What you seem to be saying — pardon me — is that you consider democracy of process to be a paramount good. I would tend to identify at least three things as more important, on the ground that, if they are not present as preconditions, democracy either fails to create a consensus of legitimacy, or becomes an absolute horror (as van Loon observed, really thorough-going repression is less likely under an autocratic than a democratic tyranny, simply because the functionaries of the former sort of regime are less likely to be filled with zeal — compare Czarist Russia with the early USSR, for instance). These are :
Rule of law
The public peace
Protection of minorities
So the question, or perhaps meta-question, which concerns me more than "is this process more democratic?" is "does this process give the better outcomes?" And, obviously, if what you value is democracy of representation, you will give the automatic "yes". But do we really have confidence in the statement that the primary-election candidate is more likely, for instance, to respect the three pillars which I have set up above, than the smoke-filled back-room candidate?
A related, often-discussed problem is that of the kind of people who are willing to put themselves through the electoral process as candidates in the first place, & the skill set they bring with them. I recall reading, in the memoirs of Elihu Root, the explicit statement that, if popular election of Senators had been in effect at that time, he would never have for a moment considered becoming one. Certainly the old process of election of Senators saddled the country with some real stinkers, but the new process does that pretty efficiently as well, & (beyond the extent to which it excludes people who might serve well, which is difficult to say anything definitely meaningful about) it also tends to make the Senators we get homogeneous. If you look at the Congress as a whole (and much the same applies to the State Legislatures), we have 500-odd student body presidents.
What may be worse than that, in my opinion, is that, in general, the skill set they possess is the one they value. They surround themselves with people like themselves, & listen to the opinions of people like themselves. This gives rise to a problem which I regard as extremely serious, insofar as the same people are charged with establishing the "will of the People" in terms of the objectives of public policy — which is where I see the value of democratic process to primarily lie, in terms of decision-making (separate from the establishment of legitimacy) — and the means by which those objectives are to be pursued. And since those people have no subject-matter knowledge, & frequently no respect for those who do, the implementation is either a total mess, or dictated by outside lobbyists. Frequently both. The "Clean Power Plan" put forward by the Obama EPA was an interesting example : the accounting rules failed to average in existing emissions-free hydro & nuclear correctly, so that replacing them by gas-fired generation was counted as an emissions reduction in the overall mix.
no subject
So the question, or perhaps meta-question, which concerns me more than "is this process more democratic?" is "does this process give the better outcomes?" And, obviously, if what you value is democracy of representation, you will give the automatic "yes". But do we really have confidence in the statement that the primary-election candidate is more likely, for instance, to respect the three pillars which I have set up above, than the smoke-filled back-room candidate?
A related, often-discussed problem is that of the kind of people who are willing to put themselves through the electoral process as candidates in the first place, & the skill set they bring with them. I recall reading, in the memoirs of Elihu Root, the explicit statement that, if popular election of Senators had been in effect at that time, he would never have for a moment considered becoming one. Certainly the old process of election of Senators saddled the country with some real stinkers, but the new process does that pretty efficiently as well, & (beyond the extent to which it excludes people who might serve well, which is difficult to say anything definitely meaningful about) it also tends to make the Senators we get homogeneous. If you look at the Congress as a whole (and much the same applies to the State Legislatures), we have 500-odd student body presidents.
What may be worse than that, in my opinion, is that, in general, the skill set they possess is the one they value. They surround themselves with people like themselves, & listen to the opinions of people like themselves. This gives rise to a problem which I regard as extremely serious, insofar as the same people are charged with establishing the "will of the People" in terms of the objectives of public policy — which is where I see the value of democratic process to primarily lie, in terms of decision-making (separate from the establishment of legitimacy) — and the means by which those objectives are to be pursued. And since those people have no subject-matter knowledge, & frequently no respect for those who do, the implementation is either a total mess, or dictated by outside lobbyists. Frequently both. The "Clean Power Plan" put forward by the Obama EPA was an interesting example : the accounting rules failed to average in existing emissions-free hydro & nuclear correctly, so that replacing them by gas-fired generation was counted as an emissions reduction in the overall mix.