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E. B. White on “The Meaning of Democracy”

By The New Yorker

E. B. White on “The Meaning of Democracy”

This piece originally appeared in the Notes and Comment section of the July 3, 1943, issue of The New Yorker. “ The 40s: The Story of a Decade ,” an anthology of New Yorker articles, stories, and poems, will be released on Tuesday.

We received a letter from the Writers’ War Board the other day asking for a statement on “The Meaning of Democracy.” It presumably is our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure. Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is. — E. B. White

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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 can be found 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, the needs and wishes of the people are represented by elected lawmakers who are charged with writing and voting on laws and setting policy.
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. Statics 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, a consensus of political scientists agree that most 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. Health democracies enable and encourage the 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 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.

Originated in Ancient Greece during the 5th century BCE, 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 in setting the direction of the state and the operation of its political systems. While the two forms of government 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, 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 a 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/.
Republic vs. Democracy: What Is the Difference?
Direct Democracy: Definition, Examples, Pros and Cons
Representative Democracy: Definition, Pros, and Cons
Reasons to Keep the Electoral College
The Definition and Purpose of Political Institutions
Key Election Terms for Students
What Is a Constitutional Monarchy? Definition and Examples
What Is Political Participation? Definition and Examples
What Is Theocracy? Definition and Examples
What Is a Unitary State?
Understanding Types of Government
Democracy Promotion as Foreign Policy
Major Parliamentary Governments and How They Work
What Is Majoritarianism? Definition and Examples
What Is a Constitutionally Limited Government?
7 Points to Know About Ancient Greek Government

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1.1: Introduction - What is Democracy?

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Democracy may be a word familiar to most, but it is a concept still misunderstood and misused at a time when dictators, single-party regimes, and military coup leaders alike assert popular support by claiming the mantle of democracy. Yet the power of the democratic idea has prevailed through a long and turbulent history, and democratic government, despite continuing challenges, continues to evolve and flourish throughout the world.

Democracy, which derives from the Greek word "demos," or "people," is defined, basically, as government in which the supreme power is vested in the people. In some forms, democracy can be exercised directly by the people; in large societies, it is by the people through their elected agents. Or, in the memorable phrase of President Abraham Lincoln, democracy is government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."

Freedom and democracy are often used interchangeably, but the two are not synonymous. Democracy is indeed a set of ideas and principles about freedom, but it also consists of practices and procedures that have been molded through a long, often tortuous history. Democracy is the institutionalization of freedom.

What is democracy?

By Alain Touraine

What are we celebrating today? The downfall of authoritarian regimes or the triumph of democracy? And we think back and remember that popular movements which over threw anciens régimes have given rise to totalitarian regimes practising state terrorism. So we are initially attracted to a modest, purely liberal concept of democracy, defined negatively as a regime in which power cannot be taken or held against the will of the majority. Is it not enough of an achievement to rid the planet of all regimes not based on the free choice of government by the governed? Is this cautious concept not also the most valid, since it runs counter both to absolute power based on tradition and divine right, and also to the voluntarism that appeals to the people's interests and rights and then, in the name of its liberation and independence, imposes on it military or ideological mobilization leading to the repression of all forms of opposition?

This negative concept of democracy and freedom, expounded notably by Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, is convincing because the main thing today is to free individuals and groups from the stifling control of a governing élite speaking on behalf of the people and the nation. It is now impossible to defend an antiliberal concept of democracy, and there is no longer any doubt that the so-called "people's democracies" were dictatorships imposed on peoples by political leaders relying on foreign armies. Democracy is a matter of the free choice of government, not the pursuit of "popular" policies.

In the light of these truths, which recent events have made self-evident, the following question must be asked. Freedom of political choice is a prerequisite of democracy, but is it the only one? Is democracy merely a matter of procedure? In other words, can it be defined without reference to its ends, that is to the relationships it creates between individuals and groups? At a time when so many authoritarian regimes are collapsing, we also need to examine the content of democracy although the most urgent task is to bear in mind that democracy cannot exist without freedom of political choice.

The collapse of the revolutionary illusion

Revolutions sweep away an old order: they do not create democracy. We have now emerged from the era of revolutions, because the world is no longer dominated by tradition and religion, and because order has been largely replaced by movement. We suffer more from the evils of modernity than from those of tradition. Liberation from the past interests us less and less; we are more and more concerned about the growing totalitarian power of the new modernizers. The worst disasters and the greatest injury to human rights now stem not from conservative despotism but from modernizing totalitarianism.

We used to think that social and national revolutions were necessary prerequisites for the birth of new democracies, which would be social and cultural as well as political. This idea has become unacceptable. The end of our century is dominated by the collapse of the revolutionary illusion, both in the late capitalist countries and in the former colonies.

But if revolutions move in a direction diametrically opposed to that of democracy, this does not mean that democracy and liberalism necessarily go together. Democracy is as far removed from liberalism as it is from revolution, for both liberal and revolutionary regimes, despite their differences, have one principle in common: they both justify political action because it is consistent with natural logic.

Revolutionaries want to free social and national energies from the shackles of the capitalist profit motive and of colonial rule. Liberals call for the rational pursuit of interests and satisfaction of needs. The parallel goes even further. Revolutionary regimes subject the people to "scientific" decisions by avant-garde intellectuals, while liberal regimes subject it to the power of entrepreneurs and of the "enlightened" classes the only ones capable of rational behaviour, as the French statesman Guizot thought in the nineteenth century.

But there is a crucial difference between these two types of regime. The revolutionary approach leads to the establishment of an all-powerful central authority controlling all aspects of social life. The liberal approach, on the other hand, hastens the functional differentiation of the various areas of life politics, religion, economics, private life and art. This reduces rigidity and allows social and political conflict to develop which soon restricts the power of the economic giants.

But the weakness of the liberal approach is that by yoking together economic modernization and political liberalism it restricts democracy to the richest, most advanced and best-educated nations. In other words, elitism in the international sphere parallels social elitism in the national sphere. This tends to give a governing elite of middle-class adult men in Europe and America enormous power over the rest of the world over women, children and workers at home, as well as over colonies or dependent territories.

One effect of the expanding power of the world's economic centres is to propagate the spirit of free enterprise, commercial consumption and political freedom. Another is a growing split within the world's population between the central and the peripheral sectors the latter being not that of the subject peoples but of outcasts and marginals. Capital, resources, people and ideas migrate from the periphery and find better employment in the central sector.

The liberal system does not automatically, or naturally, become democratic as a result of redistribution of wealth and a constantly rising standard of general social participation. Instead, it works like a steam engine, by virtue of a big difference in potential between a hot pole and a cold pole. While the idea of class war, often disregarded nowadays, no longer applies to post-revolutionary societies, it still holds good as a description of aspects of liberal society that are so basic that the latter cannot be equated with democracy.

The twilight of social democracy

This analysis is in apparent contradiction with the fact that social democracy developed in the most capitalist countries, where there was a considerable redistribution of income as a result of intervention by the state, which appropriated almost half the national income and in some cases, especially in the Scandinavian countries, even more.

The main strength of the social democratic idea stems from the link it has forged between democracy and social conflict, which makes the working-class movement the main drivingforce in building a democracy, both social and political. This shows that there can be no democracy unless the greatest number subscribes to the central principles of a society and culture but also no democracy without fundamental social conflicts.

What distinguishes the democratic position from both the revolutionary and the liberal position is that it combines these two principles. But the social democratic variant of these principles is now growing weaker, partly because the central societies are emerging from industrial society and entering post-industrial society or a society without a dominant model, and partly because we are now witnessing the triumph of the international market and the weakening of state intervention, even in Europe.

So Swedish social democracy, and most parties modelled on social democracy, arc anxiously wondering what can survive of the policies constructed in the middle of the century. In some countries the trade union movement has lost much of its strength and many of its members. This is particularly true in France, the United States and Spain, but also in the United Kingdom to say nothing of the excommunist countries, where trade unions long ago ceased to be an independent social force. In nearly all countries trade unionism is moving out of the industrial workplace and turning into neocorporatism, a mechanism for protecting particular professional interests within the machinery of the state: and this leads to a backlash in the form of wild-cat strikes and the spread of parallel ad hoc organizations.

So we come to the most topical question about democracy: if it presupposes both participation and conflict, but if its social-democratic version is played out, what place does it occupy today? What is the specific nature of democratic action, and what is the "positive" content of democracy? In answering these questions we must first reject any single principle: we must equate human freedom neither with the universalism of pragmatic reason (and hence of interest) nor with the culture of a community. Democracy can neither be solely liberal nor completely popular.

Unlike revolutionary historicism and liberal utilitarianism, democratic thinking today starts from the overt and insurmountable conflict between the two faces of modern society. On the one hand is the liberal face of a continually changing society, whose efficiency is based on the maximization of trade, and on the circulation of money, power, and information. On the other is the opposing image, that of a human being who resists market forces by appealing to subjectivity the latter meaning both a desire for individual freedom and also a response to tradition, to a collective memory. A society free to arbitrate between these two conflicting demands that of the free market and that of individual and collective humanity, that of money and that of identity may be termed democratic.

The main difference as compared with the previous stage, that of social democracy and the industrial society, is that the terms used are much further apart than before. We are now concerned not with employers and wage-earners, associated in a working relationship, but with subjectivity and the circulation of symbolic goods.

These terms may seem abstract, but they are no more so than employers and wage-earners. They denote everyday experiences for most people in the central societies, who are aware that they live in a consumer society at the same time as in a subjective world. But it is true that these conflicting facets of people's lives have not so far found organized political expression just as it took almost a century for the political categories inherited from the French Revolution to be superseded by the class categories specific to industrial society. It is this political time-lag that so often compels us to make do with a negative definition of democracy.

Arbitration

Democracy is neither purely participatory nor purely liberal. It above all entails arbitrating, and this implies recognition of a central conflict between tendencies as dissimilar as investment and participation, or communication and subjectivity. This concept can be adapted to the most affluent post-industrializing countries and to those which dominate the world system; but does it also apply to the rest of the world, to the great majority of the planet?

A negative reply would almost completely invalidate the foregoing argument. But in Third World countries today arbitration must first and foremost find a way between exposure to world markets (essential because it determines competitiveness) and the protection of a personal and collective identity from being devalued or becoming an arbitrary ideological construct.

Let us take the example of the Latin American countries, most of which fall into the category of intermediate countries. They are fighting hard and often successfully to regain and then increase the share of world trade they once possessed. They participate in mass culture through consumer goods, television programmes, production techniques and educational programmes. But at the same time they are reacting against a crippling absorption into the world economic, political and cultural system which is making them increasingly dependent. They are trying to be both universalist and particularist, both modern and faithful to their history and culture.

Unless politics manages to organize arbitration between modernity and identity, it cannot fulfil the first prerequisite of democracy, namely to be representative. The result is a dangerous rift between grass-roots movements seeking to defend the individuality of communities, and political parties, which are no more than coalitions formed to achieve power by supporting a candidate.

The main difference between the central countries and the peripheral ones is that in the former a person is defined primarily in terms of personal freedom, but also as a consumer, whereas in the latter the defence of collective identity may still be more important, to the extent that there is pressure from abroad to impose some kind of bloodless revolution in the form of compulsory modernization on the pattern of other countries.

This conception of democracy as a process of arbitration between conflicting components of social life involves something more than the idea of majority government. It implies above all recognition of one component by another, and of each component by all the others, and hence an awareness both of the similarities and the differences between them. It is this that most sharply distinguishes the "arbitral" concept from the popular or revolutionary view of democracy, which so often carries with it the idea of eliminating minorities or categories opposed to what is seen as progress.

In many parts of the world today there is open warfare between a kind of economic modernization which disrupts the fabric of society, and attachment to beliefs. Democracy cannot exist so long as modernization and identity are regarded as contradictory in this way. Democracy rests not only on a balance or compromise between different forces, but also on their partial integration. Those for whom progress means making a clean sweep of the past and of tradition are just as much the enemies of democracy as those who see modernization as the work of the devil. A society can only be democratic if it recognizes both its unity and its internal conflicts.

Hence the crucial importance, in a democratic society, of the law and the idea of justice, defined as the greatest possible degree of compatibility between the interests involved. The prime criterion of justice is the greatest possible freedom for the greatest possible number of actors. The aim of a democratic society is to produce and to. respect the greatest possible amount of diversity, with the participation of the greatest possible number in the institutions and products of the community.

Alain Touraine

French sociologist, Alain Touraine is director of studies and director of the Centre for Sociological Analysis and Intervention (CADIS) at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, Paris. Among his works published in English are Return of the Actor (1985) and T he Voice and the Eye: The Analysis of Social Movements (1981).

