstrates that classical participation can operate within a fundamentally Schumpeterian system.
Overall, Schumpeter’s theory is more useful for understanding contemporary democracies than the classical doctrine for three main reasons. The first is that politicians shape the popular will rather than merely transmit it. The very nature of politicians like Farage claiming that they are simply transmitting the will of the people is a form of manipulation which evidences that they are in fact not. They are instead, to some extent, competing to define what the “national interest” actually is, in a manner that suits their personal and political interests. Secondly, it is clear that elections are primarily about selecting who governs. In Nepal, the electorate did not directly determine the policies that were needed to solve the range of problems that faced the country. Instead, they entrusted Shah and his party to find a solution based on their belief in his personal character and ability to govern. Thirdly, cases such as Mongolia demonstrate that the classical doctrine can explain particular moments of democratic participation, but its utility is less convincing as evidence for the classical model, as it indicated an example of only a relatively small amount of decision-making being done in a classical fashion. It was an exception, not a norm.
Extending this idea, classical forms of participation in contemporary democracies are often dependent on Schumpeterian frameworks, as in most democracies elected political elites retain substantial autonomy over a large majority of political decisions. In fact, the use of classical participation could itself be argued to strengthen the Schumpeterian framework. By giving citizens meaningful influence over a select few issues, mechanisms such as deliberative polling can create a stronger sense of popular involvement and democratic legitimacy, even while the wider distribution of political authority remains largely unchanged. In this sense, classical participation may reinforce rather than displace an underlying Schumpeterian system, as it makes citizens exaggerate the amount of power and influence that is actively in their hands, thus reducing calls for a more truly participatory and classical democracy, perhaps explaining why the Schumpeterian model is markedly more dominant in the 21st century.
Schumpeter, J.A., Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Routledge edition
Farage, N. (2026), ‘The People VS The Establishment’, YouTube, 19 July 2026.
House of Commons Library (2024), ‘2024 General Election: Performance of Reform and the Greens’, 16 August 2024.
Reuters, ‘Who is contesting Nepal’s polls and what is at stake?’, 26 February 2026.
Reuters, ‘Nepal’s long history of political instability’, 2 March 2026.
Reuters, ‘Ex-rapper Shah sworn in as Nepal prime minister after sweeping election win’, 27 March 2026.
Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, ‘Mongolia Holds Its Second Ever National Deliberative Poll’, 2023.
Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, ‘Deliberative Polling Leads to New Constitutional Amendment in Mongolia’, 2023.
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