Emperors and Presidents.

The ultimate conclusion of this discussion will be – and is – that when an elected head of state begins to mimic an emperor then people will find a new leader, representative of their hopes.
In a system of representative politics, citizens make the ultimate decision of who leads them based on how they connect with the leadership.
hat connection is a summation of complex intersections of mutual and diverse hopes, history, thoughts, emotions and much more.
For a fact, both emperors and presidents represent given territories or states. Both are given legitimacy by the territories they represent, and both are creations of their environments.
Whatever the structure or system in place, the most important currency is legitimacy. In other words, where is the centre of power in that particular system of government.
Even in the absence of elections, monarchic systems of emperors and kings have been toppled by republics because legitimacy ultimately was a choice to be made by the people.
This is part of the reason electoral cycles and representative politics gained credence so that people became a priority for anyone seeking leadership mandate.
To this end, parliaments remain critical to bringing constituent matters from across the country into the centre.
However, the existence of parliament or presence of elections is not evidence of a listening government. In a one-party state dictatorship, for example, parliament exists to carry out the whims and wishes of the leader.
It is important to keep this point in context.
According to socialist (centrist) theory, the state is unitary, meaning that it intrinsically has the interests of its environment.
Therefore, every function and operation of the state is done in national interest, with or without the necessity of having elections.
The opposite is true for liberal democratic systems who are founded on the principle that the state is representative of its environment and prone to change or evolution.
By practice, a liberal democratic system will create clear channels of communication.
In a dictatorship, there is reliance for information than communication. This is because information is approached as a means of protecting the state and ruling class.
Information is not used to create open two-way communication channels with the population. This speaks to their foundational consulting the population about what matters to them?
This is where a president becomes an emperor. Leading with information without reference and communication from the source of the information.
A relevant example from Zambia happened when then ruling party United National Independence Party (UNIP) put an advert in state media in October 1991 just before the elections that would unseat them that very November.
That advert discarded the election observers led by late former United States President Jimmy Carter as imperialists; it called the then opposition party, the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) stooges of western powers and so on. This misguided line of thought regained some attention post 2010.
That advert fell on deaf ears not because people did not read it or share suspicion.
The problem was that UNIP was now trying to include people in national decision-making after denying citizens that right for almost 30 years.
That lesson lives true even now, especially after the reintroduction of democracy and enshrining peoples rights in the constitution following the defeat of UNIP.
The lesson is that people don’t make their final decision during elections; their decision at the ballot is a summation of how the leadership has interacted with the citizens during their mandate.
Even with the cacophony of politics, if a president has genuinely related and communicated with their citizens as a people than just an electorate, their mandate will likely be renewed.
If, however, the electorate is viewed as a gimmick to be played, the emperor will preside over their bones in eternal peace; and the living will have a relatable president who respects them.