1. Democracy Defined

2.1 instrumentalism, 2.2 non-instrumental values, 3.1 some solutions offered for the problem of democratic citizenship, 3.2 the self-interest assumption, 3.3 the role of citizenship as choosers of aims, 4. legislative representation, 5.1 instrumentalist conceptions of democratic authority, 5.2 democratic consent theories of authority, 5.3 limits to the authority of democracy, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries.

To fix ideas, the term “democracy,” as I will use it in this article, refers very generally to a method of group decision making characterized by a kind of equality among the participants at an essential stage of the collective decision making. Four aspects of this definition should be noted. First, democracy concerns collective decision making, by which I mean decisions that are made for groups and that are binding on all the members of the group. Second, this definition means to cover a lot of different kinds of groups 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. Third, the definition is not intended to carry any normative weight to it. It is quite 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 an assembly where there is competition among candidates for the position. Or it may be more robust, including equality in the processes of deliberation and coalition building. “Democracy” may refer to any of these political arrangements. It may involve direct participation 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. For instance, Joseph Schumpeter argues (1956, chap. XXI), with some force, that only a highly formal kind of democracy in which citizens vote in an electoral process for the purpose of selecting competing elites is highly desirable while a conception of democracy that draws on a more ambitious conception of equality is dangerous. On the other hand, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762, Book II, chap. 1) is apt to argue that the formal variety of democracy is akin to slavery while only robustly egalitarian democracies have political legitimacy. Others have argued that democracy is not desirable at all. To evaluate their arguments we must decide on the merits of the different principles and conceptions of humanity and society from which they proceed.

2. The Justification of Democracy

We can evaluate democracy along at least two different dimensions: consequentially, by reference to the outcomes of using it compared with other methods of political decision making; or intrinsically, by reference to qualities that are inherent in the method, for example, whether there is something inherently fair about making democratic decisions on matters on which people disagree.

2.1.1 Instrumental Arguments in Favor of Democracy

Two kinds of in instrumental benefits are commonly attributed to democracy: relatively good laws and policies and improvements in the characters of the participants. John Stuart Mill argued that a democratic method of making legislation is better than non-democratic methods in three ways: strategically, epistemically and via the improvement of the characters of democratic citizens (Mill, 1861, Chapter 3). Strategically, democracy has an advantage because it forces decision-makers to take into account the interests, rights and opinions of most people in society. Since democracy gives some political power to each, more people are taken into account than under aristocracy or monarchy. The most forceful contemporary statement of this instrumental argument is provided by Amartya Sen, who argues, for example, 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.

Epistemologically, democracy is thought to be the best decision-making method on the grounds that it is generally more reliable in helping participants discover the right decisions. Since democracy brings a lot of people into the process of decision making, it can take advantage of many sources of information and critical assessment of laws and policies. Democratic decision-making tends to be more informed than other forms about the interests of citizens and the causal mechanisms necessary to advance those interests. Furthermore, the broad based discussion typical of democracy enhances the critical assessment of the different moral ideas that guide decision-makers.

Many have endorsed democracy on the basis of the proposition that democracy has beneficial effects on character. Many have noted 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 them more than monarchy or aristocracy do. Hence, in democratic societies individuals are encouraged to be more autonomous. In addition, democracy tends to get people to think carefully and rationally more than other forms of rule because it makes a difference whether they do or not. Finally, some have argued 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 come genuinely to think in terms of the common good and justice. Hence, some have argued that democratic processes tend to enhance the autonomy, rationality 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, p. 74, Elster 2002, p. 152).

Some argue in addition that the above effects on character tend to enhance the quality of legislation as well. A society of autonomous, rational, and moral decision-makers is more likely to produce good legislation than a society ruled by a self-centered person or small group of persons who rule over slavish and unreflective subjects.

More detailed knowledge of the effects of political institutions can be used to discriminate in favor of particular kinds of democratic institutions or modifications of them. For instance in the United States, James Madison argued in favor of a fairly strong federal government on the grounds that local governments are more likely to be oppressive to minorities (Madison, Hamilton and Jay 1788, n. 10). Of course the soundness of any of the above arguments depends on the truth or validity of the associated substantive views about justice and the common good as well as the causal theories of the consequences of different institutions.

2.1.2 Instrumental Arguments against Democracy

Not all instrumental arguments favor democracy. Plato ( Republic , Book VI) 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 properly governed societies. In a democracy, he argues, those who are expert at winning elections and nothing else will eventually dominate democratic politics. Democracy tends to emphasize this expertise at the expense of the expertise that is necessary to properly governed societies. The reason for this is that most people do not have the kinds of 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.

Hobbes (1651, chap. XIX) argues that democracy is inferior to monarchy because democracy fosters destabilizing dissension among subjects. But his skepticism is not based in a conception that most people are not intellectually fit for politics. 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. For Hobbes, then, democracy has deleterious effects on subjects and politicians and consequently on the quality of the outcomes of collective decision making.

Many public choice theorists in contemporary economic thought expand on these Hobbesian criticisms. They argue that citizens are not informed about politics and that they are often apathetic, which 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 else. Some of them argue for giving over near complete control over society to the market, on the grounds that more extensive democracy tends to produce serious economic inefficiencies. More modest versions of these arguments have been used to justify modification of democratic institutions.

2.1.3 Grounds for Instrumentalism

Instrumentalists argue that these instrumental arguments for and against the democratic process are the only bases on which to evaluate democracy or compare it with other forms of political decision making. There are a number of different kinds of argument for instrumentalism. One kind of argument proceeds from a certain kind of moral theory. For example classical utilitarianism simply has no room in its fundamental value theory for the ideas of intrinsic fairness, 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. And there are many moral theories of this sort.

But one need not be a thoroughgoing consequentialist 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 2002, pp. 96-97).

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. 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 1980, p. 116). 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, so it cannot be intrinsically fair or just (Dworkin 2000, ch. 4 [originally published in 1987]). In later work, Dworkin has pulled back from this originally thoroughgoing instrumentalism (Dworkin 2000, ch. 10 [originally published in 1999]).

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. The most common of these come broadly under the rubrics of liberty and equality.

2.2.1 Liberty

Some argue that the basic principles of democracy are founded in the idea that each individual has a right to liberty. Democracy, it is said, extends the idea that each ought to be master of his or her life to the domain of collective decision making. First, each person's life is deeply affected by the larger social, legal and cultural environment in which he or she lives. Second, only when each person has an equal voice and vote in the process of collective decision-making will each have control over this larger environment. Thinkers such as Carol Gould (1988, pp.45-85) conclude that only when some kind of democracy is implemented, will individuals have a chance at self-government. Since individuals have a right of self-government, they have a right to democratic participation. This right is established at least partly independently of the worth of the outcomes of democratic decision making. 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.

Here we can see the makings of an argument against instrumentalism. To the extent that an instrumentalist wishes to diminish a person's power to contribute to the democratic process for the sake of enhancing the quality of decisions, he is committed to thinking that there is no moral loss in the fact that our power has been diminished. But if the liberty argument is correct our right to control our lives is violated by this.

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.

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. And so it is hard to see how any political decision making method can respect everyone's liberty.

2.2.2 Democracy as Public Justification

One distant relative of the self-government approach is the account of democracy as a process of public justification defended by, among others, Joshua Cohen (2002, p. 21). 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. Citizens justify laws and policies to each other 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 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 to this kind of worry. 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.

Another set of worries concerning this approach arises when we ask what reason there is for trying to ensure that political decisions are grounded in principles that everyone can reasonably accept. What is the basis of this need for consensus? To be sure, the consensus that is aimed at is reasonable consensus among reasonable persons. Reasonable consensus does not imply actual consensus. The unreasonable persons in society need not agree with the terms of association arrived at by reasonable persons in order for those terms to be legitimate.

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. The notion of the reasonable is meant to be fairly weak on this account. One can reasonably reject a doctrine to the extent that it is incompatible with one's own doctrine as long as one's doctrine does not imply imposition on others and it is a doctrine that has survived sustained critical reflection. So this principle is a kind of principle of reciprocity. 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 not propose laws and policies on the basis of controversial principles for the regulation of society. 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, 1996, Lecture IV). This is meant to obviate the need for a complete consensus on the principles that regulate society.

What moral reasons can there be for restraining oneself from offering what one takes to be the best justified proposals for the terms of the society one lives in? One might consider a number of arguments for this principle of reasonableness. One argument is an epistemological one. It is that there is no justification independent of what people or at least reasonable people believe. Hence, if one cannot provide a justification for principles that others can accept given their reasonable beliefs then those principles are not justified for those persons. Another argument is a moral argument. One fails to respect the reason of the other members of society if one imposes terms of association on them that they cannot accept given their reasonable views. This failure of respect for the reason of the other members of society defeats the value of the principles one is proposing for the society. A third argument is a specifically democratic argument. One does not genuinely treat others as equals if one insists on imposing principles on them that they cannot reasonably accept, even if this imposition takes place against the background of egalitarian decision making processes.

Each of these three arguments can be questioned. On the democratic argument, it simply isn’t clear why it is necessary to democratic equality to justify ones views on terms that others can accept. If each person has robust rights to participate in debate and decision making and each person's views are given a reasonable hearing, it is not clear why equality requires more. My rejection of another person's beliefs does not in any way imply that I think that person is inferior to me in capacity or in moral worth or in the rights to have a say in society. The epistemological argument seems to presuppose a far too restrictive conception of justification to be plausible. Many beliefs are justified for me even if they are not compatible with the political beliefs I currently hold as long as those beliefs can be vindicated by the use of procedures and methods of thinking that I use to evaluate beliefs. The conception of respect for reason in the moral argument seems not obviously to favor the principle of reasonableness. It may require that I do as much as I can to make sure that the society I live in conform to what I take to be rationally defensible norms. Of course, I may also believe that such a society must be democratically organized in which case I will attempt to advance these principles through the democratic process.

Moreover, 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.

2.2.3 Equality

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. On one version, defended by Peter Singer (1973, pp. 30-41), 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. But these claims to dictatorship cannot all hold up, the argument goes. 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).

One difficulty is that this view relies on agreement much as the liberty views described above. 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.

Another egalitarian defense of democracy asserts that it publicly embodies the equal advancement of the interests of the citizens of a society when there is disagreement about how best to organize their shared life. The idea is that a society ought to be structured to advance equally the interests of the members of the society. And the equality of members ought to be advanced in a way that each can see that they are being treated as equals. So it requires equal advancement of interests in accordance with a public measure of those interests. Hence, justice requires the publicly equal advancement of the interests of the members of society or public equality.

The idea of public equality requires some explanation. If we start with the principle of equal advancement of interests, we will want to know what it implies. Does it imply equality of well being or equality of opportunity for well being or equality of resources? There are other possibilities but the problem with these accounts is that they cannot be realized in a way that every conscientious and informed person can know them to be in place. So even if one of these principles is implemented many will think that they are not being treated equally. There are likely to be too many disagreements about what each person's well being consists in and how to compare it to the well being of others. The question for a political society is, is there a kind of equality that genuinely advances equally the interests of the members of the society but that does so in a way that all conscientious and informed people can agree treats them as equals? And the answer to this question must be informed by background facts of diversity, cognitive bias, fallibility and disagreement. Public equality is the realization of equality of advancement of interests that all can see to be such a realization. And the basic argument for democracy is that it realizes equality of advancement of interests when we take the background facts above into account.

Now the idea is that public equality is a great value. The importance of publicity itself is grounded in equality. Given the facts of diversity, cognitive bias, fallibility and disagreement, each will have reason to think that if they are ruled in accordance with some specific notion of equality advanced by some particular group that their interests are likely to be set back in some way. Only a conception of equality that can be shared by the members of society can give good reason to think that this will not happen. Within the context set by public equality, people can argue for more specific implementations of equality among citizens in law and policy all the while knowing that there will be substantial and conscientious disagreement on them. As long as the framework within which they make and vote for opposing views is set by public equality, they can know that at base, the society treats them as equals in a way that they can recognize.

