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A democracy is a form of government in
which ordinary citizens may take part in governing, in contrast with a monarchy or
dictatorship. In contemporary usage, democracy is often understood
as the same as liberal democracy.
The word democracy originates from the Greek "demos" meaning "the
people" and "kratein" meaning "to rule" or, literally: "the people to rule", which means "Rule by the People." The term is also
sometimes used as a measurement of how much influence a people has over their government, as in how much democracy exists.
Anarchism and Communism (as in
the final stage of social development according to Marxist theory) are social systems
that employ a form of direct democracy, but have no state.
A modern democracy implies certain rights for citizens:
There is much debate on the ability of a democracy to properly represent both the will of the people and to do what
is right, but to quote Winston Churchill:
- "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried."
Edmund Burke gives an opposing viewpoint:
- "I cannot help concurring [e.g., with Aristotle, inter alios] that an absolute democracy, no more than an
absolute monarchy, is not to be reckoned among the legitimate forms of government. They think it rather the corruption and
degeneracy than the sound constitution of a republic."
Burke's agreement with Aristotle is in reference to the fact that Aristotle
called democracy one of three "evil" forms of government (the other two: ochlocracy and tyranny).
Further, people who believe, as does David Friedman, that any
government will do more harm than good, naturally regard the issue of whether the best government is democratic as secondary,
like the issue of how long is the horn of a unicorn.
Traditionally the purpose of democracy is to prevent tyranny (the accumulation of too much authority in the hands of one or a few). That is, democracy is not necessarily intended to give us "good"
government, but to put some limits to the abuse of power, and to ensure that any bad government can be deposed and replaced
peacefully.
Nonetheless, many people think that there is no system that can ideally order society and that democracy is not morally ideal. These advocates say that at the heart of democracy is the belief
that if a majority is in agreement, it is legitimate to harm the minority. The opponents to this viewpoint say that in a liberal
democracy where particular minority groups are protected from being targeted, majorities and minorities actually take a markedly
different shape on every issue; therefore, majorities will usually take care to take into account the dissent of the minority,
lest they ultimately are part of a minority on a future democratic decision.
While a clear improvement over tyranny, this potential threat of coercive power is still cause for concern. For this reason,
some countries (such as the USA) have created constitutions that protect particular issues
from majoritarian decision-making. Generally, changes in these
constitutions require the agreement of a super-majority. This means a majority can still legitimately coerce a minority (which is
still ethically questionable), but as a practical matter it is harder to get a larger proportion of the people to agree to such
actions.
As well as constitutional protections for citizens' rights (such as the right to stay alive, express political opinions and
form political organisations, independent and regardless of government approval); some electoral systems, such as the various
forms of Proportional Representation, attempt
to ensure that minorities are represented fairly and equally in the nation's legislative bodies, according to their proportion in
the community. This differs from majoritarian forms of democracy that tend to give legislative power only to the two most popular
political parties. This, proponents of PR often argue, results in more bitter partisanship and systemic discrimination against
political minorities.
Distinctions
Democratic governments can be divided into different types, based on a number of different distinctions. One such distinction
is that between "direct" and "indirect" democracy.
Direct democracy
A direct democracy is a political system in which all citizens
are allowed to influence policy by means of a direct vote, or referendum, on
any particular issue.
Proponents of direct democracy contend that it is good because it devolves power. Because direct democracy disperses power
throughout many people, policy decisions are likely to be made for the benefit of the majority, not for the benefit of factions
or those who hold power.
The traditional, and to many still compelling, objection to democracy as a form of government, and to direct democracy in
particular, is that it is open to demagoguery. They observe, for example, that
Athens put Socrates to death by
democratic means.
Another objection to direct democracy is that of practicality and efficiency. Deciding all or most matters of public
importance by direct referendum is slow and expensive, and can result in public apathy and voter fatigue. Furthermore, since referendum questions have to be short and with a yes/no answer, voters may
choose incoherent policies: for instance, a majority may vote in favor of reducing taxes, while a majority may also vote for
increasing expenses for public education.
In many countries villages, parishes and smaller towns can be governed by meetings for
the eligible. In Switzerland even two states (cantons) practice
a form of direct democracy where all eligible residents (Landsgemeinde) gather in the open air and decide forthcoming policy by show of hands.
Indirect democracy
Indirect democracy is a broad term describing a means of governance by the people through elected representatives.
The most common system found in today's democratic states is the representative democracy. The people elect government officials who then make decisions
on their behalf. Essentially, a representative democracy is a form of indirect democracy in which representatives are
democratically selected, and usually difficult to recall.
A doctrine often known as Edmund Burke's Principle states that
representatives should act upon their own conscience in the affairs of a representative democracy. This is contrasted to the
expectation that such representatives should consider the views of their electors - an expectation particularly common in
states with strong constituency links, or with representative recall provisions (such as modern British Columbia).
