Democracy

No account of democracy will meet with universal acceptance: the word denotes what the philosopher W.B. Gallie called an ‘essentially contested concept’. There is, however, a large measure of agreement that any democracy must satisfy the following conditions:

Government by the people

The word democracy means ‘rule or government by the people’. (The English word comes, through French and Late Latin, from the Greek δημοκρατία (dēmokratia), itself a compound of δῆμος (dēmos), ‘the (common) people’, and κράτος (kratos), ‘power’.) Democracy may, therefore, be distinguished from certain non-democratic forms of constitution under which it is not the people who govern but either a single person (as in an absolute monarchy) or a small group of persons (as in an oligarchy). (The threefold classification of constitutions according to whether government is in the hands of one person, a few, or ‘the many’ goes back at least to the time of Plato and Aristotle: see, e.g., Aristotle, Politics III 7, 1279a27-28.)

The statement that in a democracy it is the people who govern may be understood in different ways, yielding different forms of democracy. There is a fundamental distinction to be drawn between direct democracy, when the people participate in government directly, and representative democracy, when they participate in government indirectly, through their elected representatives. (For more on this distinction see Direct democracy - representative democracy.) Direct democracy was the form of democracy characteristic of some of the ancient Greek city states, but it plays little part in contemporary political life: modern democratic states are representative democracies, in which the government is chosen by, and answerable to, the people.

If the people are genuinely to ‘have a say’ in government through their choice of representatives, it is essential that the elections in which those representatives are chosen should be free and fair, and this requirement, for free and fair elections, generates a further set of conditions which any state must meet if it is to be genuinely democratic:

• universal adult suffrage: all adult citizens should have the right to vote in elections: the restriction of the franchise, e.g., to those who satisfy a property qualification, or its denial to women or members of a particular ethnic group would be undemocratic.

• range of candidates: the candidates who stand in elections should represent a broad spectrum of positions so that, as far as possible, every citizen has the opportunity to vote for a candidate whose views resemble his own. Clearly, to take an extreme case, if all the candidates were members of the party in power and opposition parties were not permitted to offer candidates, the election would be neither free nor fair.

• freedom of the press and freedom of speech: citizens must not only be in a position to acquire reliable information about the issues of the day and about candidates’ views in relation to them but should feel free to express their own views and discuss them with others.

• secret ballot: citizens must be confident that they may vote as they judge best without risking ‘punishment’ or being made to suffer in some way for having done so.

• integrity of elections: the government or other interested parties must not interfere in elections to produce a particular result, e.g., by ‘losing’ or excluding from the count (large numbers of) genuine ballots or by including (large numbers of) fraudulent ballots.

Respect for the basic rights of all citizens

That the people or their representatives should govern does not, by itself, imply any limits to the policies such a government may adopt, the actions it may undertake, or the legislation it may enact. The requirement that a democratic government must respect the basic rights of all its citizens sets limits to what it may legitimately do, and provides individual citizens with an assurance that the government will not act to their detriment in certain ways which are fundamentally unjust. This assurance has particular significance for the members of minorities in a population, who may find themselves permanently excluded from government and for whom in consequence democracy may seem little better than oligarchy or dictatorship: in these circumstances the requirement that the government must respect the basic rights of all its citizens provides a degree of protection against what J.S. Mill called the ‘tyranny of the majority’.

Respect for the rule of law

In a democracy the rule of law is paramount. Democratic governments are not above the law but subject to the law, and in this respect no different from their citizens. While a democratic government may, with the approval of the legislature, repeal old laws and enact new ones, it must nonetheless abide by the law as it is. Citizens may have the right to challenge the legality of the government’s action in the courts, where the judge or judges who will try the case are distinct from, and completely independent of, the government. Respect for the rule of law, like respect for citizens’ basic rights, places constraints on the way a government may act and provides a safeguard for citizens against certain kinds of arbitrary action on the part of their government.

Note: This page does no more than introduce a large and controversial topic. Those wishing to investigate the issues further should consult a reputable textbook, such as Jack Lively, Democracy (1975, reprinted 2007, ECPR Classics) or Bernard Crick, Democracy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002).