characteristics of democracy essay

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Normative democratic theory deals with the moral foundations of democracy and democratic institutions, as well as the moral duties of democratic representatives and citizens. It is distinct from descriptive and explanatory democratic theory, which aim to describe and explain how democracy and democratic institutions function. Normative democracy theory aims to provide an account of when and why democracy is morally desirable as well as moral principles for guiding the design of democratic institutions and the actions of citizens and representatives. Of course, normative democratic theory is inherently interdisciplinary and must draw on the results of political science, sociology, psychology, and economics in order to give concrete moral guidance.

This brief outline of normative democratic theory focuses attention on seven related issues. First, it proposes a definition of democracy. Second, it outlines different approaches to the question of why democracy is morally valuable at all. Third, it discusses the issue of whether and when democratic institutions have authority and different conceptions of the limits of democratic authority. Fourth, it explores the question of what it is reasonable to demand of citizens in large democratic societies. This issue is central to the evaluation of normative democratic theories. A large body of opinion has it that most classical normative democratic theory is incompatible with what we can reasonably expect from citizens. Fifth, it surveys different accounts of the proper characterization of equality in the processes of representation and the moral norms of representation. Sixth, it discusses the relationship between central findings in social choice theory and democracy. Seventh, it discusses the question of who should be included in the group that makes democratic decisions.

This entry focuses on issues in contemporary democratic theory. Although it mentions authors in the history of philosophy where relevant, it does not attempt to give a history of democratic theory. Readers interested in more in-depth discussions of historical figures important to the development of democratic theory are advised to look at the entries listed in the “Historical Figures” section towards the end of this entry.

1. Democracy Defined

2.1.1.1 the production of relatively good laws and policies: responsiveness theories, 2.1.1.2 the production of relatively good laws and policies: epistemic theories, 2.1.1.3 character-based arguments, 2.1.1.4 economic justifications of democracy, 2.1.2 instrumental arguments against democracy, 2.1.3 grounds for instrumentalism, 2.2.1 liberty, 2.2.2 democracy as public justification, 2.2.3 equality, 3.1 instrumentalist conceptions of democratic authority, 3.2.1 democracy as collective self-rule, 3.2.2 freedom and democratic authority, 3.2.3 equality and authority, 3.3.1 internal limits to democratic authority, 3.3.2 the problem of persistent minorities, 3.3.3 external limits to democratic authority, 4.1 the problem of democratic participation, 4.2.1 elite theory of democracy, 4.2.2 interest group pluralism, 4.2.3 neo-liberalism.

• 4.2.4. The self-interest assumption

4.2.5 The Division of Democratic Labor

4.2.6 sortition, 4.3.1 the duty to vote, 4.3.2 principled disobedience of the law, 4.3.3 accommodate disagreement through compromise and consensus, 5.1 what sort of representative system is best, 5.2 the ethics of representation, 6. social choice and democracy, 7. the boundary problem: constituting the demos, 8. historical figures, other internet resources, related entries.

The term “democracy”, as we will use it in this entry, refers very generally to a method of collective decision making characterized by a kind of equality among the participants at an essential stage of the decision-making process. Four aspects of this definition should be noted. First, democracy concerns collective decision making, by which we mean decisions that are made for groups and are meant to be binding on all the members of the group. Second, we intend for this definition to cover many different kinds of groups and decision-making procedures that may be called democratic. So there can be democracy in families, voluntary organizations, economic firms, as well as states and transnational and global organizations. The definition is also consistent with different electoral systems, for example first-past-the-post voting and proportional representation. Third, the definition is not intended to carry any normative weight. It is compatible with this definition of democracy that it is not desirable to have democracy in some particular context. So the definition of democracy does not settle any normative questions. Fourth, the equality required by the definition of democracy may be more or less deep. It may be the mere formal equality of one-person one-vote in an election for representatives to a parliament where there is competition among candidates for the position. Or it may be more robust, including substantive equality in the processes of deliberation and coalition building leading up to the vote. “Democracy” may refer to any of these political arrangements. It may involve direct referenda of the members of a society in deciding on the laws and policies of the society or it may involve the participation of those members in selecting representatives to make the decisions.

The function of normative democratic theory is not to settle questions of definition but to determine which, if any, of the forms democracy may take are morally desirable and when and how. To evaluate different moral justifications of democracy, we must decide on the merits of the different principles and conceptions of human beings and society from which they proceed.

2. The Justification of Democracy

In this section, we examine different views concerning the justification of democracy. Proposed justifications of democracy identify values or reasons that support democracy over alternative forms of decision-making, such as oligarchy or dictatorship. It is important to distinguish views concerning the justification of democracy from views concerning the authority of democracy, which we examine in section 3 . Attempts to establish democratic authority identify values or reasons in virtue of which subjects have a duty to obey democratic decisions. Justification and authority can come apart (Simmons 2001: ch. 7)—it is possible to hold that the balance of values or reasons supports democracy over alternative forms of decision-making while denying that subjects have a duty to obey democratic decisions.

We can evaluate the justification of democracy along at least two different dimensions: instrumentally, by reference to the outcomes of using it compared with other methods of political decision; or intrinsically, by reference to values that are inherent in the method.

2.1 Instrumentalism

2.1.1 instrumental arguments in favor of democracy.

Two kinds of in instrumental benefits are commonly attributed to democracy: (1) the production of relatively good laws and policies and (2) improvements in the characters of the participants.

It is often argued that democratic decision-making best protects subjects’ rights or interests because it is more responsive to their judgments or preferences than competing forms of government. John Stuart Mill, for example, argues that since democracy gives each subject a share of political power, democracy forces decision-makers to take into account the rights and interests of a wider range of subjects than are taken into account under aristocracy or monarchy (Mill 1861: ch. 3). There is some evidence that as groups are included in the democratic process, their interests are better advanced by the political system. For example, when African Americans regained the right to vote in the United States in 1965, they were able to secure many more benefits from the state than previously (Wright 2013). Economists argue that democracy promotes economic growth (Acemoglu et al. 2019). Several contemporary authors defend versions of this instrumental argument by pointing to the robust empirical correlation between well-functioning democratic institutions and the strong protection of core liberal rights, such as rights to a fair trial, bodily integrity, freedom of association, and freedom of expression (Gaus 1996: ch. 13; Christiano 2011; Gaus 2011: ch. 22).

A related instrumental argument for democracy is provided by Amartya Sen, who argues that

no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free press. (Sen 1999: 152)

The basis of this argument is that politicians in a multiparty democracy with free elections and a free press have incentives to respond to the expressions of needs of the poor.

Epistemic justifications of democracy argue that, under the right conditions, democracy is generally more reliable than alternative methods at producing political decisions that are correct according to procedure-independent standards. While there are many different explanations for the reliability of democratic decision-making, we outline three of the most prominent explanations here: (1) Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, (2) the effects of cognitive diversity, and (3) information gathering and sharing.

The most prominent explanation for democracy’s epistemic reliability rests on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (CJT), a mathematical theorem developed by eighteenth-century mathematician the Marquis de Condorcet that builds on the so-called “law of large numbers”. CJT states that, when certain assumptions hold, the probability that a majority of voters support the correct decision increases and approaches one as the number of voters increases. The assumptions are (Condorcet 1785):

• each voter is more likely than not to identify the correct decision (the competence assumption );
• voters vote for what they believe is the correct decision (the sincerity assumption );
• votes are statistically independent of one another (the independence assumption ).

While Condorcet’s original proof was restricted to decisions with only two choices, more recent work argues that CJT can be extended to decisions with three or more choices (List & Goodin 2001). The use of CJT to explain democracy’s reliability is often thought to originate with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s claim that

[i]f, when a sufficiently informed populace deliberates, the citizens were to have no communication among themselves, the general will would always result from the large number of small differences, and the deliberation would always be good. (Rousseau 1762: Book III, ch. IV)

Contemporary theorists continue to rely on CJT, or variants of it, to justify democracy (Barry 1965; Cohen 1986; Grofman and Feld 1988; Goodin & Spiekermann 2019).

The appeal of CJT for epistemic democrats derives from the fact that, if its underlying assumptions are satisfied, decisions produced by even moderately-sized electorates are almost certain to be correct. For example, if the assumptions of CJT hold for an electorate of 10,000 voters, and if each voter is 51 percent likely to identify the correct decision of two options, then the probability that a majority will select the correct decision is 99.97 percent. The formal mathematics of CJT are not subject to dispute. However, critics of CJT-based arguments for democracy argue that the assumptions underlying CJT are rarely, if ever, satisfied in actual democracies (see Black 1963: 159–65; Ladha 1992; Estlund 1997b; 2008: ch. XII; Anderson 2006). First, many have remarked that voters’ opinions are not independent of each other. Indeed, the democratic process seems to emphasize persuasion and coalition building. Second, the theorem does not seem to apply to cases in which the information that voters have access to, and on the basis of which they make their judgments, is segmented in various ways. Segmentation occurs when some sectors of the society do not have the relevant information while others do have it. Modern societies and politics seem to instantiate this kind of segmentation in terms of class, race, ethnic groupings, religion, occupational position, geographical place and so on. Finally, all voters approach issues they have to make decisions on with strong ideological biases that undermine the claim that each voter is bringing a kind of independent observation on the nature of the common good to the vote.

Advocates of CJT-based justifications of democracy generally respond to these sorts of criticisms by attempting to develop variations of CJT with weaker assumptions. These assumptions are more easily satisfied in democracies and so the revised theorems may show that even moderately-sized electorates are almost certain to produce correct decisions (Grofman & Feld 1988; Austen-Smith 1992; Austen-Smith & Banks 1996).

A second common epistemic justification for democracy—which is often traced to Aristotle ( Politics , Book II, Ch. 11; see Waldron 1995)—argues that democratic procedures are best able to exploit the underlying cognitive diversity of large groups of citizens to solve collective problems. Since democracy brings a lot of people into the process of decision making, it can take advantage of many sources of information and perspectives in assessing proposed laws and policies. More recently, Hélène Landemore (2013) has drawn on the “diversity-trumps-ability” theorem of Scott Page and Lu Hong (Hong & Page 2004; Page 2007)—which states that a random collection of agents drawn from a large set of limited-ability agents typically outperforms a collection of the very best agents from that same set—to argue that democracy can be expected to produce better decisions than rule by experts. Both Page and Hong’s original theorem and Landemore’s use of it to justify democracy are subject to dispute (see Quirk 2014; Brennan 2014; Thompson 2014; Bajaj 2014).

A third common epistemic justification for democracy relies on the idea that democratic decision-making tends to be more informed than other forms of decision-making about the interests of citizens and the causal mechanisms necessary to advance those interests. John Dewey argues that democracy involves “a consultation and a discussion which uncovers social needs and troubles”. Even if experts know how best to solve collective problems, they need input from the masses to correct their biases tell them where the problems lie (Dewey 1927 [2012: 154–155]; see also Marsilius [DP]; Anderson 2006; Knight & Johnson 2011).

Many have endorsed democracy on the grounds that democracy has beneficial effects on the characters of subjects. Many agree with Mill and Rousseau that democracy tends to make people stand up for themselves more than other forms of rule do because it makes collective decisions depend on their input more than monarchy or aristocracy do. Hence, in democratic societies individuals are encouraged to be more autonomous. Relatedly, by giving citizens a share of control over political-decision-making, democracy cultivates citizens with active and productive characters rather than passive characters. In addition, it has been argued that democracy tends to get people to think carefully and rationally more than other forms of rule because it makes a difference to political outcomes whether they do or not. Finally, some argue that democracy tends to enhance the moral qualities of citizens. When they participate in making decisions, they have to listen to others, they are called upon to justify themselves to others and they are forced to think in part in terms of the interests of others. Some have argued that when people find themselves in this kind of circumstance, they can be expected genuinely to think in terms of the common good and justice. Hence, some have argued that democratic processes tend to enhance the autonomy, rationality, activity, and morality of participants. Since these beneficial effects are thought to be worthwhile in themselves, they count in favor of democracy and against other forms of rule (Mill 1861 [1991: 74]; Elster 1986 [2003: 152]; Hannon 2020).

Some argue in addition that the above effects on character tend to enhance the quality of legislation as well. A society of autonomous, rational, active, and moral decision-makers is more likely to produce good legislation than a society ruled by a self-centered person or a small group of persons who rule over slavish and unreflective subjects. Of course, the soundness of any of the above arguments depends on the truth of the causal theories of the consequences of different institutions.

There are a number of economic justifications of democratic institutions. They proceed from the idea that preferences are given and that institutions are justified in terms of how citizens, given their preferences, would rationally want their society to be organized. The two accounts we mention here are in a broadly contractarian tradition, which seeks to determine what persons would agree to as a framework for collective decision making. Probably the most famous of these efforts and the one that has led to the highly fruitful research program of public choice theory is that of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their classic work The Calculus of Consent (1963). They argue that something like constitutional democracy could arise from a state of nature in which persons, with their basic natural and property rights protected, would agree to a collective decision procedure. The basic preference structure is self-interest in which persons attempt to maximize the stream of benefits to themselves. Individuals desire a collective decision-making apparatus in order to take care of problems that arise in the state of nature from uncontrolled external costs and public bads, which are costs that arise for everyone because no individual has incentive to limit them. External costs are costs that persons impose others without their consent. Hence, the purpose of the collective decision making is to take care of problems that arise when markets are inefficient because of externalities and public bads. The design of the decision procedure is meant to minimize two kinds of costs: external costs and decision costs. Decision costs are costs that arise from the difficulty of making collective decisions. Such decision making takes time and resources. Here is the basic calculation each person considers when choosing a collective decision procedure. On the one hand, they consider the external costs imposed on them if the decision procedure is not a unanimity procedure. Each person reflects that as the decision procedure approximates unanimity the chance of external costs imposed on them goes to zero. Taking the external costs of the procedure alone into account each prefers unanimity. On the other hand, each person considers the decision costs of a collective procedure. Here, as the decision procedure approaches unanimity the decision costs grow extremely large because of all the haggling such a procedure would generate. The procedure each person would choose under the circumstances would attempt to minimize the combination of these two costs. It would be a procedure that is close to majority rule, though there is no reason to suppose that majority rule itself would be chosen.

One objection is that the assumptions behind the argument are too strong. Buchanan and Tullock argue that this process would lead to unanimous agreement on a collective decision procedure under certain assumptions such as individuals cannot be divided into groups with strongly opposed interests and when individuals are sufficiently uncertain of their fates in the long term that their interests become more or less the same. They are in effect behind a veil of ignorance with regard to the future. These assumptions have been contested as descriptions of any plausible circumstances in which societies find themselves.

Another broadly economic approach can be found in Douglas Rae (1969). Rae argues that individuals with preferences over social states would generally prefer majority rule over the long run because majority rule maximizes the chances of the satisfaction of their preferences. The Rae-Taylor theorem states that if each individual has an equal prior probability of preferring each of the two alternatives, majority rule maximizes each individual’s expected utility (see the Section 2.4 of the entry on social choice theory ). Again the background assumption is that people don’t know how often they fall in the majority or minority and don’t have any special preference for the status quo. Under these circumstances, one gets what one wants more often from a collective decision procedure when it is majoritarian (see also Coleman [1989]).

Not all instrumental arguments favor democracy. Plato argues that democracy is inferior to various forms of monarchy, aristocracy and even oligarchy on the grounds that democracy tends to undermine the expertise necessary to the proper governance of societies (Plato 1974, Book VI). Most people do not have the kinds of intellectual talents that enable them to think well about the difficult issues that politics involves. But in order to win office or get a piece of legislation passed, politicians must appeal to these people’s sense of what is right or not right. Hence, the state will be guided by very poorly worked out ideas that experts in manipulation and mass appeal use to help themselves win office. Plato argues instead that the state should be ruled by philosopher-kings who have the wisdom and moral character required for good rule. He thus defends a version of what David Estlund calls “epistocracy”, a form of oligarchy that involves rule by experts (Estlund 2003).

Mill defends a form of epistocracy that is sometimes referred to as the “plural voting” scheme (1861: ch. 4). While all rational adults get at least one vote under this scheme, some citizens get a greater number of votes based on satisfying some measure of political expertise. While Mill identifies the relevant measure of expertise in terms of formal education, the plural voting scheme is consistent with other measures. This scheme might be thought to combine the instrumental value of political expertise with the intrinsic value of broad inclusion.

One objection to any form of epistocracy—the demographic objection —holds that any criterion of expertise is likely to select demographically homogeneous individuals who are be biased in ways that undermine their ability to produce political outcomes that promote the general welfare (Estlund 2003).

Hobbes argues that democracy is inferior to monarchy because democracy fosters destabilizing dissension among subjects (Hobbes 1651: chap. XIX). On his view, individual citizens and even politicians are apt not to have a sense of responsibility for the quality of legislation because no one makes a significant difference to the outcomes of decision making. As a consequence, citizens’ concerns are not focused on politics and politicians succeed only by making loud and manipulative appeals to citizens in order to gain more power, but all lack incentives to consider views that are genuinely for the common good. Hence the sense of lack of responsibility for outcomes undermines politicians’ concern for the common good and inclines them to make sectarian and divisive appeals to citizens.

Many contemporary theorists expand on these Platonic and Hobbesian criticisms. A good deal of empirical data shows that citizens of large-scale democracies are ill-informed and apathetic about politics. This makes room for special interests to control the behavior of politicians and use the state for their own limited purposes all the while spreading the costs to everyone. Moreover, there is empirical evidence that democratic citizens often engage in motivated reasoning that unconsciously aims to affirm their existing political identities rather than arrive at correct judgments (Lord, Ross, & Lepper 1979; Bartels 2002; Kahan 2013; Achen & Bartels 2016). Some theorists argue that these considerations justify abandoning democracy altogether, while modest versions of these arguments have been used to justify modification of democratic institutions (Caplan 2007; Somin 2013; Brennan 2016). Relatedly, some theorists argue that rather than having beneficial effects on the characters of subjects as Mill and others argue, democracy actually has deleterious effects on the subjects’ characters and relationships (Brennan 2016: ch. 3).

Pure instrumentalists argue that these instrumental arguments for and against the democratic process are the only bases on which to evaluate the justification of democracy or compare it with other forms of political decision-making. There are a number of different kinds of argument for pure instrumentalism. One kind of argument proceeds from a more general moral theory. For example, classical utilitarianism has no room in its monistic axiology for the intrinsic values of fairness and liberty or the intrinsic importance of an egalitarian distribution of political power. Its sole concern with maximizing utility—understood as pleasure or desire satisfaction—guarantees that it can provide only instrumental arguments for and against democracy.

But one need not be a thoroughgoing utilitarian to argue for instrumentalism in democratic theory. There are arguments in favor of instrumentalism that pertain directly to the question of democracy and collective decision making generally. One argument states that political power involves the exercise of power of some over others. And it argues that the exercise of power of one person over another can only be justified by reference to the protection of the interests or rights of the person over whom power is exercised. Thus no distribution of political power could ever be justified except by reference to the quality of outcomes of the decision making process (Arneson 1993 [2002: 96–97]; 2003; 2004; 2009). Another sort of argument for instrumentalism proceeds negatively, attempting to show that the non-instrumental values most commonly used in attempted justifications for democracy do not actually justify democracy, and that an instrumental justification for democracy is therefore the only available sort of justification (Wall 2007).

