ABSTRACT
Conflicts of interests - and difficulties to come to terms with them - do not only prevail in democratic societies, but in any society. With dictatorships or autocracies, however, the vast majority of individual interests, values or preferences are strictly and systematically ignored. Only democracies are organized in such a way that there are options to address each individual's interests, values or preferences properly, in other words: to respect them. Or, to put it differently, democracy is admittedly not a sufficient condition, but nevertheless a necessary one for making politicians do what is in the interest of the people. We should keep this in mind when talking about real-world aspects of institutional design.