The publicly equal advancement of interests requires that individuals’ judgments be taken into account equally when there is disagreement. Here is the argument for the transition from equal concern for interests to equal concern for judgment. Respect for each citizen's judgment is grounded in the principle of public equality combined with a number of basic facts and fundamental interests that attend social life in typical societies. The basic facts are that individuals are very diverse in terms of their interests. People's interests are diverse because of their different natural talents, because they are raised in different sectors of society and because they are raised in societies where there is a diversity of cultural backgrounds. Partly as a consequence of the fact that people are raised in different sectors of society and in distinct cultural milieus they are likely to have deep cognitive biases when they attempt to understand other people's interests and how they are compared to their own interests. Those biases will tend to assimilate other people's interests to their own in some circumstances or downplay them when there is a wide divergence of interests. Hence people have deep cognitive biases towards their own interests. The facts of diversity and of cognitive bias ensure that individuals are highly fallible in their understanding of their own and others’ interests and that there will be considerable disagreement among them. And they are likely to be highly fallible in their efforts to compare the importance of other people's interests to their own. So they are highly fallible in their efforts to realize equal advancement of interests in society. And of course there will be a lot of substantial disagreement about how best to advance each person's interests equally.

Against the background of these facts each person has interests that stand out as especially important in a pluralistic society. They have interests in correcting for the cognitive biases of others when it comes to the creation or revision of common economic, legal and political institutions. And each person has interests in living in a world that makes some sense to them, that accords, within limits, to their sense of how that social world out to be structured. The facts described above, and the principle of equality, suggest that each person ought to have an equal say in determining the common legal, economic and political institutions they live under. In the light of these interests each citizen would have good reason to think that his or her interests were not being given the same weight as others if he or she had less decision making power than the others. And so each person who is deprived of a right to an equal say would have reason to believe that she is being treated publicly as an inferior. Furthermore, since each person has an interest in being recognized as an equal member of the community, and having less than an equal say suggests that they are being treated as inferiors, only equality in decision making power is compatible with the public equal advancement of interests. The principle of equal advancement of interests also implies limits to what can be up for democratic control and so the infinite regress noted above is avoided.

So against the background facts of diversity, cognitive bias, fallibility and disagreement each person has fundamental interests in having an equal say in the processes of collective decision making. And so in order for people to be treated publicly as equals they must have an equal say in collective decision making (Christiano, 2004).

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 equality and even with public equality. Second, the kind of view defended above is susceptible to the criticisms leveled against the ideal of equality in decision making processes. Is it a coherent ideal, in particular in the modern state? 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.

3. The Problem of Democratic Citizenship

A vexing problem of democratic theory has been to determine whether ordinary citizens are up to the task of governing a large society. There are three distinct problems here. First, Plato ( Republic , Book VI) argued that some people are more intelligent and more moral than others and that those persons ought to rule. Second, 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?

Third, 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 a vote will affect the outcome of an election are nearly indistinguishable from zero. Worse still, Anthony Downs has argued (1957, chap. 13) that almost all of those who do vote have little reason to become informed about how best to vote. 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.

3.1.1 Elite Theory of Democracy

Some modern theorists of democracy, called elite theorists, have argued against any robustly egalitarian or deliberative forms of democracy on these grounds. 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. The alternative, they believe, is a highly motivated population of persons who know nothing and who are more likely than not to pursue irrational and emotionally appealing aims.

Joseph Schumpeter's assertion that the “democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote” (1956, p. 269), still stands as a concise statement of the elitist view. In this view, the emphasis is placed on responsible political leadership. 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 in the process of competition 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.

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 democracy, even on this stripped down version, plays some role in protecting society from the worst politicians.

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. Against the liberty and equality arguments, the elite theory simply rejects the possibility that citizens can participate as equals. The society must be ruled by elites and the role of citizens is merely to ensure smooth and peaceful circulation of elites. Against the public justification view, ordinary citizens cannot be expected to participate in public deliberation and the views of elites ought not to be fundamentally transformed by general public deliberation. To be sure, it is conceivable for all that has been said that 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. Indeed, some deliberative democrats do emphasize deliberation in legislative assemblies though in general deliberative democrats favor a more broadly egalitarian approach to deliberation, which is vulnerable to the kinds of worries raised by Schumpeter and Downs.

3.1.2 Interest Group Pluralism

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 sale tax” (Dahl 1959, p. 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. And it attempts to do this in a way that gives citizens a key role in decision making. The account ensures that individuals can participate roughly as equals to the extent that it narrowly confines the issues each individual is concerned with. It is not particularly compatible with the deliberative public justification approach because it eschews deliberation about the common good or about justice. And it takes the democratic process to be concerned essentially with bargaining among the different interest groups where the preferences to be advanced by each group is not subject to further debate in the society as a whole. To be sure, there might be some deliberation within interest groups but it will not be society wide.

3.1.3 Neo-Liberalism

A third approach inspired by the problem of citizenship may be called the neo-liberal approach to politics favored by public choice theorists such as James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock (1965). 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. As a consequence, interest groups will not form very easily. Only those interest groups that are guided by powerful economic interests are likely to succeed in organizing to influence the government. Hence, only some interest groups will succeed in influencing government and they will do so largely for the benefit of the powerful economic elites that fund and guide them. Furthermore, they argue that such interest groups will tend to produce highly inefficient government because they will attempt to advance their interests in politics while spreading the costs to others. The consequence of this is that policies will be created that 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 argue that any way of organizing a large and powerful democratic state is likely to produce serious inefficiencies. They 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. The assumptions that lead neo-liberals to be skeptical about the large modern state imply equally disturbing problems for the large private concentrations of wealth in a neo-liberal society.

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. While these ideas have generated interesting results and have become ever more sophisticated, there has been a growing chorus of opponents. Against the self-interest axiom, defenders of deliberative democracy and others claim that citizens are capable of being motivated by a concern for the common good and justice. And they claim, with Mill and Rousseau, that such concerns are not merely given prior to politics but that they can evolve and improve through the process of discussion and debate in politics. 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. Accordingly, many propose that democratic institutions be designed to support the inclination to engage in moral and open-minded discussion with others (see the essays in Mansbridge 1990).

Once we approach the idea of citizenship from a moral point of view and we recognize the importance of a division of labor, the question arises, what is the appropriate role for a citizen in a democracy? If we think that citizens are too often uninformed 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? Some, such as Dahl in the above quote, have proposed that citizens know about their particular sectors of society and not others. We have seen that this view has a number of difficulties. Christiano proposes, along with others, 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, chap. 5). This kind of view needs to answer to the problem of how to ensure that politicians, administrators and experts actually do attempt to realize the aims set by citizens. And it must show how institutions can be designed so as to establish the division of labor while preserving equality among citizens. But 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.

It is hard to see how citizens can satisfy any even moderate standards for beliefs about out how best to achieve their political aims. Knowledge of means requires an immense amount of social science and knowledge of particular facts. For citizens to have this kind of knowledge generally would require that we abandon the division of labor in society. On the other hand, citizens do have first hand and daily experience with thinking about the values and aims they pursue. This gives them a chance to satisfy standards of belief regarding what the best aims are.

Still the view is not defensible without a compelling institutional answer to the question of how to ensure that others are genuinely pursuing the means to achieve the aims specified by citizens. On the proposed view, legislative representatives and bureaucrats as well as judges must subordinate their activities to the task of figuring out how to pursue the aims of citizens. There is a huge principal/agent problem here.

Furthermore, we must ask, how must institutions be designed in order to reconcile the demand for equality among citizens with the need for a division of labor? We will discuss one dimension of this issue in the question of legislative representation.

A number of debates have centered on the question of what kinds of legislative institution are best for a democratic society. What choice we make here will depend heavily on our underlying ethical 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 present most prominently in the United States and the United Kingdom. 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 (1989, chap. 7) that single member district representation encourages moderation in party programs offered for citizens to consider. 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. 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.

Another criticism of single member district representation is that it encourages parties to pursue dubious electoral campaign strategies. The need to appeal to a large, diverse and somewhat amorphous sector of the population can very often be best met by using ambiguous, vague and often quite irrelevant appeals to the citizens. Thus instead of encouraging reasonable compromise the scheme tends to support tendencies towards ignorance, superficiality and fatuousness in political campaigns and in the citizenry. It encourages political leaders to take care of the real issues of politics in back rooms while they appeal to citizens by means of smoke and mirrors. Of course, those who agree in the main with the elitist type theories will see nothing wrong in this, indeed they may well champion this effect. Proportional representation requires that parties be relatively clear and up front about their proposals, so those who believe that democracy is ethically grounded in the appeal to equality tend to favor proportional representation (see Christiano 1996, chap. 6).

Advocates of group representation, like Iris Marion Young (1990, chap. 6), have argued that some historically disenfranchised groups may still not do very well under proportional representation. 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 frieze 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.

5. The Authority of Democracy

Since democracy is a collective decision process, the question naturally arises about whether there is any obligation of citizens to obey the democratic decision. In particular, the question arises as to whether a citizen has an obligation to obey the democratic decision when he or she disagrees 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 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?

With respect to democracy we can imagine three main approaches to the question as to whether democratic decisions have authority. First, we can appeal to perfectly general conceptions of legitimate authority. Some have thought that the question of authority is independent entirely of whether a state is democratic. Consent theories of political authority and instrumentalist conceptions of political authority state general criteria of political authority that can be met by non democratic as well as democratic states. Second, some have thought that there is a conceptual link between democracy and authority such that if a decision is made democratically then it must therefore have authority. Third, some have thought that there are general principles of political authority that are uniquely realized by a democratic state under certain well defined conditions.

Readers who are interested in more general conceptions of political authority may consult the entry for political authority for a discussion of the issues. And the second kind of view has been largely abandoned by democratic theorists. I do wish to discuss the third kind of conception of the political authority of democracy.

In general, instrumentalist conceptions of authority make no special mention of democracy. The instrumental arguments for democracy give some reason for why one ought to respect the democracy when one disagrees with its decisions. But there may be many other 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 approach inspired by the Condorcet Jury Theorem (Goodin, 2003, chap. 5; Estlund, 2002, 77-80). According to this theorem, on issues where there are two alternatives and there is a correct answer as to which one is correct, if voters have on average a better than even chance of getting the right answer, the majority is more likely to have the right answer than anyone in the minority. And the likelihood that the majority is right increases as the size of the voting population increases. In very large populations, the chance that the majority is right approaches certainty. The theorem is an instance of the law of large numbers. If each voter has an independently better than 0.5 chance of getting the right answer then the probability that more than 0.5 of the voters get the right answer approaches 1 as the number of voters becomes very large.

Such a result makes sense of Rousseau's famous passage: “Each citizen, in giving his suffrage, states his mind on that question [concerning what the general will is]; and the general will is found by counting the votes. When, therefore, the motion which I opposed carries, it only proves to me that I was mistaken and that what I believed to be the general will was not so” (Rousseau 1762, 95-96). On this account, we have a conception of the authority of democracy. 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.

There are a number of difficulties with the application of the Condorcet Jury Theorem to the case of voting in elections and referenda. First, many have remarked that voters’ opinions are not independent of each other. Indeed, the democratic process seems to emphasize persuasion and coalition building. And the theorem only works on independent trials. 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 so that some sectors of the society do not have the relevant information while others do have it. And 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. One can always have good reason to think that the majority is not properly placed to make a reasonable decision on a certain issue when one is in the minority. Finally, all voters approach issues they have to make decisions on with strong ideological biases thus undermining the sense that each voter is bringing a kind of independent observation on the nature of the common good to the vote.

One further worry about the Condorcet Theorem's application seems to be that it would prove too much anyway for it undermines the common practice of the loyal opposition in democracies. Indeed, 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, chap. 7).

Some consent theorists have thought that there is a special relation between democracy and legitimate authority at least under certain conditions. John Locke argues (1690, sec. 96) that when a person consents to the creation of a political society, he necessarily consents to the use of majority rule in deciding how the political society is to be organized. Locke thinks that majority rule is the natural decision rule when there are no other ones. He argues that once a society is formed it 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.

To be sure, Locke thinks that a people, which is formed by individuals in consenting 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 when taxes may be 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. How democratic this conception is depends on how we understand property in Locke's discussion. If it includes the rights of citizens generally, then we have an argument for democratic decision making. But if the idea of property only includes holders of private property then we have an argument for, at best, a highly attenuated form of democratic decision making.

Another consent-based argument for the claim that democracy is necessary for legitimate authority asserts that when people participate in the democratic process, by their act of participation they consent to the outcome, even if it goes against them. Their participation thereby lends legitimacy to the outcome and perhaps even to the democratic assembly that is elected by citizens. On this account, the acts of voting, for example, are also acts of consent to the outcome of the voting. So participants are thereby obligated to comply with the decision made by the majority.

The problem with all these variations on consent theory is that they face a worrisome dilemma. On the one hand, they seem to involve highly suspect interpretations of behaviors that may or may not imply the kinds of consent that these theorists have in mind. Hume's worries about consent theorists’ interpreting residence in a territory as consent to its government have close analogs in this kind of context (Hume, 1748, p. 263). Why suppose that a person's vote is understood by that person to be consent to the outcome of the vote. Why not suppose that the person is merely trying to have an impact on the outcome? Or why suppose that a person's membership in society—the “consent” signaled by remaining in the society—really commits him to agreeing that decisions must be made by majority rule?