Other arguments question the coherence of the idea of intrinsically fair collective decision making processes. For instance, social choice theory questions the idea that there can be a fair decision making function that transforms a set of individual preferences into a rational collective preference. The core objection is that no general rule satisfying reasonable constraints can be devised that can transform any set of individual preferences into a rational social preference. And this is taken to show that democratic procedures cannot be intrinsically fair (Riker 1982: 116). Ronald Dworkin argues that the idea of equality, which is for him at the root of social justice, cannot be given a coherent and plausible interpretation when it comes to the distribution of political power among members of the society. The relation of politicians to citizens inevitably gives rise to inequality; the process of democratic deliberation inevitably gives those with superior argument making abilities and greater willingness to participate more influence and therefore more power, than others, so equality of political power cannot be intrinsically fair or just (Dworkin 2000). In later work, Dworkin has pulled back from this originally thoroughgoing instrumentalism (Dworkin 1996).

2.2 Non-instrumentalism

Few theorists deny that political institutions must be at least in part evaluated in terms of the outcomes of having those institutions. Some argue in addition, that some forms of decision making are morally desirable independent of the consequences of having them. A variety of different approaches have been used to show that democracy has this kind of intrinsic value.

One prominent justification for democracy appeals to the value of liberty. According to one version of the view, democracy is grounded in the idea that each ought to be master of his or her life. Each person’s life is deeply affected by the larger social, legal and cultural environment in which he or she lives. Only when each person has an equal voice and vote in the process of collective decision-making will each have equal control over this larger environment. Thinkers such as Carol Gould conclude that only when some kind of democracy is implemented, will individuals have a chance at self-government (Gould 1988: 45–85; see also Marsilius [DP]). Since individuals have a right of self-government, they have a right to democratic participation. The idea is that the right of self-government gives one a right, within limits, to do wrong. Just as an individual has a right to make some bad decisions for himself or herself, so a group of individuals have a right to make bad or unjust decisions for themselves regarding those activities they share.

One major difficulty with this line of argument is that it appears to require that the basic rule of decision-making be consensus or unanimity. If each person must freely choose the outcomes that bind him or her then those who oppose the decision are not self-governing. They live in an environment imposed on them by others. So only when all agree to a decision are they freely adopting the decision (Wolff 1970: ch. 2). The trouble is that there is rarely agreement on major issues in politics. Indeed, it appears that one of the main reasons for having political decision making procedures is that they can settle matters despite disagreement.

One liberty-based argument that might seem to escape this worry appeals to an irreducibly collective right to self-determination. It is often argued that political communities have a right as a community to organize themselves politically in accordance with their values, principles, or commitments. Some argue that the right to collective self-determination requires democratic institutions that give citizens collective control over their political and legal structure (Cassese 1995). However, many argue democratic institutions are sufficient but not necessary to realize the right to collective self-determination because political communities might exercise this right to implement non-democratic institutions (Altman & Wellman 2009; Stilz 2016).

Another non-instrumental justification of democracy appeals to the ideal of public justification. The idea behind this approach is that laws and policies are legitimate to the extent that they are publicly justified to the citizens of the community. Public justification is justification to each citizen as a result of free and reasoned debate among equals.

Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of deliberative democracy has been highly influential in the development of this approach. Habermas analyses the form and function of modern legal systems through the lens of his theory of communicative action. This analysis yields the Democratic Principle:

[O]nly those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in turn has been legally constituted. (Habermas 1992 [1996: 110])

Habermas advances a conception of democratic legitimacy according to which law is legitimate only if it results from a free and inclusive democratic process of “opinion and will-formation”. What might such a process look like in a complex and differentiated society? Habermas answers by advancing a “two-track” model that understands democratic legitimation in terms of the relationship between institutionalized deliberative bodies (e.g legislatures, agencies, courts) and informal communication in the public sphere, which is “wild”, and not centrally coordinated.

One possible objection to this view is that free and inclusive democratic procedures are insufficient to satisfy the demand for deliberative consensus embodied in the Democratic Principle. This demand is unlikely to be satisfied in diverse societies, since deep disagreements about which laws ought to be enacted is likely to remain after the relevant process of opinion and will-formation. The Democratic Principle might thus be thought to embody an overly idealistic conception of democratic legitimacy (Estlund 2008: ch.10). Another possible worry is that the Discourse Principle is not a genuine moral principle, but a principle that embodies the felicity conditions of practical discourse. As such, the Discourse Principle cannot ground a conception of democratic legitimacy that yields robust moral prescriptions (Forst 2016).

Drawing on Habermas and John Rawls, among others, Joshua Cohen (1996 [2003]) develops a conception of democracy in which citizens justify laws and policies on the basis of mutually acceptable reasons. Democracy, properly understood, is the context in which individuals freely engage in a process of reasoned discussion and deliberation on an equal footing. The ideas of freedom and equality provide guidelines for structuring democratic institutions.

The aim of Cohen’s conception of democracy as public justification is reasoned consensus among citizens. But a serious problem arises when we ask about what happens when disagreement remains. Two possible replies have been suggested. It has been urged that forms of consensus weaker than full consensus are sufficient for public justification and that the weaker varieties are achievable in many societies. For instance, there may be consensus on the list of reasons that are acceptable publicly but disagreement on the weight of the different reasons. Or there may be agreement on general reasons abstractly understood but disagreement about particular interpretations of those reasons. What would have to be shown here is that such weak consensus is achievable in many societies and that the disagreements that remain are not incompatible with the ideal of public justification.

The basic principle seems to be the principle of reasonableness according to which reasonable persons will only offer principles for the regulation of their society that other reasonable persons can reasonably accept. One only offers principles that others, who restrain themselves in the same way, can accept. Such a principle implies a kind of principle of restraint which requires that reasonable persons avoid proposing laws and policies on the basis of controversial moral or philosophical principles. When individuals offer proposals for the regulation of their society, they ought not to appeal to the whole truth as they see it but only to that part of the whole truth that others can reasonably accept. To put the matter in the way Rawls puts it: political society must be regulated by principles on which there is an overlapping consensus (Rawls 2005: Lecture IV). This is meant to obviate the need for a complete consensus on the principles that regulate society.

However, it is hard to see how this approach avoids the need for a complete consensus, which is highly unlikely to occur in any even moderately diverse society. The reason for this is that it is not clear why it is any less of an imposition on me when I propose legislation or policies for the society that I must restrain myself to considerations that other reasonable people accept than it is an imposition on others when I attempt to pass legislation on the basis of reasons they reasonably reject. For if I do restrain myself in this way, then the society I live in will not live up to the standards that I believe are essential to evaluating the society. I must then live in and support a society that does not accord with my conception of how it ought to be organized. It is not clear why this is any less of a loss of control over society than for those who must live in a society that is partly regulated by principles they do not accept. If one is a problem, then so is the other, and complete consensus is the only solution (Christiano 2009).

Many democratic theorists have argued that democracy is a way of treating persons as equals when there is good reason to impose some kind of organization on their shared lives but they disagree about how best to do it. Peter Singer argues that when people insist on different ways of arranging matters properly, each person in a sense claims a right to be dictator over their shared lives (Singer 1973: 30–41). But these claims to dictatorship cannot all hold up. Democracy embodies a kind of peaceful and fair compromise among these conflicting claims to rule. Each compromises equally on what he claims as long as the others do, resulting in each having an equal say over decision making. In effect, democratic decision making respects each person’s point of view on matters of common concern by giving each an equal say about what to do in cases of disagreement (Singer 1973; Waldron 1999: chap. 5).

What if people disagree on the democratic method or on the particular form democracy is to take? Are we to decide these latter questions by means of a higher order procedure? And if there is disagreement on the higher order procedure, must we also democratically decide that question? The view seems to lead to an infinite regress.

An alternative way of justifying democracy on the basis of equality is to ground democracy in public equality. Public equality is a principle of equality which ensures that people can see that they are being treated as equals. This view arises from three ideas. First, there is the basic egalitarian idea that people’s interests ought to be equally advanced, or at least that they ought to have equal opportunities to advance them. Second, human beings generally have highly fallible and biased understandings of their own and other people’s interests. Third, persons have fundamental interests in being able to see that they are being treated as equals. Public equality is an egalitarian principle that can be seen to be realized among persons despite the dramatically incomplete forms of knowledge people have. It is not all of justice, but it is essential that the principle be realized in a pluralistic society.

Democracy is a uniquely publicly egalitarian way to make collective decisions when there is substantial disagreement and conflict of interest among persons about how to shape the society they share. Each can see that the only plausible way of overcoming persistent disagreement over how to shape the society they all live in, while still publicly treating all persons as equals in the face of bias and fallibility, is to give each person an equal say in the process of shaping that society. Thus, democracy is necessary to the realization of public equality in a political society. Within the framework determined by this publicly realized equality, persons are permitted to attempt to bring about their more particular ideas about justice and the common good that they think are right.

The idea of public equality also grounds limits to democratic decision making. The thought is that a society cannot democratically decide to abolish the democratic rights of some of its members. Public equality also requires that basic liberal and civil rights be respected as well, by the democratic process and so serves as a limit to democratic decision making (Christiano 2008; Valentini 2013).

A number of worries attend this kind of view. First, it is generally thought that majority rule is required for treating persons as equals in collective decision making. This is because only majority rule is neutral towards alternatives in decision making. Unanimity tends to favor the status quo as do various forms of supermajority rule. But if this is so, the above view raises the twin dangers of majority tyranny and of persistent minorities, i.e., groups of persons who find themselves always losing in majority decisions. Surely these latter phenomena must be incompatible with public equality. Second, the kind of view defended above is susceptible to the worry that political equality is not a coherent ideal in any modern state with a complex division of labor and the need for representation. This last worry will be discussed in more detail in the next sections on democratic citizenship and legislative representation. The first worry will be discussed more in the discussion on the limits to democratic authority.

A related approach grounds democracy in the ideal of relational equality . A concern with relational equality is a concern for

human relationships that are, in certain crucial respects at least, unstructured by differences of rank, power, or status. (Scheffler 2010: 225)

Niko Kolodny argues that democratic institutions are an essential component of relational equality (Kolodny 2014a,b). One line of Kolodny’s argument holds that political decisions involve the use of coercive force. Inequalities in the power to use force undermine equal social status at least in part because the power to use force is “the power that usually determines the distribution of other powers” (Kolodny 2014b: 307). Individuals who have superior power to use force on others have a superior social status. An egalitarian distribution of political power is thus essential for realizing social equality. And only democratic institutions provide an egalitarian distribution of political power. We will discuss the relationship between relational equality and democracy further when we discuss the authority of democracy in Part 3 below.

3. The Authority of Democracy

Since democracy is a collective decision process, the question naturally arises about whether there is any duty of citizens to obey democratic decisions when they disagree with it.

There are three main concepts of the legitimate authority of the state. First, a state has legitimate authority to the extent that it is morally justified in coercively imposing its rule on the members. Legitimate authority on this account has no direct implications concerning the obligations or duties that citizens may hold toward that state. It simply says that if the state is morally justified in doing what it does, then it has legitimate authority. Second, a state has legitimate authority to the extent that its directives generate duties in citizens to obey. The duties of the citizens need not be owed to the state but they are real duties to obey. The third is that the state has a right to rule that is correlated with the citizens’ duty to it to obey it. This is the strongest notion of authority and it seems to be the core idea behind the legitimacy of the state. The idea is that when citizens disagree about law and policy it is important to be able to answer the question, who has the right to choose?

Instrumental arguments for democracy give some reason for why one ought to respect the democracy when one disagrees with its decisions. There may be many instrumental considerations that play a role in deciding on the question of whether one ought to obey. And these instrumental considerations are pretty much the same whether one is considering obedience to democracy or some other form of rule.

There is one instrumentalist approach which is quite unique to democracy and that seems to ground a strong conception of democratic authority. That is the epistemic approach inspired by the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which we discussed in section 2.1.1.2 above. There, we discussed a number of difficulties with the application of the Condorcet Jury Theorem to the case of voting in elections and referenda in large-scale democracies, including lack of independence, informational segmentation, and the existence of ideological biases.

One further worry about the Jury Theorem’s epistemic conceptions of authority is that it would prove too much since it undermines the common practice of the loyal opposition in democracies. If the background conditions of the Jury Theorem are met, a large-scale democracy majority is practically certain to produce the right decisions. On what basis can citizens in a political minority rationally hold on to their competing views? The members of the minority have a powerful reason for shifting their allegiance to the majority position, since each has very good reason to think that the majority is right. The epistemic conception of authority based on the Jury Theorem thus threatens to be objectionably authoritarian, since it looks like it demands not only obedience of action but obedience of thought as well. Even in scientific communities the fact that a majority of scientists favor a particular view does not make the minority scientists think that they are wrong, though it does perhaps give them pause (Goodin 2003: ch. 7).

Some theories of democratic authority combine instrumental and non-instrumental considerations. David Estlund argues that democratic procedures have legitimate authority because they are better than random and epistemically the best of the political systems that are acceptable to all reasonable citizens (Estlund 2008). They must be better than random because, otherwise, why wouldn’t we use a fair random procedure like a lottery or coin flip? Democratic authority must have an epistemic element. And the justification of democratic procedure must be acceptable to all reasonable citizens in order to respect their freedom and equality. Estlund’s conception of democratic authority—which he calls “epistemic proceduralism”— thus combines the ideal of public justification with a concern for the tendency of democracies to produce good decisions.

3.2 Intrinsic Conceptions of Democratic Authority

Some theorists argue that there is a special relation between democracy and legitimate authority grounded in the value of collective self-rule. John Locke argues that when a person consents to the creation of a political society, they necessarily consent to the use of majority rule in deciding how the political society is to be organized (Locke 1690: sec. 96). Locke thinks that majority rule is the natural decision rule when there is disagreement. He argues that a society is a kind of collective body that must move in the direction of the greater force. One way to understand this argument is as follows. If we think of each member of society as an equal and if we think that there is likely to be disagreement beyond the question of whether to join society or not, then we must accept majority rule as the appropriate decision rule. This interpretation of the greater force argument assumes that the expression “greater force” is to be understood in terms of the equal worth of each person’s interests and rights, so the society must go in the direction in which the greater number of persons wants it to go.

Locke thinks that a people, which is formed by individuals who consent to be members, could choose a monarchy by means of majority rule and so this argument by itself does not give us an argument for democracy. But Locke refers back to this argument when he defends the requirement of representative institutions for deciding when property may be regulated and taxes levied. He argues that a person must consent to the regulation or taxation of his property by the state. But he says that this requirement of consent is satisfied when a majority of the representatives of property holders consent to the regulation and taxation of property (Locke, 1690: sec. 140). This does seem to be moving towards a genuinely democratic conception of legitimate authority.

Rousseau argues that when individuals consent to form a political community, they agree to put themselves under the direction of the “general will” (Rousseau 1762). The general will is not a mere aggregation of individuals’ private wills. It is, rather, the will of the political community as a whole. And since the general will can only emerge as the product of a properly organized democratic procedure, individuals consent to put themselves under the direction of a properly organized democratic procedure. On one interpretation of Rousseau, democratic procedures are properly organized only when they (1) define rights that apply equally to all, (2) via a procedure that considers everyone’s interests equally, and (3) everyone who is coerced to obey the laws has a voice in that procedure.

There are at least two ways of understanding the idea of the general will. On what might be called the constitutive interpretation, the general will is constituted by the results of a properly organized democratic procedure. That is, the results of a properly organized democratic procedure are the general will in virtue of the fact that they emerge from a properly organized democratic procedure, and not because they reflect some procedure-independent truth about the common good. On what might be called the epistemic interpretation, the results of a properly organized democratic procedure are the way of tracking the procedure-independent truth about the common good. As we discussed in section 3.1 , Rousseau is often interpreted as appealing to Condorcet’s Jury Theorem to support the epistemic credentials of a properly organized democratic procedure.

Anna Stilz develops an account of democratic authority that appeals to the value of “freedom as independence” (Stilz 2009). Freedom as independence is freedom from being subject to the will of another. In order not to be subject to the will of others, individuals need property rights and a protected sphere of autonomy to pursue one’s plans. Drawing on Kant, Stilz argues that attempts by particular individuals, no matter how conscientious, to define and secure rights to property and autonomy in a state of nature will be inconsistent with freedom as independence. Such attempts unilaterally impose new obligations on others through acts of private will in the face of competing claims. But even if individuals in a state of nature do agree to a resolution of their competing claims, they are dependent on the will of others to honor this agreement. Stilz thus argues that justice must be administered by an authoritative legal system which can coercively impose one set of objective rules—rules we must respect even when we disagree—to adjudicate our conflicting claims. But if such a system is to be consistent with the freedom of subjects, it cannot be imposed by the private wills of rulers. The solution, Stilz argues, lies in Rousseau’s idea of the general will. When subjects obey the general will, they are not obeying the private will of any individual; they are obeying a will that arises from all and applies to all.

One worry with this account is that those who oppose democratically-enacted laws or policies can complain that those laws or policies are imposed against their will. Perhaps they are not subject to the will of a particular individual, but they are subject to the will of a majority. This might be thought to constitute a significant threat to individuals’ freedom as independence. Another worry, which Stilz’s view arguably inherits from Rousseau, is that the conditions for the general will to emerge are so demanding that the view implies that no state that exists or has existed has legitimate political authority. Stilz’s view might thus be thought to entail what A.J. Simmons calls “a posteriori anarchism” (Simmons 2001).

Another approach to democratic authority asserts that failing to obey the decisions of a democratic assembly amounts to treating one’s fellow citizens as inferiors (Christiano 2008: ch. 6). In the face of disagreement about substantive law and policy, democracy realizes a kind of public equality by giving each individual an equal say in determining which laws or policies will be enacted. Citizens who skirt laws made by suitably egalitarian procedures act contrary to the equal right of all citizens to have a say in making laws. Those who refuse to pay taxes or respect property laws on the grounds that they are unjust are affirming a superior right to that of others in determining how the shared aspects of social life ought to be arranged. Thus, they violate the duty to treat others publicly as equals. And there is reason to think this duty must normally have some pre-eminence. Public equality is the most important form of equality and democracy is required by public equality. The other forms of equality in play in substantive disputes about law and policy are ones about which people can have reasonable disagreements (within limits specified by the principle of public equality). Citizens thus have obligations to abide by the democratic process even if their favored conceptions of justice or equality are passed by in the decision making process.

Daniel Viehoff develops an egalitarian conception of democratic authority based on the ideal of relational equality (Viehoff 2014; see section 2.2.3 above for more on relational equality). Viehoff argues that relational equality is threatened by “subjection” in a relationship, which occurs when individuals have significantly different power over how they interact with and relate to one another. According to Viehoff, obeying the outcomes of egalitarian democratic procedures is necessary and sufficient for citizens to achieve coordination on common rules without subjection. It is sufficient because democratic procedures distribute decision-making power equally, which ensures that coordination is not determined by unequal power advantages. It is necessary because parties must set aside the considerations of greater and lesser power to realize non-subjection in their relationship.

Fabienne Peter develops a fairness-based conception of democratic authority that incorporates epistemic considerations (Peter 2008; 2009). Drawing on insights from proceduralist epistemology, Peter’s “pure epistemic proceduralism” holds that suitably egalitarian democratic decisions are binding at least in part because they result from a fair procedure of knowledge-production. This account differs from Estlund’s epistemic proceduralism (see section 5.1 above) because it does not condition the authority of democratic procedures on their ability to produce decisions that track the procedure-independent truth. Rather, the authority of democratic procedures is grounded in their fairness. And it differs from pure procedural accounts because the relevant notion of fairness is fairness in knowledge-production.

