What if no one voted anymore in a Western democracy?

[Deleted]

What would happen to a (Western) democracy if everyone decided no to vote anymore, period?

Who would be in charge? Would someone grab the power? Would there be anarchy?

[Charge me Doctor]

Nothing would change

[Zogarth]

A better question is what would happen if everyone voted.

But I guess nothing will happen, and they will try a re-election of some kind. If it does not work, the current goverment will most likely stay in power.

[Wildtree]

What would happen to a (Western) democracy if everyone decided no to vote anymore, period?

Who would be in charge? Would someone grab the power? Would there be anarchy?

That's a hypothesis with pretty much zero sense...

If no one voted, those in charge simply remain in charge.
Democracy at work. You have to vote people and parties out of office.. If you don't.. well.. as said..

[Revi]

That's a hypothesis with pretty much zero sense...

If no one voted, those in charge simply remain in charge.
Democracy at work. You have to vote people and parties out of office.. If you don't.. well.. as said..

But there's limits on how long they stay. They aren't justified in remaining in power after an election if they weren't voted in again.

[Deleted]

But there's limits on how long they stay. They aren't justified in remaining in power after an election if they weren't voted in again.

They are if nobody voted. Voting is way of saying you want to change. If you dont say anything then it means you dont want things to change.

[Wildtree]

But there's limits on how long they stay. They aren't justified in remaining in power after an election if they weren't voted in again.

That depends on the countries........ In Germany are no term limits... You could pull off to be a chancellor for life.
And yes, it's exactly as I said. A party in power would remain in power if no other party would get em out of it. The system would attributes the non-votes accordingly to prior election result.

[Masark]

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3817

[Grummgug]

Depends on the rules.

If no-one voted for president of the united states, then no-one would win a majority of electoral votes. The US Constitution clearly states that if no-one wins a majority of electoral votes, then the House selects the president and the Senate selects the Vice President. So you would get two republicans since republicans control both chambers.

[Deleted]

Typically countries have a "interim-government" rule for these kinds of situations.

for example: if your government has a issue they cannot work out, often the government collapses and new elections are called for. In the time between the collapse and the new elections, life goes on however and the current government becomes a interim-government to keep track of day to day affairs, but they can no longer implement new laws/rules.

This is the immediate result of a failed election, they will probably do a few more elections after that, and after that the monarch/head of state would probably seize emergency power and form a emegency government untill democracy could be restored (or not), because life goes on and new rules need to be made eventually.
I like to think the military wouldn't take over in western countries (unless there was civil unrest but this scenario doesnt seem to imply that) but you never know, so thats a option.

Many countries also require a certain minimum amount of votes for the election to not fail, so it could also fail if only a few voted.

also didn't Belgium recently go through something like this and went without official government for over a year or something? Even tho the cause wasn't nobody voting, it's probably as close to a real life example as you can get, and they seem to have managed well enough.