From top: The RDS count centre on Saturday; Dr Julien Mercille

Elections are exciting but real democracy happens between them.

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

Election talk has dominated the airwaves over the last few weeks. Left parties like Sinn Féin and the Anti-Austerity Alliance-People Before Profit have made important gains. Progressive Independents like Clare Daly and Mick Wallace have kept their seats.

So there is cause to celebrate…but not so fast.

Many commentators have declared that this is “democracy in action” and how beautiful it all was. The people have spoken and, allegedly, this is what democracy is all about, holding our politicians to account.

Yet, it is important to remember that electoral democracy is so shallow as to be somewhat irrelevant.

Voting once every four or five years and doing nothing in between is actually a way to protect the establishment from being really challenged. It is a way to keep the population out of all sorts of important decisions for the country and that will affect each one of us.

In other words, we need to deepen democracy.

I take “democracy” here to mean simply the condition in which people are able to decide over what matters in their lives, as opposed to having decisions imposed on them by those in power.

Significantly, deep democracy means cooperation among ordinary people, because that’s essential to becoming more free. We can’t increase our opportunities and expand our horizons without the assistance of others and without collaboration at the community and national levels, and beyond.

If we become atomised and individualistic, our opportunities will shrink and we will have to satisfy ourselves with a very limited existence.

This means that whatever the election results are, we must continue to extend democracy to the many areas where it is either non-existent or too shallow—and there isn’t a shortage of those in Ireland.

The objective is to give as much control as possible to people over their lives and to organise the economic, political and social spheres in a way that we can benefit as much as possible.

Deep democracy therefore includes:

Economic democracy: This involves a redistribution of resources so as to reduce inequalities and so that the products of work do not go disproportionately to a small corporate elite. It also involves giving those who work the right to decide about what goes on in the workplace, instead of being told what to do by their bosses and managers. We’re not cogs in a machine, we’re creative beings.

Social democracy: This means the right of everybody to decent housing and a decent education without discrimination based on religion or ethnicity or socio-economic class. It’s also about the right to quality health care whenever needed. So far, those services are organised to cater to the needs of the well off more than anybody else.

Gender democracy: This means giving women the possibility of making decisions over their own bodies. In Ireland, this means giving them the possibility to make their own choices about abortion. It also means doing away with all sorts of gender discrimination in the economic, cultural and political spheres which are too many to enumerate here.

But the fact is that very few of those will be won in the Dáil.

Parliaments mostly rubber-stamp legislation once people have organised and campaigned for it. Politicians need to be pressurised until it becomes too costly politically for them to ignore people’s wishes. As the saying goes, rights are not granted, they are won.

Therefore, when looking at the election, it will be easy to identify a number of progressive candidates who should have been elected but didn’t make it. Either they never came close to making it, or they lost in the very last rounds by a few dozen votes.

It’s disappointing, but one way to look at it positively is that those who didn’t achieve their electoral goals have not really lost.

They will continue to create very significant change outside Parliament, and that may sometimes actually turn out to be more useful than parliamentary work. Combining that to agenda-setting speeches in the Dáil by those who got in should make us hopeful.

So let’s get to work.

Julien Mercille is a lecturer at University College Dublin. Follow him on Twitter: @JulienMercille