3.3 Limits to the Authority of Democracy

What are the limits to democratic authority? A limit to democratic authority is a principle violation of which defeats democratic authority. When the principle is violated by the democratic assembly, the assembly loses its authority in that instance or the moral weight of the authority is overridden. A number of different views have been offered on this issue. We can distinguish between internal and external limits to democratic authority. An internal limit arises from the constitutive requirements of the democratic process or from the principles that ground democracy. An external limit arises from principles that are independent of the values or requirements that ground democracy.

External limits to democratic authority are rebutting limits, which are principles that weigh against—and may sometimes outweigh the principles that ground democracy. So in a particular case, an individual may see that there are reasons to obey the assembly and some reasons against obeying the assembly and in the case at hand the reasons against obedience outweigh the reasons in favor of obedience. Internal limits to democratic authority are undercutting limits. These limits function not by weighing against the considerations in favor of authority, they undercut the considerations in favor of authority altogether; they simply short circuit the authority. When an undercutting limit is in play, it is not as if the principles which ground the limit outweigh the reasons for obeying the democratic assembly, it is rather that the reasons for obeying the democratic assembly are undermined altogether; they cease to exist or at least they are severely weakened.

Some have argued that the democratic process ought to be limited to decisions that are not incompatible with the proper functioning of the democratic process. So they argue that the democratic process may not legitimately take away the political rights of its citizens in good standing. It may not take away rights that are necessary to the democratic process such as freedom of association or freedom of speech. But these limits do not extend beyond the requirements for proper democratic functioning. They do not protect non political artistic speech or freedom of association in the case of non political activities (Ely 1980: chap. 4).

Another kind of internal limit is a limit that arises from the principles that underpin democracy. And the presence of this limit would seem to be necessary to making sense of the first limit because in order for the first limit to be morally important we need to know why a democracy ought to protect the democratic process.

Locke gives an account of the internal limits of democracy in his idea that there are certain things to which a citizen may not consent (Locke 1690: ch. XI). She may not consent to arbitrary rule or the violation of fundamental rights including democratic and liberal rights. Since consent is the basis of democratic authority for Locke, this account provides an explanation of the idea behind the first internal limit, that democracy may not be suspended by democratic means but it goes beyond that limit to suggest that rights that are not essentially connected with the exercise of the franchise may also not be violated because one may not consent to their violation.

More recently, Ronald Dworkin has defended an account of the limits of democratic authority (Dworkin 1996). He argues that democracy is justified by appeal to a principle of self-government. He argues that self-government cannot be realized unless all citizens are treated as full members of the political community, because, otherwise, they are not able to identify as members of the community. Among the conditions of full membership, he argues, are rights to be treated as equals and rights to have one’s moral independence respected. These principles support robust requirements of non-discrimination and of basic liberal rights.

The conception of democratic authority that grounds it in public equality also provides an account of the limits of that authority (Christiano 2008: ch. 6). Since democracy is founded in public equality, it may not violate public equality in any of its decisions. The basic idea is that overt violation of public equality by a democratic assembly undermines the claim that the democratic assembly embodies public equality. Democracy’s embodiment of public equality is conditional on its protecting public equality. To the extent that liberal rights are grounded in public equality and the provision of an economic minimum is also so grounded, this suggests that democratic rights and liberal rights and rights to an economic minimum create a limit to democratic authority. This account also provides a deep grounding for the kinds of limits to democratic authority defended in the first internal limit and it goes beyond these to the extent that protection of rights that are not connected with the exercise of the franchise is also necessary to public equality.

This account of the authority of democracy also provides some help with a vexing problem of democratic theory. This problem is the difficulty of persistent minorities. There is a persistent minority in a democratic society when that minority always loses in the voting. This is always a possibility in democracies because of the use of majority rule. If the society is divided into two or more highly unified voting blocks in which the members of each group votes in the same ways as all the other members of that group, then the group in the minority will find itself always on the losing end of the votes. This problem has plagued some societies, particularly those with indigenous peoples who live within developed societies. Though this problem is often connected with majority tyranny it is distinct from the problem of majority tyranny because it may be the case that the majority attempts to treat the minority well, in accordance with its conception of good treatment. It is just that the minority never agrees with the majority on what constitutes proper treatment. Being a persistent minority can be highly oppressive even if the majority does not try to act oppressively. This can be understood with the help of the very ideas that underpin democracy. Persons have interests in being able to correct for the cognitive biases of others and to be able to make the world in such a way that it makes sense to them. These interests are set back for a persistent minority since they never get their way.

The conception of democracy as grounded in public equality can shed light on this problem. It can say that the existence of a persistent minority violates public equality (Christiano 2008: chap. 7). In effect, a society in which there is a persistent minority is one in which that minority is being treated publicly as an inferior because it is clear that its fundamental interests are being set back. Hence to the extent that violations of public equality undercut the authority of a democratic assembly, the existence of a persistent minority undermines the authority of the democracy at least with respect to the minority. This suggests that certain institutions ought to be constructed so that the minority is not persistent.

One natural kind of limit to democratic authority is the external kind of limit. Here the idea is that there are certain considerations that favor democratic decision making and there are certain values that are independent of democracy that may be at issue in democratic decisions. For example, many theories recognize core liberal rights—such as rights to property, bodily integrity, and freedom of thought and expression—as external limits to democratic authority. Locke is often interpreted as arguing that individuals have natural rights to property in themselves and the external world that democratic laws must respect in order to have legitimate authority (Locke 1690).

Some views may assert that there are only external limits to democratic authority. But it is possible to think that there are both internal and external limits. Such an issue may arise in decisions to go to war, for example. In such decisions, one may have a duty to obey the decision of the democratic assembly on the grounds that this is how one treats one’s fellow citizens as equals but one may also have a duty to oppose the war on the grounds that the war is an unjust aggression against other people. To the extent that this consideration is sufficiently serious it may outweigh the considerations of equality that underpin democratic authority. Thus one may have an overall duty not to obey in this context. Issues of foreign policy in general seem to give rise to possible external limits to democracy.

4. The Demands of Democratic Participation

In this section, we examine the demands of participation in large-scale democracies. We begin by examining a core challenge to the idea that democratic citizens are capable of governing a large and complex society. We then explore different proposed solutions to the core challenge. Finally, we examine the moral duties of democratic citizens in large-scale democracies in light of the core challenge.

A vexing problem of democratic theory has been to determine whether ordinary citizens are up to the task of governing a large and complex society. There are three distinct problems here:

• Plato argued that some people are more intelligent and informed about political matters than others and have a superior moral character, and that those persons ought to rule ( The Republic , Book VI)
• Others have argued that a society must have a division of labor. If everyone were engaged in the complex and difficult task of politics, little time or energy would be left for the other essential tasks of a society. Conversely, if we expect most people to engage in other difficult and complex tasks, how can we expect them to have the time and resources sufficient to devote themselves intelligently to politics?
• Since individuals have so little impact on the outcomes of political decision making in large societies, they have little sense of responsibility for the outcomes. Some have argued that it is not rational to vote since the chances that an individual’s vote will a decide the outcome of an election (i.e., will determine whether a candidate gets elected or not) are nearly indistinguishable from zero. For example, one widely accepted estimate puts the odds of an individual casting the deciding vote in a United States presidential election at 1 in 100 million. Many estimates put the odds much lower. Worse still, Anthony Downs has argued that almost all of those who do vote have little reason to become informed about how best to vote (Downs 1957: ch.13). On the assumption that citizens reason and behave roughly according to the Downsian model, either the society must in fact be run by a relatively small group of people with minimal input from the rest or it will be very poorly run. As we can see these criticisms are echoes of the sorts of criticisms Plato and Hobbes made.

These observations pose challenges for any robustly egalitarian or deliberative conception of democracy. Without the ability to participate intelligently in politics one cannot use one’s votes to advance one’s aims nor can one be said to participate in a process of reasoned deliberation among equals. So, either equality of political power implies a kind of self-defeating equal participation of citizens in politics or a reasonable division of labor seems to undermine equality of power. And either substantial participation of citizens in public deliberation entails the relative neglect of other tasks or the proper functioning of the other sectors of the society requires that most people do not participate intelligently in public deliberation.

4.2 Proposed Solutions to the Problem of Democratic Participation

Some modern theorists of democracy, called elite theorists, have argued against any robustly egalitarian or deliberative forms of democracy in light of the problem of democratic participation. They argue that high levels of citizen participation tend to produce bad legislation designed by demagogues to appeal to poorly informed and overly emotional citizens. They look upon the alleged uninformedness of citizens evidenced in many empirical studies in the 1950s and 1960s as perfectly reasonable and predictable. Indeed they regard the alleged apathy of citizens in modern states as highly desirable social phenomena.

Political leaders are to avoid divisive and emotionally charged issues and make policy and law with little regard for the fickle and diffuse demands made by ordinary citizens. Citizens participate by voting but since they know very little they are not effectively the ruling part of the society. The process of election is usually just a fairly peaceful way of maintaining or changing those who rule (Schumpeter 1942 [1950: 269]).

On Schumpeter’s view, however, citizens do have a role to play in avoiding serious disasters. When politicians act in ways that nearly anyone can see is problematic, the citizens can throw the bums out.

So the elite theory of democracy does seem compatible with some of the instrumentalist arguments given above but it is strongly opposed to the intrinsic arguments from liberty, public justification and equality. To be sure, there can be an elite deliberative democracy wherein elites deliberate, perhaps even out of sight of the population at large, on how to run the society.

A view akin to the elite theory but less pessimistic about citizens’ political agency and competence argues that a well-functioning representative democracy can function as a kind of “defensible epistocracy” (Landa & Pevnick 2020). This view holds that, under the right conditions, elected officials can be expected to exercise political power more responsibly than citizens in a direct democracy because each official is far more likely to cast the deciding vote in legislative assemblies (the “pivotality effect”) and officials have more incentive to exercise power with due regard for the general welfare (the “accountability effect”). Moreover, under the right conditions, representative democracy allows individuals to assess the competence of candidates for office and to select candidates who are best able to help the community pursue its commitments.

One approach that is in part motivated by the problem of democratic citizenship but which attempts to preserve some elements of equality against the elitist criticism is the interest group pluralist account of politics. Robert Dahl’s early statement of the view is very powerful.

In a rough sense, the essence of all competitive politics is bribery of the electorate by politicians… The farmer… supports a candidate committed to high price supports, the businessman…supports an advocate of low corporation taxes… the consumer…votes for candidates opposed to a sales tax. (Dahl 1959: 69)

In this conception of the democratic process, each citizen is a member of an interest group with narrowly defined interests that are closely connected to their everyday lives. On these subjects citizens are supposed to be quite well informed and interested in having an influence. Or at least, elites from each of the interest groups that are relatively close in perspective to the ordinary members are the principal agents in the process. On this account, democracy is not rule by the majority but rather rule by coalitions of minorities. Policy and law in a democratic society are decided by means of bargaining among the different groups.

This approach is conceivably compatible with the more egalitarian approach to democracy. This is because it attempts to reconcile equality with collective decision making by limiting the tasks of citizens to ones which they are able to perform reasonably well. It is not particularly compatible with the deliberative public justification approach because it takes the democratic process to be concerned essentially with bargaining among the different interest groups where the preferences are not subject to further debate in the society as a whole.

A third approach inspired by the problem of participation may be called the neo-liberal approach to politics favored by public choice theorists such as James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock (1962). Against elite theories, they contend that elites and their allies will tend to expand the powers of government and bureaucracy for their own interests and that this expansion will occur at the expense of a largely inattentive public. For this reason, they argue for severe restrictions on the powers of elites. They argue against the interest group pluralist theorists that the problem of participation occurs within interest groups more or less as much as among the citizenry at large. Only powerful economic interests are likely to succeed in organizing to influence the government and they will do so largely for their own benefit. Since economic elites will advance their own interests in politics while spreading the costs to others, policies will tend to be more costly (because imposed on everyone in society) than they are beneficial (because they benefit only the elites in the interest group.)

Neo-liberals infer that one ought to transfer many of the current functions of the state to the market and limit the state to the enforcement of basic property rights and liberties. These can be more easily understood and brought under the control of ordinary citizens.

But the neo-liberal account of democracy must answer to two large worries. First, citizens in modern societies have more ambitious conceptions of social justice and the common good than are realizable by the minimal state. The neo-liberal account thus implies a very serious curtailment of democracy of its own. More evidence is needed to support the contention that these aspirations cannot be achieved by the modern state. Second, the neo-liberal approach ignores the problem of large private concentrations of wealth and power that are capable of pushing small states around for their own benefit and imposing their wills on populations without their consent.

Somin (2013) also argues that government be significantly reduced in size so that citizens have a lesser knowledge burden to carry. But he calls for government decentralization so that citizens can vote with their feet in favor of or against competing units of government, in effect creating a kind of market in governments among which citizens can choose.

4.2.4 The self-interest assumption

A considerable amount of the literature in political science and the economic theory of the state are grounded in the assumption that individuals act primarily and perhaps even exclusively in their self-interest narrowly construed. The problem of participation and the accounts of the democratic process described above are in large part dependent on this assumption. When the preferences of voters are not assumed to be self-interested the calculations of the value of participation change. For example, if a person is a motivated utilitarian, the small chance of making a difference is coupled with a huge accumulated return to many people if there is a significant difference between alternatives. It may be worth it in this case to become reasonably well informed (Parfit 1984: 74). Even more weakly altruistic moral preferences could make a big difference to the rationality of becoming informed, for example if one had a preference to comply with perceived civic duty to vote responsibly (see section 4.3.1 for discussion of the duty to vote). Any moral preference can be formulated in consistent utility functions.

Moreover, defenders of deliberative democracy often claim that concerns for the common good and justice are not merely given prior to politics but that they can evolve and improve through the process of discussion and debate in politics (Elster 1986 [2003]; Gutmann & Thompson 2004; Cohen 1989 [2009]). They assert that much debate and discussion in politics would not be intelligible were it not for the fact that citizens are willing to engage in open minded discussion with those who have distinct morally informed points of view. Empirical evidence suggests that individuals are motivated by moral considerations in politics in addition to their interests (Mansbridge 1990).

Public deliberation in any large-scale democracy will occur within a complex and differentiated “deliberative system”, a

wide variety of institutions, associations, and sites of contestation accomplish political work. (Mansbridge et. al. 2012)

Moreover, the deliberative system of a complex democracy will be characterized by a division of democratic labor , with different parts of the system making different contributions to the overall system. The question arises: what is the appropriate role for a citizen in this division of labor? Philosophically, we should ask two questions. What ought citizens have knowledge about in order to fulfill their role? What standards ought citizens’ beliefs live up to in order to be adequately supported? One promising view is that citizens must think about what ends the society ought to aim at and leave the question of how to achieve those aims to experts (Christiano 1996: ch 5). The rationale for this division of labor is that expertise is not as fundamental to the choice of aims as it is to the development of legislation and policy. Citizens are capable in their everyday lives of understanding and cultivating deep understandings of values and of their interests. And if citizens genuinely do choose the aims and others faithfully pursue the means to achieving those aims, then citizens are in the driver’s seat in society and they can play this role as equals.

To be sure, citizens need to know who to vote for and whether those they vote for are genuinely advancing their aims. This would appear to require some basic knowledge of about how best to achieve their political aims. How is this possible without extensive knowledge? In addition, there is empirical evidence that those who are better informed have more influence on representatives (Erikson 2015). So, if this task requires some kind of knowledge to do well, how can this be compatible with equality?

One promising response is that ordinary citizens do not need individually to have a lot of knowledge of social science and particular facts in order to make political decisions based on such knowledge. Recent research in cognitive science indicates the individuals use “cognitive shortcuts” to save on time in acquiring information about the world they live in (Lupia & McCubbins 1998). This use of shortcuts is common and essential throughout economic and political life. In political life, we see part of the rationale for the many intermediate institutions between government and citizens (Downs 1957: 221–229). Citizens save time by making use of institutions such as the press, unions and other interest group associations, political parties, and opinion leaders to get information about politics. They also rely on interactions in the workplace as well as conversations with friends and families. Political parties can connect ordinary citizens in various ways to expertise because each one contains a division of labor within them that mirrors that in the state. Experts in parties have incentives to make their expertise intelligible to other members (Christiano 2012). In addition, under favorable conditions, political parties stimulate the development of citizens’ normative perspectives and facilitate a healthy public competition of political justifications based on those perspectives (White & Ypi 2016).

People are dependent on social networks in other ways in a democracy. People receive “free” information (which they do not deliberately seek out) about politics and law in school, through their jobs, in discussion with friends, colleagues and family and incidentally through the media. And this can form a better or worse basis on which to pursue other information. Institutions can make a difference to the stream of free information individuals receive. Education can be distributed in a more or less egalitarian way. The circumstances of work can provide more or less free information about politics and law. People who have jobs with a significant amount of power such as lawyers, business persons, government officials will be beneficiaries of very high quality free information. They need to know about law and politics to do their jobs properly. Those who hold low skilled and non-unionized jobs will receive much less free information about politics at work. To the extent that we can alter the economic division of labor by for example giving more place to unions or having greater worker participation, we might be able to reduce inequalities of information among citizens.

It has been argued that some of the core problems of electoral representative democracy can be solved by embracing the appointment of political officials by random selection, or sortition . Athenian democracy involved direct democracy for the making of laws and sortition for the choice of officials. Sortition is arguably consistent with the definition of democracy offered in section 1 because, in virtue of the fact that citizens have an equal chance of being selected, sortition is characterized by equality at a crucial stage of the decision-making process. Alex Guerrero (2014) argues that sortition can avoid the related problems of political ignorance, lack of representative accountability, and capture of the political process by elites. The problems are solved because the appointment of public officials does not depend on the input of ordinary citizens who are likely to be ignorant about political matters, nor does it leave space for the wealthy and powerful to influence official decision-making through funding electoral campaigns. One objection is that sortition ignores citizens’ interests in being part of the process of collective self-governance and rather than merely having an equal chance to be part of this process (Lafont 2019). Another objection is that the process of sortition does not allow for choosing representatives and political parties that have put together a conception of how all the interests in society are to fit together in a just and reasonable whole.

4.3 The Moral Duties of Democratic Citizens

What are the moral duties of democratic citizens in complex democracies? In this section, we discuss three important democratic duties: (1) the duty to vote, (2) the duty to promote justice through principled disobedience of the law, and (3) duties to accommodate disagreement through compromise and consensus.

It is often thought that democratic citizens have a moral duty to vote in elections. But this is not obvious. Individual votes are a causally insignificant contribution to the democratic process. In large-scale democracies, the chance that any particular citizen’s vote will decide the outcome of an election is minuscule. What moral reason do democratic citizens have to participate in politics even though they’re almost certain not to make the difference to who gets elected? Why shouldn’t they seek to promote the good or justice in other ways?

Parfit develops an act-utilitarian answer to this question (Parfit 1984: 73–75). Act-utilitarians hold that morally right actions maximize the total expected sum of the utilities of all persons in the society. Parfit argues that voting might nonetheless maximize expected utility if one candidate is significantly superior to the other(s). If we add the benefits to each member of the society of having the superior candidate win, we get a very large difference in value. So when we multiply that value by the probability of casting the deciding vote, which is often thought to be about 1/100,000,000 in a United States presidential election, we might still get a reasonably high expected value. When we subtract the cost to the voter and others of voting, which is often quite low, from this number, we may still have a good reason to vote.

