The image of the citizen as a prospective or potential absolute ruler emerges clearly from the following thought-experiment. It takes us to a modern Western-style democracy in which the legislative power is both formally sovereign and for all practical purposes absolute. Moreover, it is a regime in which the parties of the parliamentary majority also, by custom or law, form the government while still retaining all the rights of a parliamentary party (including voting rights in plenary sessions and commissions). The same party (or coalition of parties) controls the government and the parliament. In other words, the so-called separation of powers is reduced to a sham, at least where the legislative and the executive powers are concerned.
Here is the thought-experiment: Suppose an election is held but that every voter but one stays at home. The one voter who does show up at the ballot box and casts his vote ex hypothesi determines which party will occupy all the seats in parliament and therefore form and control the government. His vote, and his vote alone, is decisive. He is in the same position as an absolute king, who would have been able to pick his own ministers and council. Obviously,
Because the legal-constitutional rights of the voting citizen are the same as those of every other citizen, every citizen has right to decide who shall rule in such an absolutist way. In reality, of course, no individual citizen has the actual power to do so but only because not every other voter stays away on Election Day. Admittedly, although voter apathy is a familiar phenomenon, the thought experiment posits an extreme hypothesis. However, the point is that if the election is organised in a ‘fair’ way then the resulting absolute majority is legitimate from the democratic point of view. Its legitimacy, in the strict legalconstitutional sense, is not diminished by the fact that only one voter turned up. The majority of the actual voters not necessarily is a majority of the citizens or subjects with voting rights.
Here is another proof of the Hobbesian character of modern democracy. In a ‘classic’ Hobbesian absolutist regime, in choosing his government, the vote of the Sovereign decides for 100% of his subjects; every other expression of preference on the matter counts for nothing. The Hobbesian Sovereign ‘represents’, and makes the laws that are ‘authorised’ by, all the citizens. In a simple democratic regime with only two parties, up to 50% of the votes count for nothing but 50%+n (1=