Is democracy really paradoxical?

Richard Wolheim though that a paradoxical aspect of democracy was that the voting process forceda minority-voter into having inconsistent beliefs with respect to the policies he was voting for:

“Let us imagine a citizen who feeds his choice for, say, A, into the democratic machine. On the present interpretation, he is to be regarded as thereby expressing his opinion that A ought to be enacted. And now let us further suppose that the machine into which this and other choices have been fed comes up with its own choice, and its choice is for B. How can the citizen accept the machine’s choice, which involves his thinking that B ought to be enacted when, as we already know, he is of the declared opinion, that A ought to be enacted? […] For if a man expresses a choice for A and the machine expresses a choice for B, then the man, if he is to be a sound democratic, seems to be committed to the belief that A ought to be the case and to the belief that B ought to be the case. […] If this is so, then the difficulty that I have described would seem to constitute a paradox in the very heart of democracy.”

Tentative solutions to the paradox of democracy focus on semantic issues surrounding the use of the word 'ought.' For instance, the idea that because both 'oughts' are derived from different principles, they do not actually contradict each other. Such ideas are unsatisfactory, because, as in this case, they require us to abandon some common-sense beliefs about rationality, consistency, and moral deliberation. For a full list of such attempts, including Wollheim's, see: http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com/Article/What-is-Wollheim-s-paradox--How-is-it-to-be-resolved-/5

A different approach to this paradox has been to question whether it really is a paradox. What is needed is an account of a voter's beliefs which is both (a) rational, (involving no contradictions) and (b) plausible. An account can be given which is rather a lot simpler than any solution so far, and that is to deny that there is an inconsistency in the voter's beliefs by denying that a voter believes that the policy he votes for ought necessarily to be enacted. As well as restoring consistency to the belief-set, there is a great deal of intuitive plausibility in the idea that a voter believes that. For if we has assumed that he is a democrat, and in that we mean that he accepts the majoritarian principle, he surely cannot rationally believe that 'the policy I vote for ought necessarily be enacted' for this belief is totalitarian, and contradicts the democratic principle.

In fact, when we go to the voting booth, we find ourselves in precisely this situation: we want the policy we vote for to be enacted (given that we think it is the best policy, and we want the best policy to be enacted) but we accept that it shouldn't necessarily be enacted, even if it is the best policy. Why we hold such a belief throws back to the problem of political obligation; i.e. there is a trade-off between accepting the enactment of a worse policy because to refuse to accept it (within moral limits) could threaten the basis of democracy, or, at least, would not be democratic behaviour. This reflects hte compromise one accepts when consenting to a collective decision-making process.

From this analysis, it seems clear that there is no paradox to deal with. A paradox is a set of obviously true axioms which lead to something apparently false, such as a contradiction. In Wollheim's case, the belief that democracy was paradoxical was driven my a false attribution of beliefs to the voter.

Although this theory needs some clarification/elaboration, I believe it puts this problem to rest for good. There is no semantical tinkering necessary, since the problem itself is a pseudo-problem.