One worry with Parfit’s view is that it faces a version of what Jason Brennan calls “the particularity problem” (Brennan 2011). This is the problem of explaining why citizens ought to promote value through political participation as opposed to through non-political acts. Voting is just one way of promoting overall utility; we need to know the expected utility of the different acts they might perform instead. Even if the argument above is correct, it might be the case that many individuals maximize expected utility by not voting and doing something even more beneficial with their time.

Alex Guerrero argues that citizens have moral reasons to vote because candidates who win by a larger proportion of votes can claim a greater “normative mandate” to govern (Guerrero 2010). Still each individual vote makes only a tiny contribution to the proportion of votes a candidate receives. So, we might doubt the strength of the reason to vote that Guerrero identifies.

Some theorists argue that individuals have a moral duty to vote in order to absolve themselves of complicity in state injustices (Beerbohm 2012; Zakaras 2018). All states commit injustices—they make and enforce unjust laws, wage unjust wars, and much else. And citizens of large-scale democracies have a kind of standing responsibility, by paying taxes and obeying laws, for their state’s injustices of which they must actively absolve themselves The complicity account argues that citizens avoid shared responsibility for their state’s injustices if they oppose those injustices through voting and of public advocacy (Beerbohm 2012).

One worry is that it is unclear why voting and publicly advocating against injustice should be thought to absolve responsibility that is established by paying taxes and obeying laws. Another worry is that one’s concern to oppose injustice should derive from a more direct concern for the wrongs suffered by victims of injustice rather than a concern with keeping one’s hands clean.

One sort of account that avoids this worry grounds the moral duty to vote in the importance of doing one’s fair share of the demands of political justice consistent with public equality. The demands of creating and sustaining just institutions distribute fairly among all citizens (Maskivker 2019). If one fails to do one’s fair share of these demands, then one fails to show due regard for the eventual victims of injustice. Furthermore, voting provides citizens with a mechanism for doing their fair shares of the demands of making their institutions just in a way that is consistent with respecting the public equality of fellow citizens. By showing up and casting a vote, citizens can contribute to the collective achievement of justice while maintaining equal decision-making power with fellow citizens.

Civil disobedience has long been recognized as a central mechanism through which democratic citizens may legitimately promote political justice in their society. According to the standard view, civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law that aims to change laws or government policies. People who engage in civil disobedience are willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions in order to show fidelity to the law (Bedau 1961; Rawls 1971: ch. 55). The standard definition of civil disobedience has been subjected to challenge. For example, some argue that the private acts in which the disobedient seeks to evade legal consequences can count as instances of civil disobedience (Raz 1979; Brownlee 2004, 2007, 2012).

Perhaps the most common way of justifying civil disobedience argues that the same considerations that ground the pro tanto duty to obey the law sometimes make it appropriate to engage in civil disobedience of the law (see, e.g., Rawls 1971: ch. 57; Sabl 2001; Markovits 2005; Smith 2011). For example, Rawls argues that while citizens of a “nearly just” society have a pro tanto duty to obey its laws in virtue of it being nearly just, civil disobedience can be justified as a way of making the relevant society more just (Rawls 1971: ch. 57). Similarly, Daniel Markovits argues that members of a society with suitably egalitarian and inclusive democratic procedures have a general duty to obey its laws because they are produced by procedures that are suitably egalitarian and inclusive, but that civil disobedience can be justified as a way of making the relevant procedures more egalitarian or inclusive (Markovits 2005).

It is easy to see why this constitutes an attractive way of justifying civil disobedience, since it justifies it by appeal to the same values that ground the pro tanto duty to obey the law. On the other hand, as Simmons notes, if there is no general duty to obey the law, there would seem to be no presumption in favor of obedience and thus no special need for a justification of civil disobedience; obedience and disobedience would stand equally in need of justification (Simmons 2007: ch 4).

Advocates of the standard approach generally assume that only civil disobedience can be justified in this way. However, some argue civil disobedience does not enjoy a special normative presumption over uncivil disobedience. The core idea that insofar as the values that ground a pro tanto duty to obey the law—for example, justice or democratic equality—are sometimes best served by civil disobedience of the law, they are sometimes best served by covert, evasive, anonymous, or even violent disobedience of the law (Delmas 2018; Lai 2019; Pasternak 2018).

Disagreement about what laws, policies, or principles ought to be implemented is a persistent feature of democratic societies. It is often argued that citizens and officials have duties to moderate their political activity in order to accommodate the competing views of fellow citizens or officials. Two duties of accommodation are widely discussed in the literature: duties of compromise and duties of public justification.

A compromise can be understood as an agreement between parties to advance laws or policies that all regard as suboptimal because they disagree about which laws or policies are optimal (May 2005). While it is widely accepted that there are sometimes compelling instrumental reasons to compromise, whether there are intrinsic moral reasons to compromise is more controversial. Some defend intrinsic reasons to compromise based on democratic values like inclusion, mutual respect, and reciprocity (Gutmann and Thompson 2014; Wendt 2016; Weinstock 2013). However, Simon May argues that such arguments fail and that all reasons to compromise are pragmatic (May 2005).

Advocates of the public justification approach to democracy (see section 2.2.2 ) often argue that democratic citizens and officials have individual moral duties of public justification. John Rawls argues for a “duty of civility” that requires citizens and officials to be prepared to give mutually acceptable justifications for important laws when voting and engaged in public advocacy. Given the inevitability of disagreement about comprehensive moral and philosophical truth in free democracies, the duty of civility requires citizens to appeal to a reasonable “political” conception of justice that can be the object of an “overlapping consensus” between different comprehensive doctrines. While different theorists motivate duties of public justification in different ways, many appeal to the need for exercises of coercive political authority to respect citizens’ freedom and equality.

5. Democratic Representation

Representation is an essential part of the division of labor of large-scale democracies. In this section, we examine two moral questions concerning representation. First, what sort of representative system is best? Second, by what moral principles are representatives bound?

A number of debates have centered on the question of what kinds of representative systems are best for a democratic society. What choice we make here will depend heavily on our underlying moral justification of democracy, our conception of citizenship as well as on our empirical understanding of political institutions and how they function. The most basic types of formal political representation available are single member district representation, proportional representation and group representation. In addition, many societies have opted for multicameral legislative institutions. In some cases, combinations of the above forms have been tried.

Single member district representation returns single representatives of geographically defined areas containing roughly equal populations to the legislature and is prominent in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India, among other places. The most common form of proportional representation is party list proportional representation. In a simple form of such a scheme, a number of parties compete for election to a legislature that is not divided into geographical districts. Parties acquire seats in the legislature as a proportion of the total number of votes they receive in the voting population as a whole. Group representation occurs when the society is divided into non-geographically defined groups such as ethnic or linguistic groups or even functional groups such as workers, farmers and capitalists and returns representatives to a legislature from each of them.

Many have argued in favor of single member district legislation on the grounds that it has appeared to them to lead to more stable government than other forms of representation. The thought is that proportional representation tends to fragment the citizenry into opposing homogeneous camps that rigidly adhere to their party lines and that are continually vying for control over the government. Since there are many parties and they are unwilling to compromise with each other, governments formed from coalitions of parties tend to fall apart rather quickly. The post war experience of governments in Italy appears to confirm this hypothesis. Single member district representation, in contrast, is said to enhance the stability of governments by virtue of its favoring a two party system of government. Each election cycle then determines which party is to stay in power for some length of time.

Charles Beitz argues that single member district representation encourages moderation in party programs offered for citizens to consider (Beitz 1989: ch. 7). This results from the tendency of this kind of representation towards two party systems. In a two party system with majority rule, it is argued, each party must appeal to the median voter in the political spectrum. Hence, they must moderate their programs to appeal to the median voter. Furthermore, they encourage compromise among groups since they must try to appeal to a lot of other groups in order to become part of one of the two leading parties. These tendencies encourage moderation and compromise in citizens to the extent that political parties, and interest groups, hold these qualities up as necessary to functioning well in a democracy.

In criticism, advocates of proportional and group representation have argued that single member district representation tends to muffle the voices and ignore the interests of minority groups in the society (Mill 1861; Christiano 1996). Minority interests and views tend to be articulated in background negotiations and in ways that muffle their distinctiveness. Furthermore, representatives of minority interests and views often have a difficult time getting elected at all in single member district systems so it has been charged that minority views and interests are often systematically underrepresented. Sometimes these problems are dealt with by redrawing the boundaries of districts in a way that ensures greater minority representation. The efforts are invariably quite controversial since there is considerable disagreement about the criteria for apportionment.

In proportional representation, by contrast, representatives of different groups are seated in the legislature in proportion to citizens’ choices. Minorities need not make their demands conform to the basic dichotomy of views and interests that characterize single member district systems so their views are more articulated and distinctive as well as better represented.

Advocates of group representation, like Iris Marion Young, have argued that some historically disenfranchised groups may still not do very well under proportional representation (Young 1990: ch. 6). They may not be able to organize and articulate their views as easily as other groups. Also, minority groups can still be systematically defeated in the legislature and their interests may be consistently set back even if they do have some representation. For these groups, some have argued that the only way to protect their interests is legally to ensure that they have adequate and even disproportionate representation.

One worry about group representation is that it tends to freeze some aspects of the agenda that might be better left to the choice of citizens. For instance, consider a population that is divided into linguistic groups for a long time. And suppose that only some citizens continue to think of linguistic conflict as important. In the circumstances a group representation scheme may tend to be biased in an arbitrary way that favors the views or interests of those who do think of linguistic conflict as important.

What moral norms apply to representatives carrying out their official duties? We can get a better handle on possible answers by introducing Hannah Pitkin’s famous distinction between trustees and delegates (Pitkin 1967). Representatives who act as trustees rely on their own independent judgments in carrying out their duties. Norms of trusteeship are supported in recognition that, given a natural division of democratic labor, officials are in a much better position to make well-reasoned and well-informed political decisions than ordinary citizens.

Representatives who act as delegates defer to the judgments of their citizens. These norms might be thought to reflect the value of democratic accountability. Because the people authorize representatives to govern, it is natural to think that representatives are accountable to the people to enact their judgments. If representatives are not accountable in this way, citizens lose democratic control over their representatives’ actions.

Which norms should win out when they conflict? Pitkin argues that the answer varies by context. This seems plausible. For example, if we take the view that citizens primarily have the role of determining the aims of the society, we might think that representatives ought to be delegates with regard to the aims, but trustees with regard to the ways of realizing the aims (Christiano 1996). See Suzanne Dovi’s discussion of representation for a deeper and more nuanced discussion of these issues.

Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem is thought by some to provide a major set of difficulties for democratic theory (Arrow 1951). William Riker, Russell Hardin, and others have thought that the impossibility theorem shows that there are deep problems with democratic ideals (Riker 1982; Hardin 1999). Neither of these thinkers are opposed to democracy itself, they both think that there are good instrumental reasons for having democracy.

The basic results of social choice theory are laid out in detail elsewhere in the encyclopedia (List 2013). Here we will simply articulate the basic result and an illustration. The question of Arrowian social choice theory is: how do we determine a social preference for a society overall on the basis of the set of the individual preferences of the members? Arrow shows that a social choice function that satisfies a number of plausible constraints cannot be defined when there are three or more alternatives to be chosen by the group. He lays out a number of conditions to be imposed on a social choice function. Unlimited domain : The social choice function must be able to give us a social preference no matter what the preferences of the individuals over alternatives are. Non dictatorship : the social choice function must not select the preference of one particular member regardless of others’ preferences. Transitivity and completeness : The individual preferences orderings must be transitive and complete orderings and the social preference derived from them must be transitive and complete. Independence of irrelevant alternatives : the social preference between two alternatives must be the result only of the individual orderings between those two alternatives. Pareto condition : if all the members prefer an alternative x over y , then x must be ranked above y in the social preference. The theorem says that no social choice function over more than two alternatives can satisfy all of these conditions.

A useful illustration of this idea involves an extension of majority rule to cases of more than two alternatives. The Condorcet rule says that an alternative x wins when, for every other alternative, a majority prefers x over that alternative. For example, suppose we have three persons A , B and C and three alternatives x , y and z . A prefers x over y , y over z ; B prefers y over z and z over x ; C prefers x over z and z over y . In this case, x is the Condorcet winner since it beats y , and it beats z . The problem with this plausible sounding rule is the case of a majority cycle. Suppose you have three persons A , B and C , and three alternatives, x , y and z . In the case in which A prefers x over y and y over z , while B prefers y over z and z over x , and C prefers z over x and x over y , the Condorcet rule will yield a social preference of x over y , y over z and z over x . One can see here that the Condorcet rule satisfies all the conditions except transitivity of social preference. One way to avoid intransitivity is to restrict the domain of preferences from which the social preference arises. Another is to introduce cardinal information that compares the how much people prefer alternatives (violating independence). Another might be to make one person a dictator. So, this case nicely illustrates that one cannot satisfy all of the constraints simultaneously.

Riker argues that the theorem shows that the idea that the popular will can be the governing element in a society is false. If an existence condition for a popular will is a restricted set of preferences the question naturally arises as to whether such a condition is always or normally met in a moderately complex society. We might wonder whether a highly pluralistic society with a very complex division of labor is likely to satisfy the restricted preference set condition necessary to avoid cycles or other pathologies of social choice. Some have argued that we have empirical evidence to the effect that modern societies do normally satisfy such conditions (Mackie 2003). Others have argued that this seems unlikely (Riker 1982; Ingham 2019). This is not merely a defense of unlimited domain. It is a defense of the thesis that normally the collections of preferences in modern societies are not likely to have the properties that enable them to avoid cycles.

The fairness critique from social choice theory is based on the idea that when a voting process meets requirements of fairness, the fairness of the process and the preferences may not generate determinate outcomes. If cycles are pervasive, the outcomes of democratic processes may be determined by clever strategies and not by the fairness of the procedures (Riker 1982). Three remarks are in order here. First, it is compatible with the process being completely fair that the outcomes of the process are indeterminate. After all, coin flips are fair. Second, there is some question as to how prominent the cycles are. Third, one might think that if the conditions which enable opposing sides to strategize effectively are themselves roughly equal, then the concerns for fairness are fully met. If resources for persuasion and organization are distributed in an egalitarian way, perhaps the fairness account is vindicated after all. This point can be made more compelling when we consider Sean Ingham’s account of political equality. He includes intensity of preference in his account of fairness. This is a departure from the Arrowian approach, but it is in many ways a realistic one. The idea is that majorities have equal control over policy areas when they are able to get what they want with the same amount of intensity of preferences. And equality holds generally when all groups of the same size have the same control (Ingham 2019). There remains an extreme case in which all majorities have equal intensity of preference and are caught in a majority cycle. But the chances of this happening are very slim, even if the chances of majority cycles more generally are not as small. Even if there are a lot of majority cycles, if the issues are resolved in such a way that those majorities that have most at stake in the conflict are the ones that get their way, then we can have fairness in a quite robust sense even while having pervasive majority cycles.

If democratic societies allow members to participate as equals in collective decision making, a natural question arises: who has the right to participate in making collective decisions? We can ask this question within a particular jurisdiction (ought all adults have the right to participation? Ought children have the right to participation? Ought all residents have such rights?). But we can also ask what the extent of the jurisdiction ought to be. How many of the people in the world ought to be included in the collective decision-making? An easy, though slightly misleading, way of asking this question is, what ought the physical boundaries of a particular institution of collective decision-making be? We see partially democratic societies within the confines of the modern nation-state. But we might ask, why should we restrict the set of persons who participate in making decisions of the modern state just to those who happen to be the physical inhabitants of those states? Surely there are many other persons affected by decisions made by democratic states aside from those persons. For example, activities in one society A can pollute another society B . Why shouldn’t the members of B have a say in the decisions regarding the polluting activities in A ? And there can be many other effects that activities in A can have on B .

Some have suggested that the boundaries of a state ought to be determined through a principle of national self-determination. We identify a nation as an ongoing group of persons who share certain cultural, historical and political norms and who identify with each other and with a piece of land. Then we determine the boundaries of the territory by appeal to the size of the group of people and the land they cherish (Miller 1995; Song 2012). This is an appealing idea in many ways: shared nationality breeds a willingness to share the sacrifices that arise from collective decision making; it generates a sense of at-homeness for people. But it is hard to use as a general principle for dividing land among persons when one of the central facts for many societies is that a diversity of nations, ethnic groups and cultures co-mingle on the very same land.

Is there a democratic solution to the boundary problem? A number of ideas have been suggested. The first idea is that the people ought to decide what the boundaries are. But this suggestion, while it may be a pragmatic resolution to the problem, seems to beg the question about who the members are and who are not (Whelan 1983).

A second theoretical solution that has some democratic credentials is to invoke the principle that all who are subjected to decision making, in the sense of who are coerced or have duties imposed upon them, ought to have a say in the decision making (Abizadeh 2008). This principle is plausible enough, but it doesn’t get at enough cases. The pollution case above is not a case of subjection.

A third proposed theoretical solution is the all-affected principle. One formulation is “all affected persons ought to have a say in the decisions that affect them”. This does suggest that when the activities in one state affect those of another state, the people of the other state ought to have a say in those activities. Some have thought that this principle tends to lead to a kind of politically cosmopolitan principle in support of world government (Goodin 2007).

But the all-affected principle is conceptually quite uncertain and morally deeply problematic, and it provides very little, if anything, in the way of a solution to the boundary problem.

First, “having a say” is not clear. Does it require having a vote in collective decision-making? Or is it also satisfied by a person’s being able to modify another’s action by negotiating with them, as we see when there is bargaining over an externality? This latter version would undermine the idea that the all-affected principle has direct implications for the boundary problem. When the United States permits activities that produce acid rain in Canada, Canada can negotiate with the United States to lessen the production of acid rain and/or to compensate Canada for the harm. As long as there is a fair and effective system of negotiation, this would seem to satisfy the all-affected principle without giving Canadians a vote in American politics or Americans a vote in Canadian politics.

Second, it is not clear what “being affected” means. One, does a person being affected just mean that there is a change in the person’s situation or must the effect involve the setting back of one’s preferences, or interests, or legitimate interests, or exercise of one’s capacities or one’s good? Two, are one’s interests affected by a decision only when they are advanced or set back relative to some baseline (either the present state of affairs or some morally defined baseline like what you have promised me), or am I affected by decisions that could be to my advantage or disadvantage but end up making no difference? For example, if I am drowning in a pool and you are deciding whether to save me or go buy yourself a candy bar, am I affected by your buying the candy bar? If I am not affected when no change occurs, then who is affected by a decision often depends on who participates in the decision and we have no solution to the problem of inclusion. If I am affected, then the principle has some quite extraordinary implications. Now it turns out that impoverished persons in South Asia are affected by my buying a candy bar, since I could have sent the money to them (Goodin 2007).

The all-affected principle is a merely suggestive and rhetorically effective phrase. It is a conversation starter and a list of topics to be discussed, not a genuine principle. For example, if I must include everyone possibly affected by my decision for every decision I make, I will not be able to make many decisions and my decision making will no longer enable me to give a shape to my own life and my relations with others. My life becomes fragmented and lacks integrity (Williams 1973). An analog of this problem would arise for political societies, presumably. Each society would have to include a variety of different persons in each decision. It is hard to see how any society could take on any particular character if this is the case.

A more plausible principle that encompasses some of the suggestions of the all-affected principle is that a framework of institutions should be set up so that people have power to advance and protect their legitimate interests in life.