Another form of indirect democracy is delegative democracy. In delegative democracy, delegates are selected and expected to
act on the wishes of the constituency. In this form of democracy the constituency may recall the delegate at any time.
Representatives are expected only to transmit the decisions of electors, advance their views, and if they fail to do so they are
subject to immediate representative recall with only
minimal process.
One critique of indirect democracy is that it centralizes power into the hands of a few, thereby increasing the likelihood of
corruption in and abuse of power by the government. To reduce this risk, most of today's states with
representative democracies constitutionally separate powers to establish a system of checks and balances.
Moreover, while some contend indirect democracy eliminates demagoguery, there is little reason to believe the elected
representatives are not themselves demagogues, or subject to the persuasive appeal of demagogues.
Role of party
Some critics of representative democracy argue that party politics
mean that representatives will be forced to follow the party line on issues, rather than either the will of their conscience or
constituents. But it can also be argued that the electors have expressed their will in the election, which puts the emphasis on
the program the candidate was elected on, which he then is supposed to follow. One emerging problem with representative
democracies is the increasing cost of political campaigns which lends the candidates to making deals with well heeled supporters
for legislation favorable to those supporters once the candidate is elected.
Les Marshall, an expert on the
spread of democracy to nations that have not traditionally had these institutions, notes that "globally, there is no alternative
to multi-party representative democracy" for those states that embrace democratic methods at all. This is not controversial:
representative democracy is the most commonly used system of government in countries generally considered "democratic". However,
it should be noted that the definition used to classify countries as "democratic" was crafted by Europeans and is directly
influenced by the dominating cultures in those countries; care should be taken when applying it to other cultures that are tribal
in nature and do not have the same historical background as the current "democratic" countries.
Right to vote and to candidate
One important issue in a democracy is the limitations on rights to candidate and on suffrage or franchise - that is the decision as to who ought to be entitled to vote. In the Athenian democracy, slaves and women were prohibited from voting.
These, and racial prohibitions, have been common in democracies. Often they are closely connected to legal personhood issues.
campaigners working on posters in Milan, Italy, 2004
Generally, franchise may be restricted on account of:
- age (in all democracies),
- gender,
- nationality,
- race,
- religion,
- wealth,
- birth (inherited social status),
- education,
- previous crimes, etc.
Nowadays, most democracies agree that only age and (in some jurisdictions) previous crimes are the only restrictions which are
compatible with the definition of a modern democracy.
A recent example of how the "right to vote" changed over history is New Zealand, which was the first country to give women the
right to vote (September 19, 1893),
however not the right to be elected. Women voting and participating in politics in Europe and the Americas is, largely, a
20th century phenomenon.
Sex equity has been recognized in other ways in other societies, however. The Iroquois Confederacy gave a strong political role to women as far back as its origins in the 12th century, although as in 19th
century New Zealand, this was expressed as support for a specific male, not the right to sit in council. However, they like
many Native American societies recognized rituals to allow
post-menopausal or powerful widowed women to assume the role of a man - it is likely that at some point in its long history, the
Confederacy permitted a full and formal role to women using some such provision. Records and dates are however incomplete.
There are more limited alternative voting and official appointing systems that claim to be democratic. Some one-party states
such as the People's Republic of China apply
a limited form of disapproval voting that has the effect of
signalling the acceptance of those promoted into new posts, who do not generally rise further if they do not receive very high
(over 80%) acceptance.
Under perestroika, shortly before its collapse, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
under Mikhail Gorbachev implemented reforms to allow multiple
candidates, all from the local Communist Party, to run aganst each
other. Such methods are not generally considered to provide equivalent political expression to a right to replace the entire top
level of governments at once, as occurs in a multi-party system.
Another means of limited democracy is that practiced in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the right to run as a candidate is controlled by the religious
authorities, who exclude among others the Communist Party and the
Green Party of
Iran. Recent elections in Iran have suffered from very low turnout.
In the United States of America, restrictions on right to vote due to
property ownership or
lack thereof and literacy were common until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Today all but a few states deny
the right to vote to those who have suffered a felony conviction at any point in their
past.
a poster for the European Parliament election 2004 in Italy, showing party lists
In the European Union every citizen has the right to participate in
the elections of the European Parliament. However, not every
vote is counted equally: Voters from bigger countries are significantly underrepresented relative to voters from smaller
countries. E.g., a vote from Luxembourg carries 12 times as much weight as does
a vote from Germany. It should be noted however, that many jurisdictions have similar
problems with the distribution of votes per region. In the US, a Californian
vote carries four times the weight of a Montana vote in the presidential election.