On the other hand, if we eschew the interpretative route the only way to think of the person's vote as constituting consent is if we think that the person ought to consent to the outcome or ought to know that he is consenting to the outcome. The fact that they ought to consent to the outcome because they have participated is sufficient, on some views, to produce an obligation. And the thesis that they ought to know that they consent is usually grounded in the idea that it they ought to be consenting when they vote. But this kind of view seems to get far away from the basic idea of consent theorists, which is that whether persons consent or not should be up to them and should not be determined by the correct moral view. Consent theory is grounded in the need a way to think of government has legitimacy when people disagree about whether it is just or right.

5.2.1 Liberty and Authority

The liberty approaches to the justification of democracy provide alternative approaches to the idea of the authority of democracy. The idea here is that democracy has authority to the extent that people freely bring about the democratic decision. The reason for this is that democracy merely extends their activity of self-determination to the political realm. To the extent that self-determination is an preeminent value and democracy extends it to the political realm, allegiance to democratic decisions is necessary to self-determination and therefore is required by virtue of the pre eminent importance of self-determination.

But here is a worry about this kind of approach. It seems either to presuppose that decisions will have unanimous support or it requires a number of substantive conditions on self-determination, which conditions do a lot of the work of generating obligations to democracy. For instance, if a decision must be made by majority rule, one strategy for reconciling this with self-determination is to say that a self-determining person must accept the legitimacy of majority rule when there is disagreement. This may be because the self-determining person must accept the fundamental importance of equality and majority rule is essential to equality under circumstances of disagreement. So if one argues that one cannot be self-determining unless one accepts equality then one might be able to argue that the self-determining person must accept the results of majority rule. But this argument seems to make the authority of democracy depend primarily on the importance of equality. And one must wonder about the importance of the idea of self-determination to the account.

5.2.2 Equality and Authority

Another approach to the question of the authority of democracy asserts that failing to obey the decisions of a democratic assembly amounts to treating one's fellow citizens as inferiors (Christiano 2004, 284-287). And this approach establishes the authority of democracy by claiming that the inequality involved in failing to obey the democratic assembly is the most important form of inequality. It is more important to treat persons as equals in political decision making on this account than it is to treat them as equals in the economic sphere. The idea is that citizens will disagree on how to treat each other as equals in the areas of substantive law and policy. It is the purpose of democracy to make decisions when these disagreements arise. Democracy realizes a kind of equality among persons that all can share allegiance to even when they disagree about many matters relating to substantive law and policy. Since democracy realizes equality in a highly public manner and publicity is a great and egalitarian value, the equality realized by democracy trumps other kinds of equality.

The conception of democracy as grounded in public equality provides some reason to think that democratic equality must have some pre-eminence over other kinds of equality. The idea is that public equality is the most important form of equality and that democracy, as well as some other principles such as liberal rights, are unique realizations of 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). So the principle of public equality requires that one treat others publicly as equals and democracy is necessary to doing this. Since public equality has precedence over other forms of equality, citizens have obligations to abide by the democratic process even if their favored conceptions of equality are passed by in the decision making process.

Of course, there will be limits on what citizens must accept from a democratic assembly. And these limits, on the egalitarian account, must be understood as deriving from the fundamental value of equality. So, one might think that public equality also requires protection of liberal rights and perhaps even the provision of an economic minimum.

If democracy does have authority, what are the limits to that 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. First, it is worthwhile to distinguish between different kinds of moral limit to authority. We might distinguish between internal and external limits to democratic authority. An internal limit to democratic authority is a limit that arises from the requirements of democratic process or a limit that arises from the principles that underpin democracy. An external limit on the authority of democracy is a limit that arises from principles that are independent of the values or requirements of democracy. Furthermore, some limits to democratic authority are rebutting limits, which are principles that weigh in the balance against the principles that support democratic decision making. Some considerations may simply outweigh in importance the considerations that support democratic authority. 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.

On the other hand some 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.

5.3.1 Internal Limits to Democratic Authority

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 (1690, chap. XI) gives an account of the internal limits of democracy in his idea that there are certain things to which a citizen may not consent. She may not consent to arbitrary rule or the violation of fundamental rights including democratic and liberal rights. To the extent that consent is the basis of democratic authority for Locke, this suggests that there are limits to what a democratic assembly may do that derive from the very principles that ground the authority. And these limits simply undermine the right of the assembly to rule in these cases since they are not things to which citizens can consent. 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.

The conception of democratic authority that grounds it in public equality also provides an account of the limits of that authority. 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.

5.3.2 Persistent Minorities

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. 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.

5.3.3 External Limits to Democratic Authority

One natural kind of limit to democratic authority is the external rebutting 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. 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 rebutting limits to democracy.

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[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

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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Jon Meacham on E.B. White and American Democracy

"white’s patriotism is clear-eyed; his nationalism nonexistent.".

To hold America in one’s thoughts is like holding a love letter in one’s hand—it has so special a meaning. –E.B. White

Franklin D. Roosevelt couldn’t get enough of the piece. At the suggestion of his advisor Harry Hopkins, the New Dealer turned wartime consigliere, the president of the United States took a moment away from the pressures of global war to read a July 3, 1943, “Notes and Comment ” essay from The New Yorker . Occasioned by a letter from the Writers’ War Board, a group of authors devoted to shaping public opinion about the Allied effort in World War II—the board was led by the mystery novelist Rex Stout, the creator of Nero Wolfe, the orchid-loving New York City detective—the small item tackled the largest of subjects. Speaking in the magazine’s omniscient vernacular, the New Yorker author wrote, “We received a letter from the Writers’ War Board the other day asking for a statement on ‘The Meaning of Democracy,”‘ continuing:

Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in rationed coffee.

FDR thought it brilliant. “I LOVE IT!” he said, “with a sort of rising inflection on the word ‘love,”‘ according to the Hopkins biographer and playwright Robert E. Sherwood. The president read the piece to different gatherings, punctuating his recitation with a homey coda (or at least as homey as the squire of Hyde Park ever got): “Them’s my sentiments exactly.”

They were, importantly, the sentiments of the author of the “Notes and Comment,” the longtime New Yorker contributor E.B. White, whose writings of freedom and democracy captivate us still, all these years distant. Few things are as perishable as prose written for magazines (sermons come close, as do the great majority of political speeches), but White, arguably the finest occasional essayist of the 20th century, endures because he wrote plainly and honestly about the things that matter the most, from life on his farm in Maine to the lives of nations and of peoples. Known popularly more for his books for children ( Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little ) than for his corpus of essays, White is that rarest of figures, a writer whose ordinary run of work is so extraordinary that it repays our attention decades after his death.

White lived and wrote through several of the most contentious hours in our history, ones in which America itself felt at best in the dock and at worst on the scaffold. The Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthyite Red Scare, the Cold War, the civil rights movement—all unfolded under White’s watchful eye as he composed pieces for The New Yorker and for Harper’s . He was especially gifted at evoking the universal through the exploration of the particular, which is one of the cardinal tasks of the essayist. His work touched on politics but was not, in the popular sense, political, and the writings here underscore the role of the quiet observer in the great dramas of history. For White was not a charismatic speaker—he avoided the platform all his life—nor was he an activist or even a partisan in the way we think of the terms. He was, rather, a wry but profound voice in the large chorus of American life.

In the first days of World War II, in the lovely American September of 1939, after Nazi Germany launched the invasion of Poland, plunging Europe into a war that would last nearly six years, White described a day spent on the waters in Maine. “It struck me as we worked our way homeward up the rough bay with our catch of lobsters and a fresh breeze in our teeth that this was what the fight was all about,” he wrote. “This was it. Either we would continue to have it or we wouldn’t, this right to speak our own minds, haul our own traps, mind our own business, and wallow in the wide, wide sea.”

That fight seems to be unfolding still in the first decades of the 21st century, a time when an opportunistic real estate and reality TV showman from White’s beloved New York has risen to the pinnacle of American politics by marshaling and, in some cases, manufacturing fears about changing demography and identity in the life of the Republic. We can’t know for certain what White would have made of Trump or of Twitter, but we can safely say that E. B. White’s America, the one described in this collection, is a better, fairer, and more congenial place than the 45th president’s.

Reflecting on the Munich Pact of 1938, the agreement, negotiated by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, that emboldened Adolf Hitler to press on with his campaign to build a 1,000-year Reich, White wrote, “Old England, eating swastika for breakfast instead of kipper, is a sight I had as lief not lived to see. And though I’m no warrior, I would gladly fight for the things which Nazism seeks to destroy.” Reading him now, at a time when so many Americans live with sights we would have lief not lived to see, is at once reassuring and challenging, for White’s America, which should be our America, is worth a glad fight.

Born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1899, Elwyn Brooks White, the youngest of six children, grew up in comfort. “If an unhappy childhood is indispensable for a writer, I am ill-equipped: I missed out on all that and was neither deprived nor unloved,” he recalled. His father was a successful businessman who created a secure enclave for his family in Westchester County, just 25 minutes from New York City. “Our big house at 101 Summit Avenue was my castle,” E. B. White, who was nicknamed “En,” wrote. “From it I emerged to do battle, and into it I retreated when I was frightened or in trouble.” There were summers in Maine, public school in Westchester, the warmth of a sprawling family. He was sensitive, too, from an early age. “The normal fears and worries of every child were in me developed to a high degree; every day was an awesome prospect. I was uneasy about practically everything: the uncertainty of the future, the dark of the attic, the panoply and discipline of school, the transitoriness of life, the mystery of the church and of God, the frailty of the body, the sadness of afternoon, the shadow of sex, the distant challenge of love and marriage, the far-off problem of a livelihood. I brooded about them all, lived with them day by day.”

White’s father, Samuel Tilly White, perhaps sensing something of his youngest child’s anxious nature, wrote the lad a cheerful birthday note in 1911. “All hail! With joy and gladness we salute you on your natal day,” the senior White wrote. “May each recurring anniversary bring you earth’s best gifts and heaven’s choicest blessings. Think today on your mercies. You have been born in the greatest and best land on the face of the globe under the best government known to men. Be thankful then that you are an American. Moreover you are the youngest child of a large family and have profited by the companionship of older brothers and sisters. . . . [W]hen you are fretted by the small things of life remember that on this your birthday you heard a voice telling you to look up and out on the great things of life and beholding them say—surely they all are mine.”

From an early age, then, White was exhorted to think of America in the most reverential of ways. For all its faults, the nation was a place of particular merit, and a place worth defending. At 18, he debated whether to enlist in the Great War, but decided against it. (He also thought about joining the ambulance corps on the grounds that he “would rather save than destroy men.”) Instead, he headed for Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, and became a writer who did indeed look up and out (as well as inward).

The founding of The New Yorker magazine in 1925 proved a turning point for White and for American letters. Brought into being by Harold Ross, the weekly was, like Ross himself, chaotic and brilliant.

“The cast of characters in those early days,” White recalled, “was as shifty as the characters in a floating poker game.” James Thurber was among them, as was Katharine Angell, who became Mrs. White in 1929. “During the day I saw her in operation at the office,” White recalled. “At the end of the day, I watched her bring the whole mess home with her in a cheap and bulging portfolio. The light burned late, our bed was lumpy with page proofs, and our home was alive with laughter and the pervasive spirit of her dedication and her industry.”

The year he married Katharine, White approvingly cited a dissenting opinion of Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, thus inaugurating, in a sense, the canon of his work on freedom and democracy. Reading reports of a commencement speech at West Point by the secretary of war, White wrote that he hoped the young graduates would heed a recent observation of Holmes’s: “All West Point graduates should read [Holmes’s] words, brighter than sword-thrusts: ‘… if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate.”‘

He was not a predictable party man. Musing about fashionable talk of a government-controlled economy in the middle of the Depression, White wrote, “Much as we hope that something can be done to adjust the State, reduce inequalities in fortune, and right wrong, we are yet skeptical about the abandonment of private enterprise . . . Cooperation and public spirit are, we do not doubt, increasingly necessary in the scheme of our economy; but we wonder how far they go in our blood, and whether great music will be written under the guidance of a central planning board whose duty it shall be to coordinate our several harmonics.” And when President Roosevelt proposed to pack the Supreme Court after the 1936 presidential election in order to ensure rulings friendlier to the New Deal, White was having none of it. Americans, White wrote, should “decline to follow a leader, however high-minded, who proposes to take charge of affairs because he thinks he knows all the answers.”