But if we understand the principle in this way, it is not clear that it helps us much with the boundary problem. First of all, there are different ways in which people can be said to possess power over their lives. One kind of power is the power to participate as an equal in a collective decision-making process. Another kind is to be able to advance one’s interests in a decentralized process like a market or a system of agreement making like international law. Recalling our pollution problem above, we could give the state of which they are members power to negotiate with the polluting state terms that are mutually agreeable. Only the power to participate as an equal in collective decision-making involves the boundaries of collective decision-making.

Another solution to the boundary problem is a conservative one. The basic idea is to keep the boundaries of states roughly as they are except if there is a pressing need to change them. Trying to alter the boundaries of political societies is a recipe for serious conflict because there is no institution that has the legitimacy or power actually to resolve problems at an international level and there is likely to be a lot of disagreement on how to do it. States as we know them, are by far the most powerful political entities in the international system. They have developed more effective practices of accountability of power than any other entity in the system. They have created unified societies with highly interdependent populations. Finally, states and the individuals in them can be made accountable to some degree to other individuals and states through the process of negotiation and international law making. The origin of these boundaries may be arbitrary, but it is not, for all that, irrelevant. To be sure, there are clear cases where borders can be changed. One source of pressing need is serious injustice within a country. Another might be the existence of permanent minorities that are sectionally defined. Here, we ask only how to revise boundaries and the basis of such revision is that it is a remedy for serious injustice (Buchanan 1991).

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Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Forms of Government — Democracy

Essays on Democracy

Democracy essay topics and outline examples, essay title 1: the evolution of democracy: historical origins, principles, and contemporary challenges.

Thesis Statement: This essay explores the historical roots of democracy, its foundational principles, and the contemporary challenges it faces in the context of modern societies.

• Introduction
• Origins of Democracy: Ancient Greece and Beyond
• Democratic Principles: Rule of Law, Freedom, and Participation
• Democracy in Practice: Case Studies of Democratic Nations
• Challenges to Democracy: Populism, Authoritarianism, and Erosion of Institutions
• Electoral Systems: Voting Methods and Representation
• Media and Democracy: The Role of Information and Misinformation
• Conclusion: Safeguarding Democracy in the 21st Century

Essay Title 2: The Democratic Experiment: Comparative Analysis of Democratic Systems Worldwide

Thesis Statement: This essay conducts a comparative analysis of democratic systems in different countries, highlighting variations in practices, governance structures, and outcomes.

• Democratic Models: Presidential vs. Parliamentary Systems
• Democratic Variations: Federalism and Unitarism
• Elections and Representation: Proportional vs. First-Past-the-Post Systems
• Citizen Participation: Direct Democracy and Referendums
• Case Studies: Analyzing Democracies in Europe, Asia, and the Americas
• Democratic Challenges: Corruption, Voter Suppression, and Civic Engagement
• Conclusion: Lessons Learned from Global Democratic Experiences

Essay Title 3: The Digital Age and Democracy: Technology, Social Media, and the Shaping of Political Discourse

Thesis Statement: This essay examines the influence of technology and social media on democratic processes, including their impact on political communication, public opinion, and election outcomes.

• The Digital Revolution: Internet Access and Political Engagement
• Social Media Platforms: Their Role in Disseminating Information and Disinformation
• Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers: The Polarization of Political Discourse
• Online Activism: Grassroots Movements and Their Impact
• Regulation and Ethics: Balancing Free Speech and Accountability Online
• Case Studies: Examining Elections and Political Campaigns in the Digital Age
• Conclusion: Navigating the Intersection of Technology and Democracy

The Concepts and Fundamental Principles of Democracy

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By the People: Essays on Democracy

Harvard Kennedy School faculty explore aspects of democracy in their own words—from increasing civic participation and decreasing extreme partisanship to strengthening democratic institutions and making them more fair.

Winter 2020

By Archon Fung , Nancy Gibbs , Tarek Masoud , Julia Minson , Cornell William Brooks , Jane Mansbridge , Arthur Brooks , Pippa Norris , Benjamin Schneer

The basic terms of democratic governance are shifting before our eyes, and we don’t know what the future holds. Some fear the rise of hateful populism and the collapse of democratic norms and practices. Others see opportunities for marginalized people and groups to exercise greater voice and influence. At the Kennedy School, we are striving to produce ideas and insights to meet these great uncertainties and to help make democratic governance successful in the future. In the pages that follow, you can read about the varied ways our faculty members think about facets of democracy and democratic institutions and making democracy better in practice.

Explore essays on democracy

Archon fung: we voted, nancy gibbs: truth and trust, tarek masoud: a fragile state, julia minson: just listen, cornell william brooks: democracy behind bars, jane mansbridge: a teachable skill, arthur brooks: healthy competition, pippa norris: kicking the sandcastle, benjamin schneer: drawing a line.

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What Is Democracy? Definition and Examples

• B.S., Texas A&M University

A democracy is a form of government that empowers the people to exercise political control, limits the power of the head of state, provides for the separation of powers between governmental entities, and ensures the protection of natural rights and civil liberties . In practice, democracy takes many different forms. Along with the two most common types of democracies—direct and representative—variants such as participatory, liberal, parliamentary, pluralist, constitutional, and socialist democracies are in use today.

Key Takeaways: Democracy

• Democracy, literally meaning “rule by the people,” empowers individuals to exercise political control over the form and functions of their government.
• While democracies come in several forms, they all feature competitive elections, freedom of expression , and protection of individual civil liberties and human rights.
• In most democracies, elected lawmakers charged with writing and voting on laws and setting policy represent the needs and wishes of the people.
• When creating laws and policies, the elected representatives in a democracy strive to balance conflicting demands and obligations to maximize freedom and protect individual rights.

Despite the prominence in the headlines of non-democratic, authoritarian states like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, democracy remains the world’s most commonly practiced form of government. In 2018, for example, a total of 96 out of 167 countries (57%) with populations of at least 500,000 were democracies of some type. Statistics show that the percentage of democracies among the world’s governments has been increasing since the mid-1970s, currently standing just short of its post- World War II high of 58% in 2016.

Democracy Definition

Meaning “rule by the people,” democracy is a system of government that not only allows but requires the participation of the people in the political process to function properly. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln , in his famed 1863 Gettysburg Address may have best defined democracy as a “…government of the people, by the people, for the people…”

Semantically, the term democracy comes from the Greek words for “people” (dēmos) and “rule” (karatos). However, achieving and preserving a government by the people—a “popular” government—is far more complicated than the concept’s semantic simplicity might imply. In creating the legal framework under which the democracy will function, typically a constitution, several crucial political and practical questions must be answered.

Is “rule by the people” even appropriate for the given state? Do the inherent freedoms of a democracy justify dealing with its complex bureaucracy and electoral processes, or would the streamlined predictability of a monarchy , for example, be preferable?

Assuming a preference for democracy, which residents of the country, state, or town should enjoy the political status of full citizenship? Simply stated, who are the “people” in the “government by the people” equation? In the United States, for example, the constitutionally established doctrine of birthright citizenship provides that any person born on U.S. soil automatically becomes a U.S. citizen. Other democracies are more restrictive in bestowing full citizenship.

Which people within the democracy should be empowered to participate in it? Assuming that only adults are allowed to fully participate in the political process, should all adults be included? For example, until the enactment of the 19th Amendment in 1920, women in the United States were not allowed to vote in national elections. A democracy that excludes too many of the governed from taking part in what is supposed to be their government runs the risk of becoming an aristocracy—government by a small, privileged ruling class—or an oligarchy —government by an elite, typically wealthy, few.

If, as one of the foundational principles of democracy holds, the majority rules, what will a “proper” majority be? A majority of all citizens or a majority of citizens who vote only? When issues, as they inevitably will, divide the people, should the wishes of the majority always prevail, or should, as in the case of the American Civil Rights Movement , minorities be empowered to overcome majority rule? Most importantly, what legal or legislative mechanisms should be created to prevent the democracy from becoming a victim of what one of America’s Founding Fathers , James Madison , called “the tyranny of the majority?”

Finally, how likely is it that a majority of the people will continue to believe that democracy is the best form of government for them? For a democracy to survive it must retain the substantial support of both the people and the leaders they choose. History has shown that democracy is a particularly fragile institution. In fact, of the 120 new democracies that have emerged around the world since 1960, nearly half have resulted in failed states or have been replaced by other, typically more authoritarian forms of government. It is therefore essential that democracies be designed to respond quickly and appropriately to the internal and external factors that will inevitably threaten them.

Democratic Principles

While their opinions vary, most political scientists agree that the majority of democracies are based on six foundational elements:

• Popular sovereignty: The principle that the government is created and maintained by the consent of the people through their elected representatives.
• An Electoral System: Since according to the principle of popular sovereignty, the people are the source of all political power, a clearly defined system of conducting free and fair elections is essential.
• Public Participation: Democracies rarely survive without the active participation of the people. Healthy democracies enable and encourage people to take part in their political and civic processes. 
• Separation of Powers: Based on a suspicion of power concentrated in a single individual—like a king—or group, the constitutions of most democracies provide that political powers be separated and shared among the various governmental entities.
• Human Rights: Along with their constitutionally enumerated rights and freedoms, democracies protect the human rights of all citizens. In this context, human rights are those rights considered inherent to all human beings, regardless of nationality, sex, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, language, or any other considerations.
• A Rule of Law: Also called due process of law , the rule of law is the principle that all citizens are accountable to laws that are publicly created and equitably enforced in a manner consistent with human rights by an independent judicial system.

Types of Democracy

Throughout history, more types of democracy have been identified than there are countries in the world. According to social and political philosopher Jean-Paul Gagnon, more than 2,234 adjectives have been used to describe democracy. While many scholars refer to direct and representative as the most common of these, several other types of democracies can be found around the world today. While direct democracy is unique, most other recognized types of democracy are variants of representative democracy. These various types of democracy are generally descriptive of the particular values emphasized by the representative democracies that employ them.

Originating in Ancient Greece during the 5th century BC, direct democracy , sometimes called “pure democracy,” is considered the oldest non-authoritarian form of government. In a direct democracy, all laws and public policy decisions are made directly by a majority vote of the people, rather than by the votes of their elected representatives.

Functionally possible only in small states, Switzerland is the only example of a direct democracy applied on a national level today. While Switzerland is no longer a true direct democracy, any law passed by the popularly elected national parliament can be vetoed by a direct vote of the public. Citizens can also change the constitution through direct votes on amendments. In the United States, examples of direct democracy can be found in state-level recall elections and lawmaking ballot initiatives .

Representative

Also called indirect democracy, representative democracy is a system of government in which all eligible citizens elect officials to pass laws and formulate public policy on their behalf. These elected officials are expected to represent the needs and viewpoints of the people in deciding the best course of action for the nation, state, or other jurisdiction as a whole.

As the most commonly found type of democracy in use today, almost 60% of all countries employ some form of representative democracy including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.

Participatory

In a participatory democracy, the people vote directly on policy while their elected representatives are responsible for implementing those policies. Participatory democracies rely on the citizens to set the direction of the state and the operation of its political systems. While representative and participatory democracies share similar ideals, participatory democracies tend to encourage a higher, more direct form of citizen participation than traditional representative democracies.

While there are no countries specifically classified as participatory democracies, most representative democracies employ citizen participation as a tool for social and political reform. In the United States, for example, so-called “grassroots” citizen participation causes such as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s have led elected officials to enact laws implementing sweeping social, legal, and political policy changes.

Liberal democracy is loosely defined as a form of representative democracy that emphasizes the principles of classical liberalism —an ideology advocating the protection of individual civil liberties and economic freedom by limiting the power of the government. Liberal democracies employ a constitution, either statutorily codified, as in the United States, or uncodified, as in the United Kingdom, to define the powers of the government, provide for a separation of those powers, and enshrine the social contract .

Liberal democracies may take the form of a constitutional republic , like the United States, or a constitutional monarchy , such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.

Parliamentary

In a parliamentary democracy, the people directly elect representatives to a legislative parliament . Similar to the U.S. Congress , the parliament directly represents the people in making necessary laws and policy decisions for the country.

In parliamentary democracies, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan, the head of government is a prime minister, who is first elected to parliament by the people, and then elected prime minister by a vote of the parliament. However, the prime minister remains a member of the parliament and thus plays an active role in the legislative process of creating and passing laws. Parliamentary democracies are typically a feature of a constitutional monarch, a system of government in which the head of state is a queen or king whose power is limited by a constitution.

In a pluralist democracy, no single group dominates politics. Instead, organized groups within the people compete to influence public policy. In political science, the term pluralism expresses the ideology that influence should be spread among different interest groups, rather than held by a single elite group as in an aristocracy. Compared to participatory democracies, in which individuals take part in influencing political decisions, in a pluralist democracy, individuals work through groups formed around common causes hoping to win the support of elected leaders.

In this context, the pluralist democracy assumes that the government and the society as a whole benefit from a diversity of viewpoints. Examples of pluralist democracy can be seen in the impact special interest groups, such as the National Organization for Women , have had on American politics.

Constitutional

While the exact definition continues to be debated by political scientists, constitutional democracy is generally defined as a system of government based on popular sovereignty and a rule of law in which the structures, powers, and limits of government are established by a constitution. Constitutions are intended to restrict the power of the government, typically by separating those powers between the various branches of government, as in the United States constitution’s system of federalism . In a constitutional democracy, the constitution is considered to be the “ supreme law of the land .”

Democratic socialism is broadly defined as a system of government based on a socialist economy , in which most property and means of production are collectively, rather than individually, controlled by a constitutionally established political hierarchy—the government. Social democracy embraces government regulation of business and industry as a means of furthering economic growth while preventing income inequality .

While there are no purely socialist governments in the world today, elements of democratic socialism can be seen in Sweden’s provision of free universal health care, education, and sweeping social welfare programs. 

Is America a Democracy

While the word “democracy” does not appear in the United States Constitution, the document provides the basic elements of representative democracy: an electoral system based on majority rule, separation of powers, and dependence on a rule of law. Also, America’s Founding Fathers used the word often when debating the form and function of the Constitution.  

However, a long-running debate over whether the United States is a democracy or a republic continues today. According to a growing number of political scientists and constitutional scholars, it is both—a “democratic republic.”

Similar to democracy, a republic is a form of government in which the country is governed by the elected representatives of the people. However, since the people do not govern the state themselves, but do so through their representatives, a republic is distinguished from direct democracy.

Professor Eugene Volokh of the UCLA School of Law argues that the governments of democratic republics embrace the principles shared by both republics and democracies. To illustrate his point, Volokh notes that in the United States, many decisions on local and state levels are made by the people through the process of direct democracy, while as in a republic, most decisions at the national level are made by democratically elected representatives.

Brief History

Archeological evidence suggests that disorganized practices at least resembling democracy existed in some parts of the world during prehistoric times, However, the concept of democracy as a form of populist civic engagement emerged during the 5th century BCE in the form of the political system used in some of the city-states of Ancient Greece, most notably Athens . At that time, and for the next several centuries, tribes or city-states remained small enough that if democracy was practiced at all, it took the form of direct democracy. As city-states grew into larger, more heavily populated sovereign nation-states or countries, direct democracy became unwieldy and slowly gave way to representative democracy. This massive change necessitated an entirely new set of political institutions such as legislatures, parliaments, and political parties all designed according to the size and cultural character of the city or country to be governed.

Until the 17th century, most legislatures consisted only of the entire body of citizens, as in Greece, or representatives selected from among a tiny oligarchy or an elite hereditary aristocracy. This began to change during the English Civil Wars from 1642 to 1651 when members of the radical Puritan reformation movement demanded expanded representation in Parliament and the universal right to vote for all male citizens. By the middle 1700s, as the power of the British Parliament grew, the first political parties—the Whigs and Tories—emerged. It soon became obvious that laws could not be passed or taxes levied without the support of the Whig or Tory party representatives in Parliament.

While the developments in the British Parliament showed the feasibility of a representative form of government, the first truly representative democracies emerged during the 1780s in the British colonies of North America and took its modern form with the formal adoption of the Constitution of the United States of America on March 4, 1789.

Sources and Further Reference

• Desilver, Drew. “Despite global concerns about democracy, more than half of countries are democratic.” Pew Research Center , May 14, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/14/more-than-half-of-countries-are-democratic/.
• Kapstein, Ethan B., and Converse, Nathan. “The Fate of Young Democracies.” Cambridge University Press, 2008, ISBN 9780511817809.
• Diamond, Larry. “Democracy in Decline?” Johns Hopkins University Press, October 1, 2015, ISBN-10 1421418185.
• Gagnon, Jean-Paul. “2,234 Descriptions of Democracy: An Update to Democracy's Ontological Pluralism.” Democratic Theory, vol. 5, no. 1, 2018.
• Volokh, Eugene. “Is the United States of America a republic or a democracy?” The Washington Post , May 13, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/13/is-the-united-states-of-america-a-republic-or-a-democracy/. 
• Direct Democracy: Definition, Examples, Pros and Cons
• Republic vs. Democracy: What Is the Difference?
• Representative Democracy: Definition, Pros, and Cons
• What Is Totalitarianism? Definition and Examples
• What Is Civic Engagement? Definition and Examples
• Whistleblower: Definition and Examples
• Definition and Examples of Fraud
• What Is Nationalism? Definition and Examples
• The Differences Between Socialism and Communism
• What Is Political Socialization? Definition and Examples
• Reasons to Keep the Electoral College
• What Is Bureaucracy, and Is It Good or Bad?
• What Is an Ombudsman?
• About PACs - Political Action Committees
• How to Pick the Right Gift for Your Mail Carrier
• The Implied Powers of Congress

Characteristics of American Democracy Essay

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Introduction

How american democracy differs from the democratic government theory.

Individualism, political egalitarianism, popular agreement, and democratic government in the protection of minority interests are known characteristics of American democracy. The person is valued more highly than the state in American democracy. Political equality is merely another way of emphasizing how significant each person is. When the people give their agreement, the government is given power. In American democracy, passing laws is decided by a majority vote. Laws are enacted based on policies that have the support of the majority (Ouyang & Waterman, 2020). This implies that individuals have the authority to choose what is in their best interests. Personal liberty is the defining feature of American democracy. The government’s responsibility is to ensure that people have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Every American citizen ought to have equal rights as a result of the growth of American democracy, which is built on American citizens and equal rights. Additionally, people have innate rights to life and liberty, liberty, and property. According to his theory, the role of the government is to defend these rights. If it failed, it would become invalid and no longer require compliance (Lieberman et al., 2019). Five key tenets of democracy are related to people’s freedoms and rights as citizens of the United States. The right to freedom is guaranteed to every citizen of the United States, because without freedom, America would not be the country it is today.

The right to equal protection is the third tenet of American democracy, and it states that no one should receive uneven protection as a result of the freedoms and privileges that were granted to Americans. Majority rule and minority rights mean that while the majority should be in charge, it must also ensure that minorities enjoy equal rights. Principally, there is an American democracy that protects American citizens and their liberties. Without one, there would be turmoil, confusion, and unfair treatment (Lieberman et al., 2019). The ultimate agreement to abide by all rules and laws established for American citizens by their officials, and if there isn’t an agreement, there are consequences for those who defy American laws, is the final and most distinguishing feature of American democracy. In the end, American democracy was developed for its people, and all people should have an equal degree of freedom since this promotes equality, stability, and harmony for all parties.