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No broad franchise has ever come into existence on its own in any country - all democracies in effect come into existence with
a limited, elite, franchise, that only over time comes available to everyone, e.g. as in the Republic of South Africa.
Elections as rituals
Elections are not a sufficient condition for the existence of democracy, in fact elections can be used by totalitarian regimes
or dictatorships to give a false sense of democracy. Some examples are 1960s right-wing military dicatorships in South America,
left-wing totalitarian states like the USSR until 1991.
Even the form and rituals associated with elections seem to make a genuinely democratic transition of power possible with much
less violence and turmoil than if democratic mechanisms are simply put in place to replace a strict dictatorship - many such
countries, e.g. Revolutionary France or modern Uganda or Iran, have simply lapsed back into at best limited democracy until the
political maturity and education exists to support real majority rule.
Tyranny of the majority
When there is a very broad and inclusive franchise, but also on some issues with only a few elite voters, majority rule often
gives rise to a fear of so-called "tyranny of the majority," i.e. fear of a majority empowered to do anything it wanted
to an adversary minority. For example, it is theoretically possible for a majority to vote that a certain religion should be
criminalized, and its members punished with death.
Proponents of democracy argue that just as there is a special constitutional process for constitutional changes, there could
be a distinction between legislation which would be handled through direct democracy and the modification of constitutional rights
which would have a more deliberative procedure there attached, and thereby less vulnerable to the tyranny of the
majority.
Scaling to global democracy
Direct democracy becomes more and more difficult, and necessarily more closely approximates representative democracy, as the
number of citizens grows. Historically, the most direct democracies would include the New England town meeting, the political system of the
ancient Greek city
states and Oligarchy of Venice.
There are concerns about how such systems would scale to larger populations; in this regard there are a number of experiments
being conducted all over the world to increase the direct participation of citizens in what is now a representative system:
Referenda and semi-direct democracy
We can view direct and indirect democracies as ideal types, with actual democracies approximating more closely to the one or
the other, and such alternatives as liquid democracy in
between.
Some modern political entities are closest to direct democracies, such as Switzerland or some U.S. States, where frequent use
is made of referenda, and means are provided for referenda to be initiated by
petition instead of by members of the legislature or the government.
"Democracy" versus "republic"
The definition of the word "democracy" from the time of old Greece up to now has not been constant. In contemporary usage, the
term "democracy" refers to a government chosen by the people, whether it be direct or representative.
There is another definition of democracy, particularly in constitutional theory and in historical usages and especially when
considering the works of Aristotle or the American "Founding Fathers." Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle never used the words democracy or
republic interchangeably. See classic definition of republic. According to this definition, the word "democracy" refers
solely to direct democracy, whilst a representative democracy is referred to as a "republic". This older
terminology also has some popularity in U.S. Conservative and Libertarian debate.
Modern definitions of the term Republic, however, refer to any State with an
elective Head of State serving for a limited term, in contrast to most
contemporary hereditary monarchies which are representative
democracies and constitutional monarchies adhering to
Parliamentarism. (Older elective monarchies are also not considered republics.)
Alternative models of democracy
Some believe that the distinction between direct and representative, or between broadly franchised majority rule, and more
limited supervision of police and military primarily engaged in defending property rights, are not as important as the actual
process by which decision making occurs. Some further consider the
adversarial process implied by legalist mechanisms, e.g.
Supreme Court challenges, election campaigns themselves, political
party structures, to often obscure the larger opportunities the public may have, or the long-term dangers they may face,
which are not amenable to the kind of quick-retort interplay that characterizes both direct and representative mans of governing.
Some of the models that are proposed to reform it include:
There are also debates about street democracy and electoral reform which
emphasize the more local and situated means by which the public comes to know the issues, and directly encounter the consequences
of making major decisions. Some of these debates overlap with those about truth, anarchism, and the role of tolerances versus preferences in making major public decisions.
World democracy
World democracy means two things at the same time:
- Extend democracy to all the countries.
- Introduce democracy in the international organizations, via by-passing the screen of nation-states, especially in the
United Nations (see world presidentialism, democratic globalization).
There has been a great deal of research about global trends of democracy. For example, over the last century, the percent of
world population living in democracy has increased from 12% in 1900 to 63% in 2000. The majority of increase in democracy has
been in developed countries, but about half of less developed countries are now democracies as well.
See also
References
- Democracy: A Very Short Introduction, Bernard Crick, Oxford
University Press, 2002 ISBN
019280250X
- Democracy's Century Freedom House, 1999
- The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, Fareed Zakaria, W.W. Norton &
Company, 2003 ISBN 0393047644
- Rogue States: The rule of force in world affairs, Noam
Chomsky, Pluto books, 2000, ISBN
074531709X +
- How Democratic Is the American Constitution, Robert A.
Dahl, Yale University Press, 2002, ISBN 0300095244
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