In June 1940, as the Germans marched into Paris, White weighed in for The New Yorker . “To many Americans, war started (spiritually) years ago with the torment of the Jews,” White wrote. “To millions of others, less sensitive to the overtones of history, war became actual only when Paris became German. We looked at the faces in the street today, and war is at last real, and the remaining step is merely the transformation of fear into resolve Democracy is now asked to mount its honor and decency on wheels, and to manufacture, with all the electric power at its command, a world which can make all people free and perhaps many people contented. We believe and shall continue to believe that even that is within the power of men.”

The common denominators in White’s thinking about democracy were a sense of fair play and a love of liberty. He was for that which defended and expanded freedom, and he was against that which did not. “If it is boyish to believe that a human being should live free,” he wrote in September 1940, “then I’ll gladly arrest my development and let the rest of the world grow up.”

And he was quite willing to call the rest of the world onto a rhetorical carpet if circumstances warranted it. Chatting with other New Yorkers in the fall of 1940, a time when isolationism remained strong in the United States despite the harrowing fall of France and the Battle of Britain, White was disappointed that one man, “discovering signs of zeal [about the war] creeping into my blood, berated me for having lost my detachment, my pure skeptical point of view. He announced that he wasn’t going to be swept away by all this nonsense, but would prefer to remain in the role of innocent bystander, which he said was the duty of any intelligent person.”

At least one intelligent person, White, chose to disagree. “The least a man can do at such a time is to declare himself and tell where he stands,” he wrote. “I believe in freedom with the same burning delight, the same faith, the same intense abandon which attended its birth on this continent more than a century and a half ago. I am writing my declaration rapidly, much as though I were shaving to catch a train. Events abroad give a man a feeling of being pressed for time I just want to tell, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell arises. I pinch my nose.”

Freedom was not optional; nor was it, in the first instance, political. Working within an ancient Western tradition that viewed liberty as an inherent right and free will as the oxygen of humanity, White traced freedom to its intuitive origins:

[Freedom begins] with the haunting intimation (which I presume every child receives) of his mystical inner life; of God in man; of nature publishing herself through the “I.” This elusive sensation is moving and memorable. It comes early in life; a boy, we’ll say, sitting on the front steps on a summer night, thinking of nothing in particular, suddenly hearing as with a new perception and as though for the first time the pulsing sound of crickets, overwhelmed with the novel sense of identification with the natural company of insects and grass and night, conscious of a faint answering cry to the universal perplexing question: “What is ‘I’?” Or a little girl, returning from the grave of a pet bird, leaning with her elbows on the window sill, inhaling the unfamiliar draught of death, suddenly seeing herself as part of the complete story. Or to an older youth, encountering for the first time a great teacher who by some chance or mood awakens something and the youth beginning to breathe as an individual and conscious of strength in his vitals. I think the sensation must develop in many men as a feeling of identity with God—an eruption of the spirit caused by allergies and the sense of divine existence as distinct from mere animal existence. This is the beginning of the affair with freedom.

As he often did with such grace and fluidity, White turned from the intimate to the general:

The United States, almost alone today, offers the liberties and the privileges and the tools of freedom. In this land the citizens are still invited to write plays and books, to paint their pictures, to meet for discussion, to dissent as well as to agree, to mount soapboxes in the public square, to enjoy education in all subjects without censorship, to hold court and judge one another, to compose music, to talk politics with their neighbors without wondering whether the secret police are listening, to exchange ideas as well as goods, to kid the government when it needs kidding, and to read real news of real events instead of phony news manufactured by a paid agent of the state . . . To be free, in a planetary sense, is to feel that you belong to earth. To be free, in a societal sense, is to feel at home in a democratic framework.

White’s writings are remarkably free of cant and of cliche, as one might expect from the coauthor of The Elements of Style . Bombast bored him, and he loved being let alone. Writing in the Paris Review , Brendan Gill, a fellow New Yorker mainstay, once observed, “Andy White is small and wiry, with an unexpectedly large nose, speckled eyes, and an air of being just about to turn away, not on an errand of any importance but as a means of remaining free to cut and run without the nuisance of prolonged goodbyes.”

White’s patriotism is clear-eyed; his nationalism nonexistent. A case in point: in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, he wrote warmly of American values, noting, “America has been at a great disadvantage in relation to the Axis. In this country we are used to the queer notion that any sort of sporting contest must be governed by a set of rules. We think that the football can’t be kicked off until after the whistle is blown. We believe the prize fighter can’t be socked until he has come out of his corner. . . . So it was quite to be expected that America grew purple and pink with rage and fury when the Japanese struck us without warning.”

And yet White simultaneously believed, and began to argue in the first week of December 1941, that the future belonged to the supranationalists—those who saw that national rivalries were perennial and fatal and had to give way to a broader system of global governance.

“The passionate love of Americans for their America will have a lot to do with winning the war,” White wrote. “It is an odd thing though: the very patriotism on which we now rely is the thing that must eventually be in part relinquished if the world is ever to find a lasting peace and an end to these butcheries.” Musing on the snow swirling outside his window in these final weeks of the year, White went on: “Already you can see the beginnings of the big post-war poker game, for trade, for air routes and airfields, for insular possessions, and for all the rest of it,” he wrote Harold Ross in the fall of 1944. “I hate to see millions of kids getting their guts blown out because all these things are made the prizes of nationality. Science is universal, music is universal, sex is universal, chow is universal, and by God government better be, too.”

He would make the case, unsuccessfully, for years, most explicitly in a 1946 book entitled The Wild Flag . Whatever White’s (self-acknowledged) weaknesses as an architect of a kind of technocratic New Jerusalem, he remained an astute critic of democracy’s rivals. In a piece on fascism, he defined the phenomenon as “a nation founded on bloodlines, political expansion by surprise and war, murder or detention of unbelievers, transcendence of state over individual, obedience to one leader, contempt for parliamentary forms, plus some miscellaneous gymnastics for the young and a general feeling of elation. . . . Fascism is openly against people-in-general, in favor of people-in-particular.”

After World War II, he worried about fascistic tendencies in America, the very nation that had done so much to defeat the Axis. In 1947 he spoke out against the New York Herald Tribune ‘s editorial support for blacklisting those who did not swear loyalty to the United States. The anticommunist campaign, White wrote in a letter to the editor of the paper, meant that employees had to “be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs. The idea is inconsistent with our Constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic. . . . I hold that it would be improper for any committee or any employer to examine my conscience. They wouldn’t know how to get into it, they wouldn’t know what to do when they got in there, and I wouldn’t let them in anyway. Like other Americans, my acts and my words are open to inspection—not my thoughts or my political affiliation.”

His work touched on the central domestic struggle of the 20th century, too: the long battle against Jim Crow, the system of racial segregation that had grown out of the failures of Reconstruction in the wake of the Civil War. “The South,” he wrote in The New Yorker in 1956, “is the land of the sustained sibilant. Everywhere, for the appreciative visitor, the letter S insinuates itself into the scene: the sound of sea and sand, in the singing shell, in the heat of sun and sky, in the sultriness of the gentle hours, in the siesta, in the stir of birds and insects.” But, White added, in contrast to the softness of its music, the South is also “hard and cruel and prickly.”

He was reporting about a visit to Jim Crow Florida, calling himself a “beachcomber from the North, which is my present status.” It had been two years since the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down school segregation, and not long before, a collection of legislators from the Old Confederacy had issued a defiant Southern Manifesto pledging to defy federal efforts to integrate the region. Writing from Florida, White described a conversation with his cook, a Finnish woman, about “the mysteries of bus travel in the American Southland.”

“When you get on the bus,” White told her, “I think you’d better sit in one of the front seats—the seats in the back are for colored people.”

The cook, who was white, saw through it all. “A look of great weariness came into her face, as it does when we use too many dishes, and she replied, ‘Oh, I know—isn’t it silly!'”

Then came a brief meditation by White that captured much about what W.E.B. Du Bois had called “the problem of the color-line”:

Her remark, coming as it did all the way from Finland and landing on this sandbar with a plunk, impressed me. The Supreme Court said nothing about silliness, but I suspect it may play more of a role than one might suppose. People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust. I note that one of the arguments in the recent manifesto of Southern congressmen in support of the doctrine of “separate but equal” was that it had been founded on “common sense.” The sense that is common to one generation is uncommon to the next. Probably the first slave ship, with Negroes lying in chains on its decks, seemed commonsensical to the owners who operated it and to the planters who patronized it. But such a vessel would not be in the realm of common sense today.

The pressures of the Cold War gave White plenty of opportunities to offer thoughts on democracy, and he took many of them. When universities were debating loyalty and “Americanism,” White wrote, “A healthy university in a healthy democracy is a free society, in miniature. The pesky nature of democratic life is that it has no comfortable rigidity; it always hangs by a thread, never quite submits to consolidation or solidification, is always being challenged, always being defended.”

The key thing—and White worried about this, volunteering his pen in the cause—is the nature and the fate of the defense in the face of those inevitable challenges. White anticipated the antidemocratic forces of our own era: political tribalism (“We doubt that there was ever a time in this country when so many people were trying to discredit so many other people,” he wrote—in 1952); media saturation (“This country is on the verge of getting news-drunk anyway; a democracy cannot survive merely by being well informed, it must also be contemplative, and wise,” he wrote—in 1954); and the need for a free and disputatious press (“There is safety in numbers: the papers expose each other’s follies and peccadillos, correct each other’s mistakes, and cancel out each other’s biases” he wrote—in 1976). He believed strongly, too, in the virtues of a diversity of ownership in the media, arguing that oligarchical and monopolistic tendencies in terms of the control of the means of information were bad for democracy, and therefore a threat to freedom.

White was always mindful about the mind itself, which he considered, with its cousins the imagination and the conscience, the wellspring of all good things. Amid the debates about the role of religious observance in the public arena in the 20th century, he brilliantly laid out an inspired test for those who would compel others to share their beliefs. “Democracy, if I understand it at all, is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. . . . I believe that our political leaders should live by faith and should, by deeds and sometimes by prayer, demonstrate faith, but I doubt that they should advocate faith, if only because such advocacy renders a few people uncomfortable. The concern of a democracy is that no honest man shall feel uncomfortable, I don’t care who he is, or how nutty he is.”

At heart, White’s vision of democracy is about generosity of spirit and a kind of self-interested covenant—the best way to guarantee freedom and fair play for ourselves is to guarantee it for others. In this way, anyone who attempts to subvert the system or abridge another’s rights is instantly shown to be a hypocrite whose will to power threatens to hijack an ethos where no one kicks the ball until the whistle is blown, and no one can tell you what to think or whom to worship or what to do. In leaving us this understanding of how we have lived, and how we ought to go on living, White is a kind of conversational Thomas Jefferson, a 20th-century Benjamin Franklin, an accessible James Madison.

A final thought. In early 1942, White was summoned to Washington for several days of meetings about a wartime project: the production of a pamphlet, authored by several of the nation’s finest writers (Max Lerner and Reinhold Niebuhr among them), to expound on President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. A year earlier, in his January 1941 State of the Union address, FDR had first articulated his vision of a united front against the march of dictatorship. “I suppose that every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world—assailed either by arms, or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace,” Roosevelt had told the Congress. After laying out a practical program for rearmement and aid to the Allied forces, the president broadened his sights. “In the future days, which we seek to make more secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms,” he said. He enumerated the freedom of speech and conscience and the freedom from want and from fear. “That is no vision of a distant millennium,” he added. “It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”

Now, with the war upon America in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Archibald MacLeish, the poet and Librarian of Congress, wanted White to take charge of a Four Freedoms publication for wide distribution. The task was to expand on Roosevelt’s general themes, a job that White found daunting. In letters to Katharine, he was honest about his trepidation. After a series of conversations, including a lovely pasta-and-wine lunch at MacLeish’s Georgetown house, White had what he called “thousands of untranscribed notes—the kind of thing you scribble on your program in a dark theatre—and the burden of collecting these into a document which will suit the President and the Supreme Court justices and Mr. Churchill . . . and which will explain to a great man young men why they are about to get stuck in the stomach.” There was enough meandering in the debates about the project that White thought about, but did not mention, an obvious possibility. “Two or three times during the proceedings I was tempted to ask why, if the pamphlet was to be an extension and n interpretation of the President’s formula, we shouldn’t just go and ask him what he meant.” They never did, and neither can we. But we can ask E.B. White about freedom and democracy, and through his collected writings, he can answer.

__________________________________

This introduction is to On Democracy , by E.B. White, which is out on May 7, 2019 from Harper.