Because of the decisions’ broad scope and method of implementation, American democracy deviates from the notion of democratic government. The concept of the democratic system is based on majority rule, which means that people vote for others simply because they believe that a single politician will be the best for the government at that time (Ouyang & Waterman, 2020). Conversely, American democracy allows everyone and anybody to have the same opportunities regardless of the situation it is about, based on equal rights in the United States.

The American people typically vote for the candidate they believe would be the best, which is completely at odds with American democracy since American democracy is based on possibilities, liberty, and rights, which are not accorded universally to every American citizen (Ouyang & Waterman, 2020). The American government can be viewed as a democracy essentially because of the regulation that our government has over various politics, disputes, or concerns that may be occurring.

Lieberman, R. C., Mettler, S., Pepinsky, T. B., Roberts, K. M., & Valelly, R. (2019). The Trump presidency and American democracy: A historical and comparative analysis . Perspectives on Politics , 17 (2), 470-479. Web.

Ouyang, Y., & Waterman, R. W. (2020). Trump, Twitter, and the American Democracy. In Trump, Twitter, and the American Democracy (pp. 131-161). Palgrave Macmillan. Web.

• Multiculturalism: Welcome to My Country!
• Aspects of Democratic Regimes
• Is a Secret Ballot a Basic Tenet of Democracy?
• Egalitarianism in Australia: The Main Aspects
• Social Inequality and Uneven Educational Distribution
• McCarthyism and Anti-Communist Campaigns
• Dimensions of Insecurity: Mena
• Plato’s Views on Democracy
• The Left-Right Spectrum Overview
• Populism Discourse and Social Equality
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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An Introduction to Democracy

We live in an era of democracy. A majority of the world’s people live in countries with a democratic form of government, and many others desire democracy. This is a startling new development.

During most of the 20th century, there was mortal conflict between democracy and its rivals, and the nondemocratic side often seemed to be winning the struggle. In 1920, for example, there were only 15 democracies in the world, and at mid-century fewer than one-third of the world’s people lived in the 22 established democratic countries. By the end of the 20th century, however, democracy was ascendant; nearly two-thirds of the world’s people lived in the more than one hundred countries with a democratic form of government. The global advancement of democracy has continued into the 21st century.

What exactly is democracy? When and where did it begin? What are the differences between democracy in ancient and modern times? How do we know the difference between democracy and non-democracy today? What is the universal problem of good government in a democracy? What are arguments for and against democracy? And why do citizens of a democracy need to know exactly what it is and is not?

The Origin of Democracy in Ancient Times

Although democracy is newly resurgent, it is an old idea. More than 2,500 years ago in Athens and other cities of Greece (Hellas), there was rule ( kratia ) by the people ( demos ). Democracy ( demokratia ), or rule by the people, was an alternative to such traditional governments as monarchy, rule by one, and oligarchy, rule by the few. In the first democracies, citizens made and enforced the laws for their small republic, the polis or community of the city. There was majority rule by the citizens, the people of the polis who participated directly in their assembly, the lawmaking body. The status of citizen, however, was restricted to free males of Greek descent, a minority of the population. Women and slaves could not be citizens, and only a small number of non-Greek males ever were granted the privilege of citizenship.

Ancient Greek democracy afforded citizens equal rights to participate directly in governance for the common good of their community. The claims of the community upon the person, however, were primary and superior to the claims of the person upon the community. A good citizen was expected to serve unconditionally the interests of the city-community, especially to defend its freedom and independence against the threat of foreign domination.

There was no sense of personal and private rights of individuals in the democracies of ancient Greece. The decisions made by a majority vote of citizens often disregarded the interests of those in the minority, and sometimes the citizen majority formed a tyranny that abused and oppressed individuals with unpopular opinions.

The Differences between Democracy in Ancient and Modern Times

Democracy today is very different from its ancestors in antiquity. As in the past, democracy today is a government of, by, and for the people, but modern democracy involves government by the people acting indirectly through their elected representatives, rather than government conducted directly by the people themselves, as in antiquity. And the large-scale nation-state—very different in size and complexity from the small Greek polis —is the typical domain of the modern democratic government.

In striking contrast to the limited definition of citizenship in ancient times, democracy today is inclusive; nearly all permanent inhabitants of a country may possess or acquire the rights and privileges of the citizen and thereby claim membership among the people of the polity. Most important, modern democracy works by majority rule in tandem with the protection of minority rights. Tyranny of the majority over minorities is considered unjust in a democracy of our time—a gross flaw to be avoided, and if it occurs something to be corrected immediately.

The idea of liberty in today’s democracies differs significantly from that in ancient times. Democracy in our world implies both collective and personal liberty. There is concern for civic unity and the public good, as in ancient times, but diversity and privacy matter, too. Differences in opinions and interests are tolerated and even encouraged in the public and private lives of citizens. Unlike democracy in ancient times, which directed citizens primarily to serve the community, the primary purpose of government in a modern democracy is to serve and protect all persons under its authority and especially to secure their inherent rights to liberty and safety.

How to Distinguish Democracy from Non-Democracy Today

There is broad international agreement today about the minimal criteria a country must meet in order to cross the threshold of democracy. In an authentic democracy, the citizens or people choose representatives in government by means of free, fair, contested, and regularly scheduled elections in which practically all adults have the right to vote and otherwise participate in the electoral process. Between elections, all persons living in a genuine democracy can participate freely to influence the decisions of their government. And members of minority parties are able to criticize and otherwise oppose the ruling party or parties without obstruction in their pursuit of victory in the next electoral contest to control the government. Popular sovereignty prevails; the government rules by consent of the people to whom it is accountable.

An authentic democracy of our time is anchored in a constitution, a framework for limited government that guarantees the rule of law to protect the political rights of individuals to freedom of speech, press, petition, assembly, and association. Thus, citizens can participate freely to elect their representatives in government and to hold them accountable during the period between elections. And they can freely associate and express their individuality and diversity in civil society, the private domain of life that exists independently of control by government. A legitimate constitution functions effectively in the daily lives of individuals to prevent the government from acting arbitrarily to impose either a tyranny of an elite group over the majority or a tyranny of the majority over unpopular minorities.

The primary characteristics of democracy today, which distinguish it from non-democracy, are constitutionalism, representation in government, and individuals’ rights to liberty. Constitutionalism provides limited government and the rule of law based in a constitution. Representation of the people in government comes by way of free, fair, competitive, and periodic elections conducted in accordance with a constitution that protects individuals’ rights to participate. And the ultimate desirable consequence of constitutionalism and representative government through elections is the guarantee of rights to liberty for each person in the nation, majorities and minorities alike. Thus, liberty in an indirect or representative democracy depends upon constitutionalism, which limits and regulates the power of government in order to guard against tyranny of any kind.

Constitutionalism in a democracy especially protects against the pitfall of majority tyranny, which has afflicted popular governments of times past and present. Only by constitutionally restraining the majority to protect the rights of minorities can there be the inclusion of all the people in the polity, a necessary condition for justice in a democracy today.

The Universal Problem of Good Government in a Democracy

Constitutionalism involves a tension between power in government required to maintain order among the people and limits on power to prevent a government from unjustly denying liberty to the people. This inescapable tension raises a fundamental and universal problem for any people who aspire to achieve or maintain constitutional democracy. How can a society combine liberty and order for the purpose of securing equally and justly the rights of all persons in the nation?

This universal problem was discussed in an acclaimed collection of papers written to encourage ratification of the U.S. Constitution, The Federalist , co-authored in 1787–88 by three founders of the United States of America: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. In the 51st paper of The Federalist , Madison defined the problem of liberty and order in constitutional government:

But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions [a well-constructed constitution].

Madison recognized that the individual’s rights to political and personal liberty are at risk if the government has too much power or too little power. If the government’s power is too strong, or insufficiently limited, then it can and probably will be used to oppress certain individuals and deprive them unjustly of their right to liberty. There must be constitutional limits upon the power of government in order to protect the rights of all members of the community.

However, if the government is too limited, or insufficiently empowered, it will be incapable of maintaining law and order and protecting individuals against domestic or foreign predators, who could deprive them of their rights to life, liberty, and property. So, a good government in a democracy is both sufficiently limited and empowered by a constitution, to which the people have consented, for the achievement of order that secures liberty.

It is a daunting challenge for the people of a democracy to create, establish, and maintain such a constitutional government. Observance of constitutional limitations is the key to meeting this challenge. A good constitution limits the power of the people’s representatives in government to prevent them from abusing individuals’ rights to liberty, and it empowers the government to limit licentious expressions of liberty in order to prevent rampant disorder that could destroy democracy. Thus, when the government threatens the rights of individuals it is constrained, and when individuals threaten the authority of government they are checked. The result is ordered liberty, the solution to the universal problem of how to achieve good government in a representative and constitutional democracy.

The direct democracies of ancient times did not adequately balance liberty and order. This failure led to critical deficiencies that doomed them, such as disruptive factional conflict, excessive demands by the city-community on the citizens, tendencies toward majority tyranny, disregard of personal or private rights, and inept or unjust enforcement of law and order. In 1787, James Madison wrote in his 10th paper of The Federalist , “such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

The papers of The Federalist include remedies to the deficiencies of past democracies. These proposed remedies influenced the development and improvement of representative democracy in the United States of America and in other modern democratic republics. The principal and overarching remedy to the ills of direct democracy was this: to establish and maintain a representative government, a democratic republic, empowered and limited by the supreme law of a well-constructed constitution to protect equally the liberty and other fundamental rights of all persons in the polity. Every sustainable democracy responds more or less adequately to the universal problem of how to combine liberty and order in one constitutional government. But, although some people have done better than others, there has never been a perfect response to this problem. A genuine democracy today is constitutional and representative. Protecting equal rights to liberty of all persons in a democracy, however, depends primarily upon constitutionalism, the indispensable guarantor of representative government and individual rights.

Arguments For and Against Democracy

Ever since ancient times, democracy has had its proponents and detractors. For most of human history, the critics of democracy have far outnumbered its advocates. Only within the last two hundred years has support for democracy in its constitutional and representative form gained momentum. And only within the past 50 years have the promoters of democracy in the world greatly outnumbered its opponents. Among the major claims of its proponents are the propensities of democracy to:

• enhance the individual’s sense of dignity and self worth
• encourage individuals to promote the well-being of their community
• provide equal opportunities for individuals’ self fulfillment
• draw upon the collective wisdom of the people in making decisions
• treat individuals as political and civic equals
• protect the equal rights of all persons to life, liberty, and property
• encourage economic productivity and a high quality of life by distributing rewards based on merit rather than inherited status
• promote international peace, order, and stability, because democracies tend not to fight against each other
• bring about orderly resolution of conflict within a country
• make rulers accountable to the people they rule
• justify the legitimacy of government by basing it on popular consent

Opponents of democracy dispute the claims of its advocates. Some major deficiencies of democracy, say the detractors, are its tendencies to:

• govern inefficiently due to excessive deliberation in decision making
• govern ineptly because the most able persons are not selected to rule
• make unwise decisions in government by pandering to public opinion
• erode political and social authority and unity by encouraging criticism and dissent
• obstruct excellence by catering to conventional ideas and to the lowest common standards among the masses of the people
• overemphasize political and social equality to the detriment of liberty
• encourage abuse or disregard of unpopular persons and opinions
• discourage innovation and creativity by ignoring or marginalizing unpopular sources of ideas and artistic expression
• fail to achieve its ideals or to adhere to its basic principles

Most people in the world today believe the strengths of democracy greatly exceed its weaknesses. The case for democracy has been greatly augmented by the demise in the 20th century of prominent non-democracies, such as the Japanese Empire, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and communist dictatorships in central and eastern Europe. The acceptance of democracy by countries of diverse histories and cultures—such as Argentina, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, and Sweden—indicates a pervasive desire for freedom and self-government throughout the world.

It seems that, given a choice, people throughout the world political means to fulfilling their needs and aspirations. The great 20th-century British political leader Winston Churchill recognized that democracy, despite its shortcomings, was better than the alternatives, declaring, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Despite its widespread popularity, it is clear that democracy is not and cannot be a utopia. Its wisest proponents neither promise nor pursue absolute political and social perfection through democracy. Rather, they recognize the inevitable disparities in every democracy between ideals and realities, and they expect that citizens in every democracy will fail occasionally to fulfill its highest ideals and defining principles.

Its apparent imperfections do not invalidate the ideals and principles of democracy. Throughout the history of democracy in the United States and elsewhere, the standards by which democracy is defined have inspired citizens to persevere in a never-ending quest to narrow the gap between lofty ideals and flawed realities and to practice its principles more exactly and authentically. Although the highest standards of democracy remain unrealized, they nonetheless have been catalysts for improvements in the political and civic lives of people throughout the world.

Why Citizens Need to Know the Core Concepts of Democracy

The establishment and maintenance of a democracy depend greatly upon effectively educating the people about the differences between constitutional democracy and various other types of government. If there would be “government of the people, by the people, for the people” — Abraham Lincoln’s pithy phrase about the meaning of democracy — then there must be education of the people about what it is, how to do it, and why it is good, or at least better than the alternatives to it. Confounded concepts of democracy inevitably lead to confused and flawed practices of it, putting at risk the future of this form of government.

During the past century, rulers of nondemocratic regimes appropriated the vocabulary of democracy to mask their dictatorial control of the people. Despotic regimes, such as the fallen Soviet Union, the defunct Democratic Republic of (East) Germany, the Democratic Republic of (North) Korea, and the People’s Republic of China, used showcase constitutions that proclaimed governments of the people and the defense of human rights to confound their opponents and justify their existence. In such corrupt regimes, there were constitutions without constitutional governments and guarantees of human rights without the practical protection of them. These wrongful uses of the vocabulary and trappings of democracy demonstrated dramatically the importance of teaching citizens the concepts by which genuine democracy can be distinguished from its bogus imitators and rivals.

The great 19th-century French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville feared that flawed definitions of democracy would confuse people’s understanding of it and threaten its very existence. So, he bequeathed a wise warning about definitions and uses of words to the defenders of democracy against despotism. He said,

It is our way of using the words ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic government’ that brings about the greatest confusion. Unless these words are clearly defined and their definition agreed upon, people will live in an inextricable confusion of ideas, much to the advantage of demagogues and despots.

Tocqueville wanted people of the future to realize that if they were unable to tell the difference between an authentic democracy and its counterfeit imitators then government of, by, and for the people would be at risk, an unfortunate circumstance that afflicted many countries during most of the 20th century. The sage advice of Tocqueville guided the planning and writing of this little book. Its reason for being is improving public understanding of the words by which democracy is understood and practiced throughout our world today. If more and more people are able to identify an authentic democracy, then democracy in our time might be more faithfully practiced and its blessings more extensively enjoyed. Toward this end, the core concepts of democracy are presented alphabetically in the subsequent pages.

These concepts are, collectively, the criteria by which we can know what democracy is and what it is not. They are generic categories that enable us to analyze and appraise how democracy is practiced in countries throughout the world. These core concepts may be practiced differently among the various countries of our world, but every genuine democracy is based upon them in one way or another. And, if they are missing or slighted in a country claiming to be a democracy, then its claims are false.

The vocabulary of democracy in this little book denotes knowledge that should be possessed in common by citizens of the United States of America and any other democracy in order to make this form of government work better for them. If they would be supporters and promoters of democracy against its detractors and critics, then citizens of a democracy need to know its essential characteristics.

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The value of democracy

Economic insecurity and inequality, the costs of identity politics, democracy and clientelism, authoritarian threats, technological developments.

• What is democracy?
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• Why does democracy need education?
• Why is Pericles important?

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• Social Science LibreTexts - Democracies and Democratization
• Khan Academy - Types of democracy
• PBS LearningMedia - The Birth of Democracy | The Greeks
• Princeton University - Populism and Democratic Theory
• The UNESCO Courier - What is democracy?
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Democracy
• Loyola University Chicago - Political Legitimacy and Democracy
• democracy - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• democracy - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

Why should “the people” rule? Is democracy really superior to any other form of government? Although a full exploration of this issue is beyond the scope of this article ( see political philosophy ), history—particularly 20th-century history— demonstrates that democracy uniquely possesses a number of features that most people, whatever their basic political beliefs, would consider desirable: (1) democracy helps to prevent rule by cruel and vicious autocrats; (2) modern representative democracies do not fight wars with one another; (3) countries with democratic governments tend to be more prosperous than countries with nondemocratic governments; and (4) democracy tends to foster human development—as measured by health, education, personal income, and other indicators—more fully than other forms of government do. Other features of democracy also would be considered desirable by most people, though some would regard them as less important than features 1 through 4 above: (5) democracy helps people to protect their fundamental interests; (6) democracy guarantees its citizens fundamental rights that nondemocratic systems do not, and cannot, grant; and (7) democracy ensures its citizens a broader range of personal freedoms than other forms of government do. Finally, there are some features of democracy that some people—the critics of democracy—would not consider desirable at all, though most people, upon reflection, would regard them as at least worthwhile: (8) only democracy provides people with a maximum opportunity to live under laws of their own choosing; (9) only democracy provides people with a maximum opportunity to take moral responsibility for their choices and decisions about government policies; and (10) only in a democracy can there be a relatively high level of political equality.

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These advantages notwithstanding, there have been critics of democracy since ancient times. Perhaps the most enduring of their charges is that most people are incapable of participating in government in a meaningful or competent way because they lack the necessary knowledge, intelligence , wisdom, experience, or character. Thus Plato , as noted above, argued that the best government would be an aristocracy of “ philosopher-kings ” whose rigorous intellectual and moral training would make them uniquely qualified to rule. The view that the people as a whole are incapable of governing themselves has been espoused not only by kings and aristocratic rulers but also by political theorists (Plato foremost among them), religious leaders, and other authorities. The view was prevalent in one form or another throughout the world during most of recorded history until the early 20th century, and since then it has been most often invoked by opponents of democracy in Europe and elsewhere to justify various forms of dictatorship and one-party rule.

No doubt there will be critics of democracy for as long as democratic governments exist. The extent of their success in winning adherents and promoting the creation of nondemocratic regimes will depend on how well democratic governments meet the new challenges and crises that are all but certain to occur.

Problems and challenges

Democracies face growing challenges in the 21st century. There are new and serious obstacles to their stability, and the diminished performance of many democratic governments in providing encompassing economic security has bred skepticism of the value of democracy among their citizens. As democratic governments have failed to meet their citizens’ political and economic demands, disaffection has increased. This alienation is reflected in declining voter turnout, opinion polls showing reduced commitment to democratic institutions, increased admiration for autocratic leaders, and growing vote shares for extremist candidates and parties proposing antidemocratic alternatives . Rising disaffection with democracy has also gone hand in hand with increasing support for exclusionary ethnic politics.

Democracy works best when governments have incentives to pursue broadly encompassing policies that benefit the citizenry as a whole. This is most likely when political competition is robust and governments can legislate effectively. Diminishing competition between parties and political fragmentation (which tends to increase with the number of parties in a national legislature) are therefore bad for democracy. A group of legislators will find it easiest to make a collective decision if all of its members have similar preferences. If their preferences differ, they can still manage their disagreements tolerably through negotiation, compromise, and sometimes logrolling (the trading of votes by legislators to secure favourable action on projects of interest to each), so long as none has preferences that are abhorrent to others. Fragmented governments find it harder to enact policies that benefit most people, because they often depend on the support of voters with widely divergent preferences. This in turn reinforces the perception that one group’s gain is another’s loss.