Jon Meacham

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‘America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy’ Is a Dangerous—And Wrong—Argument

Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our constitutional design, but a perversion of it.

An illustration of columns, the Founding Fathers, and the Constitution

Dependent on a minority of the population to hold national power, Republicans such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah have taken to reminding the public that “we’re not a democracy.” It is quaint that so many Republicans, embracing a president who routinely tramples constitutional norms, have suddenly found their voice in pointing out that, formally, the country is a republic. There is some truth to this insistence. But it is mostly disingenuous. The Constitution was meant to foster a complex form of majority rule, not enable minority rule.

The founding generation was deeply skeptical of what it called “pure” democracy and defended the American experiment as “wholly republican.” To take this as a rejection of democracy misses how the idea of government by the people, including both a democracy and a republic, was understood when the Constitution was drafted and ratified. It misses, too, how we understand the idea of democracy today.

George Packer: Republicans are suddenly afraid of democracy

When founding thinkers such as James Madison spoke of democracy, they were usually referring to direct democracy, what Madison frequently labeled “pure” democracy. Madison made the distinction between a republic and a direct democracy exquisitely clear in “ Federalist No. 14 ”: “In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.” Both a democracy and a republic were popular forms of government: Each drew its legitimacy from the people and depended on rule by the people. The crucial difference was that a republic relied on representation, while in a “pure” democracy, the people represented themselves.

At the time of the founding, a narrow vision of the people prevailed. Black people were largely excluded from the terms of citizenship, and slavery was a reality, even when frowned upon, that existed alongside an insistence on self-government. What this generation considered either a democracy or a republic is troublesome to us insofar as it largely granted only white men the full rights of citizens, albeit with some exceptions. America could not be considered a truly popular government until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which commanded equal citizenship for Black Americans. Yet this triumph was rooted in the founding generation’s insistence on what we would come to call democracy.

The history of democracy as grasped by the Founders, drawn largely from the ancient world, revealed that overbearing majorities could all too easily lend themselves to mob rule, dominating minorities and trampling individual rights. Democracy was also susceptible to demagogues—men of “factious tempers” and “sinister designs,” as Madison put it in “Federalist No. 10”—who relied on “vicious arts” to betray the interests of the people. Madison nevertheless sought to defend popular government—the rule of the many—rather than retreat to the rule of the few.

American constitutional design can best be understood as an effort to establish a sober form of democracy. It did so by embracing representation, the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the protection of individual rights—all concepts that were unknown in the ancient world where democracy had earned its poor reputation.

In “Federalist No. 10” and “Federalist No. 51,” the seminal papers, Madison argued that a large republic with a diversity of interests capped by the separation of powers and checks and balances would help provide the solution to the ills of popular government. In a large and diverse society, populist passions are likely to dissipate, as no single group can easily dominate. If such intemperate passions come from a minority of the population, the “ republican principle ,” by which Madison meant majority rule , will allow the defeat of “ sinister views by regular vote .” More problematic are passionate groups that come together as a majority. The large republic with a diversity of interests makes this unlikely, particularly when its separation of powers works to filter and tame such passions by incentivizing the development of complex democratic majorities : “In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good.” Madison had previewed this argument at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 using the term democracy , arguing that a diversity of interests was “the only defense against the inconveniences of democracy consistent with the democratic form of government.”

Jeffrey Rosen: America is living James Madison’s nightmare

Yet while dependent on the people, the Constitution did not embrace simple majoritarian democracy. The states, with unequal populations, got equal representation in the Senate. The Electoral College also gave the states weight as states in selecting the president. But the centrality of states, a concession to political reality, was balanced by the House of Representatives, where the principle of representation by population prevailed, and which would make up the overwhelming number of electoral votes when selecting a president.

But none of this justified minority rule, which was at odds with the “republican principle.” Madison’s design remained one of popular government precisely because it would require the building of political majorities over time. As Madison argued in “ Federalist No. 63, ” “The cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers.”

Alexander Hamilton, one of Madison’s co-authors of The Federalist Papers , echoed this argument. Hamilton made the case for popular government and even called it democracy: “A representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable.”

The American experiment, as advanced by Hamilton and Madison, sought to redeem the cause of popular government against its checkered history. Given the success of the experiment by the standards of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, we would come to use the term democracy as a stand-in for representative democracy, as distinct from direct democracy.

Consider that President Abraham Lincoln, facing a civil war, which he termed the great test of popular government, used constitutional republic and democracy synonymously, eloquently casting the American experiment as government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And whatever the complexities of American constitutional design, Lincoln insisted , “the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible.” Indeed, Lincoln offered a definition of popular government that can guide our understanding of a democracy—or a republic—today: “A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.”

The greatest shortcoming of the American experiment was its limited vision of the people, which excluded Black people, women, and others from meaningful citizenship, diminishing popular government’s cause. According to Lincoln, extending meaningful citizenship so that “all should have an equal chance” was the basis on which the country could be “saved.” The expansion of we the people was behind the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ratified in the wake of the Civil War. The Fourteenth recognized that all persons born in the U.S. were citizens of the country and entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizenship. The Fifteenth secured the vote for Black men. Subsequent amendments, the Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth, granted women the right to vote, prohibited poll taxes in national elections, and lowered the voting age to 18. Progress has been slow— and s ometimes halted, as is evident from current efforts to limit voting rights —and the country has struggled to become the democratic republic first set in motion two centuries ago. At the same time, it has also sought to find the right republican constraints on the evolving body of citizens, so that majority rule—but not factious tempers—can prevail.

Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court is helping Republicans rig elections

Perhaps the most significant stumbling block has been the states themselves. In the 1790 census, taken shortly after the Constitution was ratified, America’s largest state, Virginia, was roughly 13 times larger than its smallest state, Delaware. Today, California is roughly 78 times larger than Wyoming. This sort of disparity has deeply shaped the Senate, which gives a minority of the population a disproportionate influence on national policy choices. Similarly, in the Electoral College, small states get a disproportionate say on who becomes president. Each of California’s electoral votes is estimated to represent 700,000-plus people, while one of Wyoming’s speaks for just under 200,000 people.

Subsequent to 1988, the Republican presidential candidate has prevailed in the Electoral College in three out of seven elections, but won the popular vote only once (2004). If President Trump is reelected, it will almost certainly be because he once again prevailed in the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. If this were to occur, he would be the only two-term president to never win a plurality of the popular vote. In 2020, Trump is the first candidate in American history to campaign for the presidency without making any effort to win the popular vote, appealing only to the people who will deliver him an Electoral College win. If the polls are any indication, more Americans may vote for Vice President Biden than have ever voted for a presidential candidate, and he could still lose the presidency. In the past, losing the popular vote while winning the Electoral College was rare. Given current trends, minority rule could become routine. Many Republicans are actively embracing this position with the insistence that we are, after all, a republic, not a democracy.

They have also dispensed with the notion of building democratic majorities to govern, making no effort on health care, immigration, or a crucial second round of economic relief in the face of COVID-19. Instead, revealing contempt for the democratic norms they insisted on when President Barack Obama sought to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat, Republicans in the Senate have brazenly wielded their power to entrench a Republican majority on the Supreme Court by rushing to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The Senate Judiciary Committee vote to approve Barrett also illuminates the disparity in popular representation: The 12 Republican senators who voted to approve of Barrett’s nomination represented 9 million fewer people than the 10 Democratic senators who chose not to vote. Similarly, the 52 Republican senators who voted to confirm Barrett represented 17 million fewer people than the 48 senators who voted against her. And the Court Barrett is joining, made up of six Republican appointees (half of whom were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote) to three Democratic appointees, has been quite skeptical of voting rights—a severe blow to the “democracy” part of a democratic republic. In 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder , the Court struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that allowed the federal government to preempt changes in voting regulations from states with a history of racial discrimination.

As Adam Serwer recently wrote in these pages , “ Shelby County ushered in a new era of experimentation among Republican politicians in restricting the electorate, often along racial lines.” Republicans are eager to shrink the electorate. Ostensibly seeking to prevent voting fraud, which studies have continually shown is a nonexistent problem, Republicans support efforts to make voting more difficult—especially for minorities, who do not tend to vote Republican. The Republican governor of Texas, in the midst of a pandemic when more people are voting by mail, limited the number of drop-off locations for absentee ballots to one per county. Loving, with a population of 169, has one drop-off location; Harris, with a population of 4.7 million (majority nonwhite), also has one drop-off location. States controlled by Republicans, such as Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, have also closed polling places, making voters in predominantly minority communities stand in line for hours to cast their ballot.

Who counts as a full and equal citizen—as part of we the people —has shrunk in the Republican vision. Arguing against statehood for the District of Columbia, which has 200,000 more people than the state of Wyoming, Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas said Wyoming is entitled to representation because it is “a well-rounded working-class state.” It is also overwhelmingly white. In contrast, D.C. is 50 percent nonwhite.

High-minded claims that we are not a democracy surreptitiously fuse republic with minority rule rather than popular government. Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our constitutional design, but a perversion of it. Routine minority rule is neither desirable nor sustainable, and makes it difficult to characterize the country as either a democracy or a republic. We should see this as a constitutional failure demanding constitutional reform.

This story is part of the project “ The Battle for the Constitution ,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center .

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B. R. Ambedkar, John Dewey, and the Meaning of Democracy

2009, New Literary History

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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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The Concept of Democracy: An Essay on Conceptual Amelioration and Abandonment

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1 Introduction

Published: August 2023
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This chapter is an introduction to the central themes of the book. It provides an overview of the entire book and the connections between the various chapters. It also connects the topic of the book to recent discourse about geopolitics. The chapter opens with a definition of and arguments for abolitionism, stressing that the book is a defense of the view that a strong case can be made for abolitionism. It introduces a theory of abandonment, drawing on a broad range of examples. This introductory chapter ends with a comprehensive overview of the five parts and twelve chapters of the book.

This is a book for those interested in the words we use when we think and talk about politics. In particular, it is about the words “democracy” and “democratic.” It is an exploration of a radical view: abolitionism. According to abolitionists, those words (and the concepts they express) should be abandoned. The arguments for abolitionism are fairly simple to state:

We can do better than “democracy” : We have easy access to terminology that’s better than “democracy” and “democratic.”

“Democracy” is semantically, cognitively, and communicatively defective : The histories and current use of “democracy” and “democratic” make them cognitively, semantically, and communicatively defective.

The abolitionist’s argument is simple: if these terms are defective and we can easily do better, then let’s get rid of them! Abolitionism is a surprising and unsettling view because we’re not used to the idea that some of our linguistic devices can fail us. We tend to take for granted that when we have an entrenched lexical item, with a long history, we can reliably use it to express thoughts, communicate, plan, and coordinate action. One broader lesson of this book is that such confidence is misplaced: we should take seriously the possibility that failure is an option.

Abolitionism is not all gloom and doom. It contains a message of good cheer: we have easy access to conceptual devices that are more effective than “democracy.” We can do better. These alternative linguistic devices will enable us to ask better questions, provide genuinely fruitful answers, and have more rational discussions. Moreover, those questions and answers better articulate the communicative and cognitive aims of those who use empty terms such as “democracy” and “democratic.” The switch to alternative devices would be a significant communicative, cognitive, and political advance.

This book is not an unconditional defense of abolitionism. It’s a defense of the view that a strong case can be made for abolitionism relative to many (or most) important contexts. Overall, the current reliance on this cluster of concepts is a cognitive weak spot.

It’s important to emphasize that abolitionism is not an argument against democracy . It’s an argument against “democracy.” The difference really matters. Abolitionism is not a defense of epistocracy, 1 dictatorship, or any other form of governance considered to be an alternative to what people call “democracy.” 2 If the question you’re interested in is, “Is democracy a good form of governance?”, the abolitionist’s reply is, In most (or all) contexts, it’s a bad question that doesn’t deserve an answer—and I’ll show you how to ask better questions that can be answered . Abolitionists don’t take a stand on how any group should make collective decisions, nor on how nations should decide on political issues. It’s a view about which concepts are communicatively and cognitively useful when we talk and think about collective decision-making.

These conceptual questions are prior to and more fundamental than thinking about politics. In order to start thinking about politics you first need to make conceptual choices. Most of us are not aware that we make those choices. We uncritically use the conceptual tools handed to us by tradition or authority. That can be an irresponsible attitude. In many cases, serious thinking should start by critically examining and refining the tools of thinking and talking. This book is an essay on that kind of foundational conceptual criticism and amelioration, applied to a core part of political discourse.

My discussion draws on recent work in philosophy and political theory. More specifically, it engages with issues at the intersection of philosophy of language, conceptual engineering, democratic theory, and politics. As an introduction to the central themes of the book, here are some directions from which you can get interested in all or parts of what I’ll be discussing:

From an interest in the debate about the value and nature of democracy : If you’re a typical reader of this book, you’re likely to be a follower of what Bryan Caplan calls “the secular religion of democracy.” In less tendentious terms, you’re likely to think that what’s called “democracy” is an excellent way to organize a nation—maybe even the best possible way to do it. More generally, you’re likely to think that it’s a good way for groups to make collective decisions. That view, however, is not universally shared. Plato despised democracy, the founding fathers of the US shunned the term “democracy” (by which they meant something like “direct democracy”), and there are contemporary theorists who argue against democracy. Bryan Caplan’s book The Myth of the Rational Voter aims to prod its readers to leave “the church of democracy.” The title of Jason Brennan’s book Against Democracy speaks for itself. Many readers will have a mixed view according to which (at least some) political decisions should be taken in a democratic way, but it’s OK that The New York Times , Harvard, and Tesla are non-democratic. Among those who like what they call “democracy,” there’s intense disagreement about both what the term means and the justification for that meaning (Chapters 4 and 5 go through this in more detail).

Abolitionism is an alternative view that has not, as far as I know, been defended before. Abolitionists argue that these debates over “democracy” should be rejected because the concept is defective at its core. Questions such as, “Is democracy a good form of governance?” and “Is democracy better than epistocracy?” are, despite appearances, bad questions that can’t be answered because the concept of democracy is defective and can’t be ameliorated. Abolitionists provide a diagnosis of why we ended up relying on the concept of “democracy,” and show how to do better. Caplan was almost right: there’s a secular religion, but it’s not of democracy, it’s of the concept of democracy .

For many readers, the view that “democracy” is so defective that it should be abandoned is extremely hard to believe, or even to take seriously. 3 After all, when I say, “Norway is a democracy,” that seems like a paradigmatic, clear, and meaningful statement that can be used to communicate a clear thought. It is hard to accept that entrenched and widely used terminology can be meaningless. To soften the reader up to the idea, the first part of this book provides a general introduction to the theory of defective concepts, which I call the theory of abandonment. 4 I draw on a broad range of examples from science, politics, and ordinary life to show that we have frequently used concepts that we have later discovered are fundamentally flawed. The goal of those examples is twofold: (i) to make the (apparently) incredible conclusion that “democracy” should be rejected more palatable, and even plausible; and (ii) to open up general systematic study of the conditions under which concepts and lexical items should be abandoned.

From an interest in conceptual engineering: Conceptual engineering, as I think of it, 5 has three stages:

The assessment of our concepts, or, more generally, our representational devices.

Proposed improvements to our representational devices.

Efforts to implement those proposed improvements.

My earlier work on conceptual engineering (e.g., Cappelen 2018 ) had two limitations:

First, I focused on cases where there were live ameliorative options.

Second, the discussion was on a very high level of abstraction and without commitment to any particular case. That book discusses a lot of examples, but doesn’t endorse any of them. As far as the arguments in Cappelen (2018) go, there might be no successful cases of conceptual engineering. The entire discussion takes the form, “If this ameliorative proposal were acceptable, then….”

This book is different. It takes seriously the possibility that the assessment stage can reveal defects so significant that (complete or partial) abandonment is justified. I call the exploration of that option the theory of abandonment . Part I is an introduction to this theory. The rest of the book then focuses on an extremely difficult and controversial case study: “democracy” and “democratic.” Given inherent bias in favor of lexical conservatism, I don’t expect the conclusion to convince all that many people. That said, it might move some people to take seriously a contextually restricted version of the thesis.

As will become clear, there is no algorithm for how to justify abandonment: a lot will depend on the details of particular cases. However, once you start abandoning terms, it becomes tempting to overuse this strategy. It turns out that many of our inherited and entrenched concepts are shady. This observation then raises an exciting new and large-scale research project: what should be abandoned and what should be preserved? What are the conditions under which abandonment is justified? How is abandonment implemented? How do abolitionists relate to diehard preservationists?

From an interest in the methodology of political theory : Political science and political theory have a significant methodological literature focused on the conceptual foundation of politics. Some of that literature concerns what we might call the nature of conceptual analysis. Sartori authored the seminal papers on this issue (e.g., Sartori 1970 , 1987 , 1991 ). This work has been influential in the intervening decades, and one assumption underlying it is a notion of conceptual “stretchiness,” which refers to applying concepts to cases distinct from those for which they were originally developed. 6 A different strand of the literature, which also includes work on metaethics and the foundations of political philosophy, is concerned with essentially contested concepts ( Gallie 1956 ). This idea—roughly, that there are some concepts whose definition is always up for debate and never settled—has been important (see Collier, Hidalgo, and Maciuceanu 2006 for an overview), especially because Gallie said that democracy was an essentially contested concept “ par excellence. ” 7 This book aims to incorporate recent work in conceptual engineering and metasemantics into these debates. In doing so, I also try to align discussions of terms such as “democracy” with how, say, epistemologists have used facts about the expression “knows” to understand knowledge.

From an interest in bullshit and the declining quality of public discourse: At the beginning of his book On Bullshit , Harry Frankfurt says: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this.” Frankfurt develops a primarily epistemic account of what bullshit is. The bullshitter is someone who “…offers a description of a certain state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes. Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.” (Frankfurt 2005: 32) According to Frankfurt, politics and public discourse are primary sources of bullshit: “…(it) is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” The political domain is one in which there are endless opportunities and even obligations for citizens to talk about issues they hardly understand (Frankfurt 2005: 63).

G. A. Cohen, in his paper “Deeper Into Bullshit,” builds on Frankfurt’s analysis, but focuses on whether what bullshitters say is meaningful (rather than whether they’re tracking truth). Cohen points out that nonsense is one meaning of “bullshit” in colloquial English. For Cohen, the most interesting form of nonsense is found in discourse that is “…not only obscure but which cannot be rendered unobscure, where any apparent success in rendering it unobscured creates something that isn’t recognizable as a version of what is said” (Cohen 2002: 332).

The idea that there’s a lot of bullshit shouldn’t be left as a theoretical and abstract possibility. We might all share Frankfurt’s sense that a very large part of what counts as political discourse consists primarily of bullshit, but one needs to flesh out that idea with concrete examples. This book is in part an effort to identify a particularly important source of bullshit in contemporary public discourse.

From an interest in verbal disputes: How widespread they are and how they can be avoided . A central claim in David Chalmers’s seminal paper “Verbal Disputes” is that much of the history of philosophy consists of verbal disputes. For Chalmers, such disputes are both pointless and fake. They are the result of people using words with different meanings without realizing it. They are not substantive disputes, and can be resolved metalinguistically, by the participants being explicit about what they actually mean. Doing so requires eliminating the terminology that’s the source of the confusion. Chalmers claims that debates over all of the following questions have been beset by verbal disputes:

What is free will? What is knowledge? What is justification? What is justice? What is law? What is confirmation? What is causation? What is color? What is a concept? What is meaning? What is action? What is life? What is logic? What is self-deception? What is group selection? What is science? What is art? What is consciousness? And indeed: What is a verbal dispute? Chalmers 2002, 405

If, like me, you are sympathetic to Chalmers’s view, it should be obvious that the problem isn’t restricted to philosophy. If it’s found in philosophy, it’s everywhere. Think of this book as (in part) an application of Chalmers’s framework to “democracy” and “democratic.” 8 The view is inspired by Chalmers not just in making the claim that discourses involving “democracy” are infected by endless verbal disputes but also in suggesting that this issue be resolved by eliminating “democracy” from such discourses (in effect applying Chalmers’s method of elimination).

Stepping Back: “Democracy,” Politics, and Philosophy

I’ll end this introductory chapter with an overview of the different parts of the book, but before doing so, I’ll try to briefly locate the topic of the book and its central thesis within current non-academic political discourse. While the book is about some words, it’s obvious that the primary interest of these words is derived from the central role they play in contemporary political discourse. The word “democracy” does a lot of work for us. Not a day goes by without serious warnings about the threat to democracy from China, Russia, and Hungary. The Republican Party is regularly described as moving in an anti-democratic direction. Prominent public intellectuals such as Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder warn us against the seductive lure of authoritarianism. The Washington Post recently published an article with the headline, “Historians privately warn Biden that America’s democracy is teetering.” 9 It quotes a “person familiar with the exchange” as saying, “A lot of the conversation was about the larger context of the contest between democratic values and institutions and the trends toward autocracy globally.”

One glaring problem with this way of framing the political terrain is that we have no agreed upon understanding of what the word “democracy” means, what democracy is, or what it ought to be. This is uncontroversial . Any decent introductory text on democratic theory or practice will tell you upfront that there are deep and potentially irresolvable disagreements about how to define “democracy.” Directors of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), in an introduction to their Index of Democracy, acknowledge that “There is no consensus on how to measure democracy. Definitions of democracy are contested, and there is a lively debate on the subject.” Political sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz has written, “The world’s only superpower is rhetorically and militarily promoting a political system that remains undefined—and it is staking its credibility and treasure on that pursuit.”

Now, you might have thought ‘democracy’ just means something like a form of governance where there are regular, free, and fair elections of political representatives, sometimes combined with votes on referendums . This definition squares with common sense, and has a distinguished intellectual pedigree, but it makes democracy too easy to fake. Imagine an elected leader who uses the powers of their office, along with state-of-the-art propaganda, to manipulate the populace, marginalize any opposition, and thereby mold “the will of the people” to ensure their continued reign. This is why Amartya Sen emphasizes that “…it is crucial to appreciate that democracy has demands that transcend the ballot box.…Balloting alone can be woefully inadequate, as is abundantly illustrated by the astounding electoral victories of ruling tyrannies in authoritarian regimes, from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.” The point applies to direct and indirect democracy alike.

It’s for these reasons that organizations such as Freedom House and the EIU publish nuanced rankings of how democratic various countries are—taking into account a broad range of factors beyond voting itself. The EIU measures countries along sixty dimensions, including the percentage of women in parliament, adult literacy, the degree of religious tolerance, and the proportion of the population that believes that democracy benefits economic performance. These democracy indices help flesh out our “democratic values.” But they inevitably seem parochial and unprincipled: a grab bag of features that happen to be vaunted by certain people in a certain culture at a certain historical moment. Who gets to pick the dimensions, and how do they decide which ones or how many to include? How can they be quantified, aggregated, or meaningfully compared? And what exactly makes them measures of democracy ? Again, all these difficulties are well known and carefully elaborated in scholarly work.

Here’s the conundrum: isn’t it intellectually and politically irresponsible to put our faith in something—‘democracy’—when we don’t know what ‘democracy’ means or, correspondingly, what democracy is? Over the last century, philosophers of language have had a lot to say about how we should react to terminology that appears to be deeply defective. That focus has been amplified by recent work in conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics. We can think of theorists as responding in four ways to the types of problems outlined in connection with ‘democracy.’ Some are libertarians and refuse to engage in meaning-policing: let a thousand meanings bloom, they say. Some are ameliorators and try to make language better by improving the situation. Some are Cynics who say that political speech is already so corrupt and empty that there’s no point trying to fix it. Finally, and this is the direction I am leaning in, there’s abolitionism : the view that we can do better than ‘democracy.’

The libertarian thinks that we don’t need to (and maybe we can’t) decide what “democracy” means. People who theorize about democracy shouldn’t be in the business of policing public language. To repeat: let a thousand definitional flowers bloom, says the libertarian. This view has a deeply entrenched intellectual tradition behind it. Using terminology introduced by Walter Gallie in 1957, philosophers and political theorists often say “democracy” is an “essentially contested” concept. According to Gallie, some expressions—“art” and “democracy” being paradigms—have their meanings settled in situ by the values, priorities, and goals of individual speakers. 10 Since our values, priorities, and goals will obviously differ, the meanings of these words will be constantly renegotiated.

Even though Gallie’s view has been very influential and is widely accepted by academics, the implications for real-world politics are often overlooked. Consider a document the Chinese government released in 2021 called “China: Democracy that Works.” The authors say: “There is no fixed model of democracy; it manifests itself in many forms. Assessing the myriad political systems in the world against a single yardstick and examining diverse political structures in monochrome are in themselves undemocratic.” This sounds very much like a Gallie-inspired form of libertarianism. The document then details the democratic structures at play within the Chinese government, from electoral democracy to consultative democracy. It goes on to argue that China is one of the best-functioning democracies on earth: “In the richly diverse world, democracy comes in many forms. China’s democracy is thriving alongside those of other countries in the garden of civilizations.”