The problem fragmentation poses for democracy is particularly acute when there is substantial political polarization, because, under such circumstances, some people are never willing to accommodate the preferences of others. A majority can outvote a minority in a democracy, but democracies are healthiest when the defeated minority can plausibly look forward to winning elections in the future. Otherwise, the minority will be encouraged to withdraw from democratic competition and pursue antidemocratic alternatives. This is one reason why polarization threatens democracy.

Democracy discourages extremism when it generates centripetal tendencies and encourages competition, but extremism threatens democracy by increasing the costs of regularly alternating governments and removing incentives to wait one’s turn. Those whose preferences will never be satisfied through democratic channels have incentives to pursue their interests through violence if they think they can get away with it.

Rising extremism undermines democracy in another way. Democracy counts on the “loyal opposition” for accountability. When the opposition is not credible (because it is either sufficiently undesirable or widely perceived to be so undesirable as not to be likely to win power), there is no electoral check on the incumbent, and accountability suffers.

The following sections examine the leading contemporary threats to the performance and durability of democratic systems, centring on the sources of the dynamics just described. The discussion here focuses on trends that are secular and cross-national, for the most part setting aside idiosyncratic features of particular systems in order to diagnose the predicaments of developed democracies generally. Some of the major obstacles to democratic performance—and hence to democratic stability—are structural, making them particularly difficult to resolve but also particularly worth understanding.

The survival of democratic regimes hinges above all on citizens’ economic well-being. Democracies endure when they “deliver the goods.” Historically, democracies have always survived as long as citizens’ yearly per capita income has remained above about $16,750 (as measured in 2022 U.S. dollars). Democratic breakdown becomes a concern when per capita income falls below this threshold , and it becomes increasingly likely the farther per capita income falls. There have been exceptions to this generalization—notably, India —but democracy does not usually fare well in poor countries.

Economic inequality also matters, though democracy has sometimes endured along with high and even increasing levels of inequality, as in countries like South Africa and Brazil . The direction of change seems to matter more than absolute levels of inequality. Historically, revolutions and coups have been associated with defeated expectations of rising prosperity. Democracy becomes even more vulnerable when living standards actually fall—as they did in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s and in Egypt before the military coup in that country in 2013—so that large numbers of people suffer unexpected losses of economic security and social status .

Democracy also does better in broadly diversified economies than in economies that depend on a small number of natural resources. Thus, the “oil curse” affects democracy’s durability, because government leaders who control access to such a lucrative economic sector will be less willing to surrender their authority if there are few alternative sources of income.

The older democracies of the OECD ( Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ) today face unprecedented economic challenges that threaten democratic stability. The steady decline of manufacturing jobs in these countries since the mid-20th century has resulted in a shift toward service economies and the growth of the white-collar sector. Trade union membership has declined in almost all developed countries, in many cases significantly. Lifetime employment, which was widespread in older democracies a generation ago, has been replaced by a world in which most adults must expect to change jobs multiple times during their working careers, often to lower-status positions with fewer or no employment benefits. Family or household incomes have barely kept pace with inflation , despite the fact that women have entered the labour market in large numbers, with the result that single-earner households have largely been replaced by two-earner households. Relative inequalities between those in the top decile and the rest have grown relentlessly.

Left-of-centre parties have become smaller and weaker as a result of these developments. They have failed to adequately respond to declining industrial employment, enacting policies that protect the interests of a diminishing cadre of workers more than they do the interests of those who have been left behind by deindustrialization, even as precarious employment has proliferated with the rise of independent contractors and zero-hours contracts (i.e., employment contracts that do not guarantee a minimum number of working hours for employees). This in turn has led social democratic parties to hemorrhage support, often to populist parties and politicians who promise quick fixes like immigration bans and trade wars, which produce further disenchantment when they fail to improve conditions. Mainstream parties have fragmented, which makes governing more difficult and compounds the problem of precarity and its political consequences.

As well as changing economic circumstances that sap political support for mainstream political parties, demographic changes have compounded fiscal stress in the older democracies. In most OECD countries, retired populations are growing and working populations are shrinking, as people are living longer than ever before. These developments increase demand for tax revenues to support pension and health care expenses for the elderly at the same time as tax bases shrink, diminishing government revenues. Exacerbating this fiscal stress, the collapse of communism and the advent of an integrated global economy since the 1990s have meant that capital—particularly financial capital—is more mobile than ever before. The perpetual threat of capital flight keeps pressure on governments to limit tax increases.

The mobility of capital creates another political obstacle to taxation: the political influence of the wealthy . The wealthy, by means of their greater financial resources, have disproportionate power to influence the political process through various channels, both licit and illicit. They can make substantial financial contributions to political campaigns. They can finance litigation and engage in advocacy before administrative agencies. They can invest in political advertising, think tanks, and even media organizations, shaping how issues of interest to the public are framed and influencing what issues become part of the political agendas of governments and political parties. Although citizens tend to be more exercised by insecurity than inequality, the resource advantage of the wealthy is one mechanism through which inequality has tangible effects on democratic performance and on the government’s capacity to mitigate the vulnerability of insecure populations. Insecure populations contribute to political turmoil because they often blame existing parties, with varying degrees of justification, for their vulnerability and become available to support antidemocratic candidates.

Economic resources can be divided . This means that competition over them can be managed in various ways. Importantly, economic winners (i.e., the wealthy) can compensate economic losers (i.e., the poor), or at least protect them against severe vulnerability, by supporting social welfare programs and institutions, such as those established in the United States under the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s and in western European countries after World War II . The wealthy recognized that it was in their interest to accept—and in some cases to actively support—the redistribution of wealth, partly because there was an alternative system, embodied in the Soviet Union , competing for the hearts and minds of workers in capitalist democracies.

This incentive evaporated with the worldwide collapse of communism in 1989–91 ( see collapse of the Soviet Union )—one of the reasons that mainstream parties did so little for their most adversely affected populations in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007–09. A dramatic example was the response to the subprime mortgage crisis ( see financial crisis of 2007–08 ). Western governments, regardless of their ruling party, bailed out banks and other financial institutions while providing relatively little direct assistance to the millions of voters who lost their homes. This in turn contributed to the perception among vulnerable voters that none of the established parties was responding to their plight.

Unlike economic resources, racial, ethnic, or religious identities or affiliations are indivisible goods. Competition over indivisible goods is bad for democracy, because it is much more often zero-sum: one group’s gain is another’s loss. This was a lesson of the religious wars in western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and later supplied an impetus to diminish the political power of the church—if not to disestablish it entirely—in modern democracies. Better to get religious groups out of politics than to have them vie for control of the commanding heights of the state. When electoral success hinges on religious, ethnic, or racial appeals, candidates have few incentives to offer broadly encompassing policies, such as those promoting inclusive economic growth and good public services.

At its best, democratic competition institutionalizes a “marketplace of ideas,” encouraging candidates for office to make the strongest case for their proposed policies in order to rally support. Identity politics undermines this aspiration , giving politicians incentives to court supporters along exclusionary sectarian lines. When politicians need only preach to the converted, their incentive to offer powerful arguments rather than to appeal to sectarian loyalties is attenuated . The prominence of identity politics produces a more fragmented, more polarized, and less competitive political environment .

Political mobilization along identitarian lines is a familiar problem in new democracies, which often lack robust traditions of programmatic political competition. Elections all too easily amount to little more than an ethnic census, where the minority has weak incentives to accept results and strong incentives to resort to violence.

Since the late 20th century there has also been a resurgence of identity politics in the older democracies, as political entrepreneurs have found it easy to mobilize alienated voters along ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural lines. This kind of political mobilization tends to be self-reinforcing, because it diverts attention from distributive and other economic matters where bargaining and compromise are possible. This in turn operates to the benefit of those, such as the wealthy, who do well from the status quo and would do less well from competition over matters relating to the distribution or division of material goods.

Structuring politics around identity cleavages can reify and entrench these differences, particularly because it contributes to the erosion of political parties that organize their appeals around unifying programmatic platforms. Across the developed world, the established political organs of the left and right have lost strength and have been eclipsed by new, nativist movements that frequently demonize immigrants and minority groups with ugly rhetoric . In some countries new extremist parties have displaced traditional parties, and in others extremists have co-opted traditional parties. The attrition of traditional parties and their replacement by parties and candidates that run on explicitly racist and xenophobic platforms threatens not just to elevate identity politics on the political stage but also to fan the flames of racial and ethnic antagonism in society broadly.

Identity politics also undermines the benefits of political competition because it is largely symbolic. Political accountability depends on voters’ ability to assess the output that the government delivers and to decide whether to reward or punish incumbents on this basis. But symbolic politics yields few deliverables. When identity politics predominates, voters’ decisions about whether to reward or punish officeholders correspond less to the tangible benefits that officeholders deliver to the electorate and more to how effectively they reinforce voters’ sense of belonging to one or another identity-based group. This can have adverse feedback effects by exacerbating economic insecurity and in turn voters’ disaffection from the political system .

The polarization associated with identity politics undermines support for alternation of governance among political parties, contributing to political instability. In other words, when more of politics is zero-sum, every political faction faces higher costs if it loses in the political process. The identity politics of the right and the identity politics of the left are mutually dependent and mutually reinforcing. In a fragmented political environment where parties represent identity-based groups, it becomes harder for politicians to succeed by offering encompassing programs and more congenial for them to focus on mobilizing their core supporters. Giving up power is more threatening to the interests of current winners, and losers will be more likely to try to seize and hold on to power if they can.

Institutions of political representation contribute to political fragmentation. In proportional representation (PR) systems fragmentation occurs between parties, and in plurality voting (PV) systems fragmentation occurs within parties. Fragmentation facilitates clientlike relationships between voters and politicians: the latter deliver benefits to particular groups rather than enacting policies that benefit society as a whole. PR gives rise to what one might think of as “wholesale” clientelism , marked by catering to sectional interests at the expense of encompassing social interests, whereas PV, combined with weak political parties, gives rise to “retail” clientelism, where politicians cater to particular financial supporters or to cronies.

PR enables a large number of parties to obtain legislative representation and, to that extent, diminishes parties’ incentive to advance encompassing policies that appeal to a large swathe of the electorate. As a result, parties tend to cater to core supporters. Because they produce political fragmentation, PR systems necessitate coalition governments , which are frequently unwieldy—increasingly so from the turn of the 21st century, as the number of parties has increased in almost all PR systems. Accountability also suffers under coalition governments, because no party is unambiguously responsible for the government’s performance. Voters are more likely to support the party that represents their sectional interest, regardless of government performance.

Nor do the platforms parties run on in elections correspond closely with what they do once in power, because coalition negotiations require compromise. And because parties decide on governing coalitions after elections, the extent to which the government reflects popular will is more attenuated than it is when a single party is in power. Which parties succeed in joining the government can be quite arbitrary, and the parties might emanate from a variety of points on the ideological spectrum. As a result, there may be little direct connection between the preferences expressed by voters and the policies enacted by the government that their party has joined.

PV systems—of which the Westminster system (the model of government in the United Kingdom , which has traditionally centred on parliamentary supremacy and the absence of nonelectoral checks on parliamentary authority) is the purest incarnation—confront different challenges. They do not exhibit the interparty fragmentation seen in PR systems, but problems regarding representation are created by the “winner’s bonus” that might disproportionately reward the plurality-vote winner. In a PV system the party receiving the plurality of votes cast in an election typically wins a higher proportion—indeed, often a majority—of seats. Depending on the geographical distribution of voters, the plurality-vote winner may not even win the most legislative seats in a PV system. PV systems may therefore promote decisive governance at the expense of accurate representation of the electorate.

There can also be fragmentation in PV systems, but it occurs inside parties, particularly when they are answerable to subsets of their members or to outside groups that they depend on for money. This weakens parties as institutions of effective governance. Intraparty fragmentation can therefore be exacerbated by institutions like primary elections and failures to effectively regulate the role of money in politics ( see campaign finance and campaign finance laws ). Such fragmentation undermines the accountability of government to voters and contributes to gridlock, impeding effective governance.

The United States is an unusual hybrid, wherein a PV system is counterbalanced by government institutions that stifle its advantages. The “American disease,” as some critics of the system have named it, is a profusion of veto points that amplify gridlock. The country has a bicameral system in which the two legislative chambers are governed by different rules and electoral cycles, an independently elected president whose party often does not control at least one of the legislative chambers, independent courts that can strike down duly enacted laws, and a strong federal system that enables state legislatures and governors to frustrate national policies and priorities. The dramatic malapportionment of the U.S. Senate exacerbates the situation by enabling senators representing small minorities of the population to block legislation. These obstacles to effective government dramatically curtail the decisiveness typically associated with PV systems. They also encourage clientelism by requiring more logrolling and horse trading in the legislative process than would otherwise be required. And they advantage wealthy individuals and businesses, which are better able than others to navigate the intricacies of the legislative process as well as its administrative and judicial accompaniments.

Autocracies can pose threats to the healthy operation of democratic regimes. Russia ’s role as an important oil supplier to western Europe gives it some leverage over European politics, just as China ’s foreign aid gives it influence over many developing countries. More discretely and dramatically, autocracies may seek to influence democratic politics through strategies similar to those used by Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election , including spreading disinformation to benefit certain candidates at the expense of others, to foster extreme partisanship and hostility between political factions, and to weaken the public’s faith and trust in democratic institutions. If autocracies proliferate, these kinds of external threats to democratic regimes might increase and become more serious.

Another insidious mechanism for autocratic influence on democracies is ideological . Some political theorists have suggested that the apparent economic success of authoritarian countries like China, Vietnam , and Singapore undermines support for democracy by making alternative models of governance seem attractive. The medium-term viability of their models is debatable, however, because authoritarian systems are highly susceptible to corruption and are notoriously poor at generating accurate information needed for sound decision-making in complex economies over time. Moreover, some of the more successful “Asian tigers” are democracies like Taiwan and South Korea , making it difficult to argue that Chinese economic success depends on an authoritarian governance model.

More typical of authoritarian systems are the old Soviet bloc economies, countries like North Korea , and the African and Middle Eastern autocracies. The better economic performers among them are most often oil producers that reserve the great bulk of their financial gains for tiny elites. Thus, if democracy’s prestige is declining, that trend has more to do with the struggling performance of democratic systems than with the viability of alternatives. This underperformance has fueled admiration within developed democracies for foreign autocrats like Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and for the kind of politics they represent.

Propaganda and other means of manipulating public opinion have always been part of politics, but technological developments in the 21st century have the potential to increase their potency. Internet -based social media was once seen as a potentially liberating technology that would facilitate the rapid spread of information and challenge both repressive regimes and the oligopoly of traditional news media, but today the picture is more mixed. Authoritarian governments have succeeded in tightening control over Internet access, and social media platforms have become vehicles for the spread of disinformation. While control of traditional media platforms remains an important vector for the spread of propaganda , social media also enables the dissemination of disinformation via bottom-up organizations that can circumvent gatekeepers or moderators of traditional platforms. Propaganda can thus be spread cheaply and in high volume, making it difficult to combat.

Recent technological developments also enable more-encompassing forms of surveillance, with implications for political organization. Whether through physical surveillance of their movements or virtual surveillance of their online activities, people are increasingly being monitored and recorded, and they are likely to behave differently when they know that “ Big Brother ” might be watching. They might refrain from doing things that would result in social censure or other forms of punishment. Of particular concern is the fact that surveillance might subject dissidents to intimidation or retaliation for political activity.

The availability of large amounts of data about citizens also facilitates political manipulation by enabling politicians to segment their messaging with targeted—sometimes even mutually incompatible—appeals to particular demographic groups. This contributes to political fragmentation, further undermining accountability.

There are possible cures for these worrying trends. Public policies can mitigate them through measures aimed at preserving election integrity , freedom of speech , and privacy . Civil society can also mitigate the antidemocratic effects of technology: journalists can act in innovative ways to protect and disseminate accurate information, and new techniques of social media governance can combat the prevalence of disinformation. Innovations in cryptography can enable people to avoid surveillance. On balance, it is too soon to conclude that technological developments pose insuperable challenges to democratic competition. But the problems that they present will likely become more acute, requiring an ongoing search for novel solutions.

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• Democracy Essay for Students in English

Essay on Democracy

Introduction.

Democracy is mainly a Greek word which means people and their rules, here peoples have the to select their own government as per their choice. Greece was the first democratic country in the world. India is a democratic country where people select their government of their own choice, also people have the rights to do the work of their choice. There are two types of democracy: direct and representative and hybrid or semi-direct democracy. There are many decisions which are made under democracies. People enjoy few rights which are very essential for human beings to live happily. 

Our country has the largest democracy. In a democracy, each person has equal rights to fight for development. After the independence, India has adopted democracy, where the people vote those who are above 18 years of age, but these votes do not vary by any caste; people from every caste have equal rights to select their government. Democracy, also called as a rule of the majority, means whatever the majority of people decide, it has to be followed or implemented, the representative winning with the most number of votes will have the power. We can say the place where literacy people are more there shows the success of the democracy even lack of consciousness is also dangerous in a democracy. Democracy is associated with higher human accumulation and higher economic freedom. Democracy is closely tied with the economic source of growth like education and quality of life as well as health care. The constituent assembly in India was adopted by Dr B.R. Ambedkar on 26 th November 1949 and became sovereign democratic after its constitution came into effect on 26 January 1950.

What are the Challenges:

There are many challenges for democracy like- corruption here, many political leaders and officers who don’t do work with integrity everywhere they demand bribes, resulting in the lack of trust on the citizens which affects the country very badly. Anti-social elements- which are seen during elections where people are given bribes and they are forced to vote for a particular candidate. Caste and community- where a large number of people give importance to their caste and community, therefore, the political party also selects the candidate on the majority caste. We see wherever the particular caste people win the elections whether they do good for the society or not, and in some cases, good leaders lose because of less count of the vote.

India is considered to be the largest democracy around the globe, with a population of 1.3 billion. Even though being the biggest democratic nation, India still has a long way to becoming the best democratic system. The caste system still prevails in some parts, which hurts the socialist principle of democracy. Communalism is on the rise throughout the globe and also in India, which interferes with the secular principle of democracy. All these differences need to be set aside to ensure a thriving democracy.

Principles of Democracy:

There are mainly five principles like- republic, socialist, sovereign, democratic and secular, with all these quality political parties will contest for elections. There will be many bribes given to the needy person who require food, money, shelter and ask them to vote whom they want. But we can say that democracy in India is still better than the other countries.

Basically, any country needs democracy for development and better functioning of the government. In some countries, freedom of political expression, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, are considered to ensure that voters are well informed, enabling them to vote according to their own interests.

Let us Discuss These Five Principles in Further Detail

Sovereign: In short, being sovereign or sovereignty means the independent authority of a state. The country has the authority to make all the decisions whether it be on internal issues or external issues, without the interference of any third party.

Socialist: Being socialist means the country (and the Govt.), always works for the welfare of the people, who live in that country. There should be many bribes offered to the needy person, basic requirements of them should be fulfilled by any means. No one should starve in such a country.

Secular: There will be no such thing as a state religion, the country does not make any bias on the basis of religion. Every religion must be the same in front of the law, no discrimination on the basis of someone’s religion is tolerated. Everyone is allowed to practice and propagate any religion, they can change their religion at any time.

Republic: In a republic form of Government, the head of the state is elected, directly or indirectly by the people and is not a hereditary monarch. This elected head is also there for a fixed tenure. In India, the head of the state is the president, who is indirectly elected and has a fixed term of office (5 years).

Democratic: By a democratic form of government, means the country’s government is elected by the people via the process of voting. All the adult citizens in the country have the right to vote to elect the government they want, only if they meet a certain age limit of voting.

Merits of Democracy:

better government forms because it is more accountable and in the interest of the people.

improves the quality of decision making and enhances the dignity of the citizens.

provide a method to deal with differences and conflicts.

A democratic system of government is a form of government in which supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodic free elections. It permits citizens to participate in making laws and public policies by choosing their leaders, therefore citizens should be educated so that they can select the right candidate for the ruling government. Also, there are some concerns regarding democracy- leaders always keep changing in democracy with the interest of citizens and on the count of votes which leads to instability. It is all about political competition and power, no scope for morality.

Factors Affect Democracy:

capital and civil society

economic development

modernization

Norway and Iceland are the best democratic countries in the world. India is standing at fifty-one position.

India is a parliamentary democratic republic where the President is head of the state and Prime minister is head of the government. The guiding principles of democracy such as protected rights and freedoms, free and fair elections, accountability and transparency of government officials, citizens have a responsibility to uphold and support their principles. Democracy was first practised in the 6 th century BCE, in the city-state of Athens. One basic principle of democracy is that people are the source of all the political power, in a democracy people rule themselves and also respect given to diverse groups of citizens, so democracy is required to select the government of their own interest and make the nation developed by electing good leaders.

FAQs on Democracy Essay for Students in English

1. What are the Features of Democracy?

Features of Democracy are as follows

Equality: Democracy provides equal rights to everyone, regardless of their gender, caste, colour, religion or creed.

Individual Freedom: Everybody has the right to do anything they want until it does not affect another person’s liberty.

Majority Rules: In a democracy, things are decided by the majority rule, if the majority agrees to something, it will be done.

Free Election: Everyone has the right to vote or to become a candidate to fight the elections.

2. Define Democracy?

Democracy means where people have the right to choose the rulers and also people have freedom to express views, freedom to organise and freedom to protest. Protesting and showing Dissent is a major part of a healthy democracy. Democracy is the most successful and popular form of government throughout the globe.

Democracy holds a special place in India, also India is still the largest democracy in existence around the world.

3. What are the Benefits of Democracy?

Let us discuss some of the benefits received by the use of democracy to form a government. Benefits of democracy are: 

It is more accountable

Improves the quality of decision as the decision is taken after a long time of discussion and consultation.

It provides a better method to deal with differences and conflicts.

It safeguards the fundamental rights of people and brings a sense of equality and freedom.

It works for the welfare of both the people and the state.

4. Which country is the largest democracy in the World?

India is considered the largest democracy, all around the world. India decided to have a democratic Govt. from the very first day of its independence after the rule of the British. In India, everyone above the age of 18 years can go to vote to select the Government, without any kind of discrimination on the basis of caste, colour, religion, gender or more. But India, even being the largest democracy, still has a long way to become perfect.

5. Write about the five principles of Democracy?

There are five key principles that are followed in a democracy. These Five Principles of Democracy of India are -  secular, sovereign, republic, socialist, and democratic. These five principles have to be respected by every political party, participating in the general elections in India. The party which got the most votes forms the government which represents the democratic principle. No discrimination is done on the basis of religion which represents the secular nature of democracy. The govt. formed after the election has to work for the welfare of common people which shows socialism in play.

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Lesson Plan: Introduction to the Principles of Democracy

President Obama on the Greek Origins of Democracy

In Athens during his final foreign trip as president, President Obama explains ancient Greek's influence on essential qualities of democracy. His speech includes a description about the origins of the word "democracy" and its development as a governing principle.

Description

Democratic forms of government share specific characteristics that make them unique from other forms of government. These include principles such as limited government, individual rights, rule of law, equal protection, majority rule with minority rights and popular sovereignty. This lesson has students view video clips about democracy to come up with these characteristics of democracies.

Begin the class by asking the students the following questions:

• Who has the power to make decisions in the United States government?
• How are our leaders selected?
• How can people influence their leaders in the United States?

Show each of the clips to the class and have the students use the following handout to make a list of characteristics of democracies.

Handout: Principles of Democracy (Google Doc)

Video Clip 1: President Obama on the Greek Origins of Democracy (5:50)

Video Clip 2: Introduction to the Rule of Law (1:17)

Video Clip 3: English Roots of Democracy (2:28)

Video Clip 4: Ben Carson on the Constitution (2:58)

Video Clip 5: Montesquieu Helps Frame the U.S. Constitution (4:17)

Video Clip 6: Justice Breyer on Democracy (4:14)

Video Clip 7: Rule of Law, Equal Protection and Rights (2:40)

As a class make a list of common characteristics that were mentioned in the clips.

Address any misunderstandings about the concepts.

Have the students share their definitions with the class.

After watching the clips and discussing the characteristics as a class, have the students create their own definition of democracy.

EXTENSION ACTIVITIES:

Current Events- Have students research news articles and find articles that relates to these characteristics or principles of democracy. Have student explain how these articles relate to these concepts.

Argumentative Essay Assignment- Have the students answer the following question in essay form.

• Using examples from the clips and the class discussion, argue which principle or characteristic of democracy is most important to a democratic form of government.

Additional Resources

• Bell Ringer: e-Voting: The Public’s Participation in Government and Democracy
• Bell Ringer: President Obama on the Greek Origins of Democracy
• Bell Ringer: The Birth of Politics
• Principles of Democracy Handout - Google Docs
• Ancient Greece
• Constitution
• Equal Protection
• Individual Rights And Responsibilities
• Limited Government
• Majority Rule With Minority Rights
• Rule Of Law
• Separation Of Powers

The character of American democracy: Values-based leadership

Subscribe to governance weekly, jill long thompson jlt jill long thompson board chair and ceo, farm credit administration; former member of the u.s. house of representatives.

November 12, 2020

During the Watergate investigation, President Richard Nixon’s supporters would often argue that because they agreed with his policy positions, they could overlook his ethical and moral shortcomings. At that time a member of the U.S. House, Earl Landgrebe from my home state of Indiana, took this position to the extreme when he said, “Don’t confuse me with the facts” because he had made up his mind and would continue to support the president.

We hear a similar sentiment expressed today by supporters of President Donald Trump as they support his continuing claims that the election was fraudulent. This reflects a belief by some that ethical leadership is not important, or even relevant, so long as elected officials advance policies with which they agree. This kind of thinking is a threat to our democracy and our country.

Democracy is a form of government built on a foundation of ethical principles and it cannot survive unless those principles are honored and protected. Values matter because how we adopt laws is as important as the laws we adopt, and all of us are charged with protecting the self-governing principles that are the foundation of our great nation. Unethical leadership can undermine the democratic process, and even democracy itself.

Values-based leadership is essential to preserving and protecting democratic principles and there are at least three widely recognized moral virtues that are central to ensuring the governing process is democratic: truthfulness, justice, and temperance.

Truthfulness

When leaders lie, it is usually because the facts are not on their side and they do not want others to know the truth. They think the lie benefits them personally, usually at a cost to the rest of us. According to The Washington Post, The Fact Checker determined in August of this year that President Trump had made 22,000 false and misleading claims since taking office.

These untruths hurt our democracy because when our leaders deceive us, it becomes more challenging for the public to learn the facts. And that makes it more challenging for citizens to provide meaningful input. This undermines the all-important role of the citizenry in the policy-making process and it will most likely lead to the adoption of policies that are flawed because decisions based on falsehoods are usually bad decisions.

I came of age when the nation was deeply divided over our involvement in the Vietnam War and I very much wanted to believe that our political leaders were telling us the truth and that the anti-war protesters were wrong. But by the time I had completed my freshman year of college, critical content of the Pentagon Papers had been leaked to the press, confirming the very criticism the protesters were raising. Had the citizenry been told the truth, the course of history could have been changed for the better.

And today, we have lost tens of thousands of lives to COVID-19 that could have been saved had President Trump stated to the public what he said in his interviews with Robert Woodward.

Justice exists only when there is fairness in the process of governing. It requires those in leadership positions to consider the varied interests of all and to protect equality of participation. There must also be transparency.

Voter suppression of any kind is unjust and a threat to democracy. For example, how we draw congressional district maps influences the fairness of our elections. When congressional districts are construed in ways that concentrate voters of one political party in a smaller number of districts than is representative of the actual number of voters in that party, it can result in one party receiving a larger share of seats than votes.

As an example, in 2016 Republican candidates running for the U.S. House received 49.9 percent of the votes cast, while Democratic candidates received 47.3 percent of the votes cast. But Republicans won 55.2 percent, and Democrats won 44.8 percent of the seats in the House. In other words, Republicans got a “seats bonus.” Such gerrymandering suppresses the voices of voters across the country and clearly undercuts the most basic democratic principle of political equality.

Temperance is also central to democratic leadership. In democracy we do not each get our way, but we must respect the right we all have to work with our fellow citizens and address our challenges in a way that moves us forward as a people. Respect for the rights of others is essential. Good leaders do not divide and conquer, but rather, they bring people together through the democratic process. We are all in this together and we must all work together for the greater good of our nation.

Democracy is a principled form of government in which we all matter, and values-based leadership is central to preserving and protecting this great democratic experiment we call the United States of America.

Jill Long Thompson is a former Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, former Under Secretary at U.S.D.A., and former Board Chair and CEO at the Farm Credit Administration. She is a visiting scholar with the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University Bloomington and has authored a book, The Character of American Democracy, published by Indiana University Press on September 15, 2020. The opinions expressed in this essay are hers and do not necessarily reflect those of Indiana University.

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Democracy is a core value of the United Nations. The UN supports democracy by promoting human rights, development, and peace and security. In the 79 years since the UN Charter was signed, the UN has done more to support democracy around the world than any other global organization. The UN promotes good governance, monitors elections, supports civil society to strengthen democratic institutions and accountability, ensures self-determination in decolonized countries, and assists in the drafting of new constitutions in post-conflict nations.

United Nations activities in support of democracy are carried out through the United Nations Development Programme ( UNDP ), the United Nations Democracy Fund ( UNDEF ), the Department of Peace Operations ( DPO ), the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs ( DPPA ), the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights ( OHCHR ),and the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women ( UN Women ), among others.

Democracy in the founding documents of the United Nations

When the founders of the United Nations drafted the  United Nations Charter , they did not mention the word democracy. In 1945, many of the UN Member States did not endorse democracy as a system or didn’t practice it. Yet, the opening words of the Charter, “We the Peoples”, reflect the fundamental principle of democracy - that the will of the people is the source of legitimacy of sovereign states and, therefore, of the United Nations as a whole.

The UN does not advocate for a specific model of government but promotes democratic governance as a set of values and principles that should be followed for greater participation, equality, security and human development. Democracy provides an environment that respects human rights and fundamental freedoms, and in which the freely expressed will of people is exercised. People have a say in decisions and can hold decision-makers to account. Women and men have equal rights and all people are free from discrimination

These values are embodied in the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights . It projects the concept of democracy by stating “the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government”.  The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights  develops them even further and lays down the legal basis for the principles of democracy in international law. It covers, for instance, freedom of expression, the right of peaceful assembly, and the right to freedom of association with others. The  Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women  stipulates that its 189 contracting parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that women can vote and stand for elections, and participate in public life and decision-making, including at the international level.

The UN General Assembly and democracy

Since 1988, the  General Assembly  has adopted at least one resolution annually dealing with some aspect of democracy. In 2015, world leaders committed in the  2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development  to a world in which “democracy, good governance and the rule of law as well as an enabling environment at national and international levels, are essential for sustainable development”. The Agenda reaffirmed commitments that were made earlier at the  World Summit  in 2005 and in the  Millennium Declaration .

Democracy and Human Rights

The human rights normative framework.

The values of freedom, respect for human rights and the principle of holding periodic and genuine elections by universal suffrage are essential elements of democracy. In turn, democracy provides an environment for the protection and effective realization of human rights.

For several years, the UN General Assembly and the former Commission on Human Rights endeavoured to draw on international human rights instruments to promote a common understanding of the principles and values of democracy. As a result, in 2000, the Commission recommended a series of legislative, institutional and practical measures to consolidate democracy. Moreover, in 2002, the Commission declared the following as essential elements of democracy:

• Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms
• Freedom of association
• Freedom of expression and opinion
• Access to power and its exercise in accordance with the rule of law
• The holding of periodic free and fair elections by universal suffrage and by secret ballot as the expression of the will of the people
• A pluralistic system of political parties and organizations
• The separation of powers
• The independence of the judiciary
• Transparency and accountability in public administration
• Free, independent and pluralistic media

Since its establishment in 2006, the  Human Rights Council  (successor to the Commission) has adopted several resolutions highlighting the interdependent and mutually reinforcing relationship between democracy and human rights. Recent examples include resolutions  19/36  and  28/14  on “Human rights, democracy and the rule of law”.

Addressing democracy deficits

Democracy deficits, weak institutions and poor governance impose persistent challenges. The UN Human Rights office (OHCHR) and UNDP address these challenges through their advisory services and programmes. In transitional democracies and countries emerging from conflict, OHCHR assists to build strong and independent judiciary systems, parliaments, human rights institutions, and vibrant civil societies. UNDP helps governments in strengthening their public institutions, to help countries fight corruption and support inclusive participation to ensure that no one is left behind. Every year, UNDP invests, on average, US$565 million to support inclusive governance and development at the local level.

Supporting transitional democracies

OHCHR collaborates with national governments and other actors to rebuild public confidence and restore peace and the rule of law in post-conflict nations and transitional democracies. UN Human Rights has actively supported transitional justice programmes in more than 20 countries around the world over the past 15 years. The office tries to ensure that human rights and transitional justice considerations are reflected in peace agreements and it supports the establishment of truth-seeking processes, judicial accountability mechanisms, and reparations programmes.

Guiding national and regional efforts

OHCHR works to guide national and regional efforts and to facilitate the discussion on democracy and human rights. In 2012, the Human Rights Council adopted a  resolution  titled “Human rights, democracy and the rule of law,” which reaffirmed that democracy, development and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms were interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Further, OHCHR published a  study  on challenges, lessons learned and best practices in securing democracy and the rule of law from a human rights perspective, and also organized a panel discussion on these issues.

In 2015, the Human Rights Council adopted resolution  28/14 , which established a  Forum on Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of law , to provide a platform for promoting dialogue and cooperation on issues pertaining to these areas. The Forum is held every two years. The most recent meeting was convened in Geneva on November 24-25, 2022, under the theme " Strengthening democracies to build back better: challenges and opportunities".

OHCHR also works to underline the close relationship between human rights and democracy within the United Nations system and partners with democracy-promoting organizations such as l’Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie , the Inter-Parliamentary Union , the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Democracy and Elections

The UN is a trusted impartial actor providing electoral assistance to approximately 60 countries each year, either at the request of Member States or based on a Security Council or General Assembly mandate. The assistance includes advisory services, logistics, training, civic education, computer applications and short-term observation. The UN also strives to build capacity regarding the overall political environment. This involves working with voters, the media, political parties, civil society, as well as the parliament and the judiciary.

The electoral assistance helps Member States to hold periodic, inclusive, transparent and credible elections and to establish nationally sustainable electoral processes. UN electoral assistance has been a crucial and successful component in peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and in establishing and deepening democratic governance.

The electoral assistance involves several programmes, funds, agencies and departments. The  Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs  is the UN Focal Point for Electoral Assistance. The  Electoral Assistance Division  within the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) assesses electoral needs, develops electoral policy, and maintains institutional memory. The  United Nations Development Programme  (UNDP) provides technical assistance, and fosters the participation of women, the youth and other underrepresented groups in elections. It also coordinates donor support. In peacekeeping or post-conflict environments, military and police components of peacekeeping missions support national law enforcement agencies in securing elections. The UN also partners with other regional, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations involved in electoral assistance.

Democracy and Civil Society: The United Nations Democracy Fund

The  United Nations Democracy Fund  (UNDEF) funds projects that empower civil society, promote human rights, and encourage the participation of all groups in democratic processes. Currently, for example, UNDEF finances projects to mobilize the youth for elections in Côte d'Ivoire, to engage men in promoting gender equality in Palestine, and to build a platform for citizen advocacy in elections in Brazil. Most of UNDEF funds go to local civil society organizations in countries in both the transition and consolidation phases of democratisation.

Since its creation in 2005, UNDEF has supported more than 900 projects in more than 130 countries, with a total amount of almost 250 million dollars . Applicants can request a grant between 100,000 US dollars and 300,000 US dollars. The Fund depends entirely on voluntary contributions from Member States. So far, it has been supported by over 40 Governments. The  biggest donors  are the United States, Sweden, Germany and India. External evaluations of completed projects are available on the UNDEF website.

Women and Democracy

Democracy needs women to be truly democratic, and women need democracy if they are to change the systems and laws that exclude them. The role of women in democratic processes is emphasized in the  Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women  and in the  2011 General Assembly resolution on Women’s Political Participation .

Despite these normative advances, and as universal as these goals are, they nevertheless remain elusive for many women. Progress has been too slow in increasing numbers of women in representative. In 2023, women are heads of state and/or government in only 31 countries and just 26.5 per cent of them are national parliamentarians a slow increase from 14 per cent in 2000. Women are also poorly represented in local decision-making bodies, whether as mayors or local council members. Political parties and electoral commissions often lack the capacity to ensure that women’s interests are articulated and addressed.

The UN supports women's political participation. In July 2010, the UN General Assembly created  UN Women , mandated to coordinate the gender mainstreaming work of the UN System. In doing so, UN Member States took a historic step in accelerating the Organization’s goals on gender equality and the empowerment of women. The UN’s approach to support women’s effective political participation is to make local and national elections free and fair for women, to support women’s civil society organizations, to build accountability for women’s rights in public institutions, and to support women political leaders.

Democracy, Youth, and the United Nations

More than forty percent of the global population is younger than 25. The youth faces huge challenges, such as climate change, unemployment, inequalities and exclusion. Many migrate in response. Meanwhile, young people connect and give voice to issues that matter. They use new media to fight injustice, discrimination, and human rights abuses; and take action for what they believe in. Young people also have an eloquent voice that resonates deeply with their own generation – from Malala Yousafzai on the universal right to education, to Greta Thunberg on leading the fight against climate change.

The Secretary-General made working with and for young people one of his top priorities. He appointed the first Secretary-General's Envoy on Youth, mandated with the task of developing a UN Youth Strategy. The UN General Assembly in March 2015 adopted  Education for Democracy, a resolution encouraging all UN entities to use education to promote peace, human rights, and democracy. The document encourages Member States to integrate education for democracy into their education standards.

DESA’s  World Youth Report  addresses key areas of youth development around the world. Another platform for the youth is the  ECOSOC Youth Forum , where young people can voice their needs and concerns through informal dialogue with other stakeholders. The Forum represents the most institutionalized venue for youth participation in UN deliberations and is an important vehicle to mobilize young people for implementing the 2030 Agenda.

The International Day of Democracy

The General Assembly proclaimed 15 September as the  International Day of Democracy . The observance provides an opportunity to review the state of democracy in the world. Only with the full support of the international community, national governing bodies, civil society and individuals, can the ideal of democracy be realised to the benefit of all and everywhere.

• Guidance Note of the Secretary-General on Democracy
• UNDEF: Lessons Learned
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
• Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
• Study on common challenges facing States in their efforts to secure democracy and the rule of law from a human rights perspective
• UN Youth Strategy
• Child and Youth Safety Online
• Countering Terrorism
• Disarmament

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