Many would balk, dismissing the document as propaganda. But even so, its existence raises a legitimate conceptual challenge, especially for the conceptual libertarian. According to the libertarian, people are free to develop their own concept of democracy, according to their context, their values, and their goals. If that’s the right view, who is to say that the Chinese government’s definition isn’t as legitimate as, say, that of the editors of The Economist ?

You don’t have to go to China to feel the force of this problem. Within the US there are deep divisions about what it means to support “democracy.” The 45th President of the US (and the movement he leads) is regularly described as “authoritarian” and “anti-democratic.” However, in a speech after the 2020 election, Mr. Trump said: “I’m not the one trying to undermine American democracy, I’m the one who’s trying to save it. Please remember that.” Trump likes the word “democracy” and wants it to apply to the type of governance he supports. If Gallie and the libertarians are right, China, Trump, and the editors of the Economist Intelligence Unit might all be right, because they use the word “democracy” with different meanings. There’s no absolute truth about what “democracy” means or what democracy is. While some might be happy with this, it will strike many of us as an untenable form of relativism that makes it hard to see what it would mean for there to be an ongoing battle between democracies and authoritarianism. It makes public discourse involving “democracy” a depressing and never-ending orgy of verbal disputes.

In response to these concerns, the ameliorator tries to improve “democracy” by giving it a clear, appropriate, and fixed meaning. It’s hard to see how to achieve this, but one strategy can be modeled on what often happens in the sciences. When scientists (e.g., in physics, medicine, or economics) use an expression with a determined meaning, it has that meaning independently of whether it is used in a messy way by the rest of the linguistic community. According to an influential tradition in the philosophy of language (often associated with Hilary Putnam), this is called “linguistic division of labor” and it allows ordinary speakers to piggyback on the experts’ precise meaning. For example, what “weight” means in physics is fixed in a clear and precise way, independently of how that term is used by ordinary speakers of English (where “mass” and “weight” are often used interchangeably). What “arthritis” means in English depends on how medical experts use that term, independently of whatever confused views ordinary speakers have about arthritis.

In theory, amelioration is a promising strategy, but the problem is that the way “democracy” is tied to norms, values, and practical policies makes it very different from “weight” and “arthritis.” Since there’s no convergence on the relevant norms, values, and practical policies, we’re simply not going to get a convergence on the meaning of “democracy” (in the way we have for “weight” and “arthritis”). Even among political scientists, there are deep and irresolvable disagreements about how to define “democracy.” We find everything from Schumpeterian minimalists (where the only thing that matters is an occasional election) to quantitative maximalists (where a broad range of cultural, normative, and institutional factors are quantified as part of the various democracy indices). And that’s just including a tiny sample from the Western traditions. If there’s no convergence even among experts, we’re back to the messy libertarian reality of many meanings. You can, of course, try, as an individual thinker and speaker, to mean something very specific when you use the term “democracy,” but others will not pick up on that meaning, and so your idiosyncratic usage will just contribute to the increased cacophony of “democracy” meanings.

This brings us to the Cynic , who says we shouldn’t worry too much about these problems, because they are ubiquitous and ineliminable aspects of political discourse. According to the Cynic, it’s naive to think that the central goal of political speech is to convey clear thoughts or engage in rational deliberation. As Harry Frankfurt points out, “The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept.” 11 In this spirit, the Cynic says that the word “democracy” can serve its various non-rational political purposes independently of any clear or agreed-on meaning. To ask for precise definitions and coordinated meanings is to misunderstand the nature and goal of political discourse.

While there’s certainly something to be said for the Cynic’s picture of political speech, it is also defeatist and hyperbolic. Surely, not all political speech is empty of clear thought, even though some salient examples are. If you’re a theorist, a public intellectual, a serious journalist, or an honest politician, you don’t want to self-identify as a bullshitter whose aim is simply to spew empty rhetoric. You’ll want to do better.

So the conundrum remains: we can’t have a broad range of meanings (as the libertarian advocates) and we are unlikely to converge on a single meaning (as the ameliorator hopes for). At the same time, we want to improve on the current state of discourse involving “democracy” (contrary to the Cynic). This book is primarily an exploration of (and tentative defense of) an abolitionist solution to the conundrum. The abolitionist puts less weight on high-level abstract and vague terminology such as “democracy” (and its contrast, “authoritarianism”), and instead relies on terms that are less problematic and contested. We should aim to anchor political discourse in careful descriptions, analyses, and assessments of particular policies, structures, and actions, grounded in a detailed understanding of historical, cultural, and economic contexts. For some illustrations of abolitionism at work, first consider the familiar claim that the Trump-dominated GOP is undermining democracy in the US and moving in an authoritarian direction. Protect Democracy usefully develops this concern on seven fronts: 1) The GOP attempts to politicize independent institutions . 2) They spread disinformation. 3) They aggrandize executive power at the expense of checks and balances. 4) They quash criticism and dissent. 5) They specifically target vulnerable or marginalized communities. 6) They work to corrupt elections. 7) They stoke violence. It’s important to have a debate about the extent to which 1–7 are true about the GOP, and how to respond to those that are. However, according to the abolitionist, it would be a waste of time to try to figure out whether these seven points really are in conflict with the correct definition of “democracy.” Even if Mr. Trump or one of his followers came up with a definition of “democracy” according to which the GOP is the true defender of “democracy,” and even if we accept that there’s no unique correct definition of “democracy,” we should still be worried about points 1–7. Convergence on the correct definition of “democracy” is at best a distracting detour.

Next, consider Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which is often described as yet another “attack on democracy.” Even if we abandon that terminological perspective, we have plenty to say about what has happened, why it happened, and why it’s horrific. Putin has started an unjustified war, he murders innocent people, bombs apartment buildings, makes people starve, etc. To think that all of this (and much more) is usefully summarized by claims about “democracy vs. authoritarianism” risks missing most of what is important, to instead hang everything on the interpretation of a piece of terminology with a dubious foundation.

More generally, the abolitionist strategy of downplaying our reliance on terms such as “democracy” goes hand in hand with a tendency to put less weight on the Grand Narrative of contemporary geopolitics as an ongoing battle of “Democracy vs. Authoritarianism.” That’s an attractive heuristic—it helps us unify diverse phenomena and find simplicity in the extraordinary complexity of contemporary politics. However, we should also recognize that some simplifications are dangerous and undermine our ability not just to understand the world but also to communicate about it. When there are serious wrongdoings happening, we owe it to those who are harmed to make an extra effort to think clearly, carefully, and in high resolution. If we find that the Grand Narrative (and its associated terminological paraphernalia) is an unhelpful simplification, we should outgrow it.

The above is one way to think about how various issues that have been at the center of recent (and not so recent) work in philosophy of language interconnect with large-scale political issues. This book, however, is not about those political issues. It is focused on a very narrow range of linguistic issues: whether “democracy” and “democratic” are meaningful, whether they are effective communicative devices, and whether we can do better. That said, it is useful to keep in mind that a significant reason for taking an interest in these words is that they play such an important (and I think problematic) role in public discourse, deliberation, and decision-making.

Overview of the Book

Here’s a quick overview of the book and its chapters:

Part I (Chapters 1–4 ) outlines a theory of abandonment in general terms, without a focus on any particular cases. Chapter 2 presents four kinds of argument that can support abandonment. Chapter 3 addresses various issues having to do with how abolitionists can and should communicate with preservationists. Chapter 4 compares abandonment with related but distinct notions such as amelioration, reduction, elimination, and replacement.

Part II (Chapters 5 and 6 ) prepares the case against “democracy” by investigating various and often overlooked features of the use of this word in English. There will be a particular focus on the interaction between the noun “democracy” and the adjective “democratic.”

Part III presents the case for abandonment. Chapter 7 presents the defects of “democracy” and “democratic.” Chapter 8 shows how easy it is to do better. Finally, Chapter 9 describes the consequences of abandonment.

Part IV considers an alternative to abandonment: amelioration (the theme of Cappelen 2018 ). Chapters 10 and 11 investigate whether we could ameliorate “democracy” rather than abandon it. The conclusion is rather negative.

Part V consists of a brief concluding chapter where I consider various objections to both abandonment and to the project as a whole.

Before getting started, I need to flag one persistent expository problem: this book argues for the abandonment of “democracy” and “democratic.” Along the way, I engage with a lot of literature that uses those terms, and I must present and engage with these authors’ views. In doing so, I end up using “democracy” and “democratic” occasionally. While this is in principle avoidable, the cost would be an unreadable book with weird sentences containing all too many quotation marks. In his paper “Elusive Knowledge,” David Lewis uses the word “knows” in ways that aren’t entirely compatible with the theory in that paper (sort of in the same way that I have a problem with using “democracy” in a book that argues against the use of “democracy”). Lewis is aware of the problem and his response is, I think, perfect:

I could have said my say fair and square bending no rules. It would have been tiresome, but it could have been done. The secret would have been to resort to ‘semantic ascent’.…If you want to hear my story told that way, you probably know enough to do the job for yourself. If you can, then my informal presentation has been good enough.

When distancing from the terminology is easy and appropriate, I’ll often use the expression “the D-words” to denote “democracy” and “democratic” (but, admittedly, I haven’t been able to develop an entirely consistent convention for how to do this). 12

Like, e.g., Brennan (2016), Somin (2013), and Caplan (2008).

Such as the idea that we should modify our institutions to have “less” democracy, such as less often or fewer occasions to vote (Jones 2020).

I should qualify this: when I bring up how hard it is to believe the conclusion of this book to students, there are often many of them who disagree—to them, it’s almost trivial that “democracy” and other terms are empty shells without meaning.

To be clear: I’m using “abandonment” to denote what the abolitionist advocates. Thanks to an OUP reader for noting that this could be unclear.

See Cappelen (2018 , 2020a ), the papers collected in Burgess, Cappelen, and Plunkett (2020) and Eklund (2021) for synoptic presentations of the field; see Eklund (2017) , Haslanger (2000) , and Plunkett and Sundell (2013) for the application of conceptual engineering to social or normative philosophy.

Something that became important in the twentieth century, as democracies increased in number and also variation, and as quantitative methods were increasingly used to define democracy. Further influential work in this vein is theorizing about democracy “with adjectives,” for example in David Collier and his coauthors ( Collier and Mahon 1993 ; Collier and Levitsky 1997 ; Collier and Adock 1999 ).

There is interesting work in philosophy here, e.g., Väyrynen (2014) ; Evnine (2014) . For examples of recent work that aims to be synoptic or advance the debate concerning concepts in political theory, see, e.g., Olsthoorn (2017) and Gerring (2012) .

A reader for OUP asks whether my talk about verbal disputes in this book presupposes a background form of semantic internalism (and so is in conflict with my Cappelen 2018 ). It does not. There can be verbal disputes at the semantic level (corresponding to Chalmers’s narrow notion) or at a speaker-meaning level (corresponding to Chalmers’s broad notion). Both are compatible with both semantic internalism and semantic externalism.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/10/biden-us-historians-democracy-threat/ .

Warning: while I think that Gallie’s view is useful for heuristic purposes as an introduction to the topic, I don’t think this a good theory (or even really a theory at all). For further discussion, see Chapter 12 .

Frankfurt 2009.

Here’s a related complication that I’m completely ignoring in the upcoming chapters: there are many theories about what concepts are, what the relationships are between concepts and meaning, and how lexical items fit into all of this. The situation is worse than that: I am sympathetic to the view in (Machery 2009) in which he argues that we should abandon the term ‘concept’. This makes my use of ‘concept’ and its cognates deeply problematic. I wish I had a satisfactory solution, but one can only do so much at a time. If I were to write this whole book in a ‘concept’-free way, it would make the book less accessible and it would bake unrelated controversial assumptions into the discussion. In a previous book on conceptual engineering ( Cappelen 2018 ), I developed a framework for thinking about some of these issues (“the austerity framework”), and if you will, you can read this book in light of that. However, I think (but I’m not entirely sure) that most of what goes on in this book can be understood without taking on board any particular theory of concepts and their relationships to lexical items.

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Democracy Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on democracy.

Democracy is known as the finest form of government. Why so? Because in a democracy, the people of the country choose their government. They enjoy certain rights which are very essential for any human being to live freely and happily. There are various democratic countries in the world , but India is the largest one. Democracy has withstood the test of time, and while other forms have the government has failed, democracy stood strong. It has time and again proved its importance and impact.

Significance of a Democracy

Democracy is very important for human development . When people have free will to live freely, they will be happier. Moreover, we have seen how other forms of government have turned out to be. Citizens are not that happy and prosperous in a monarchy or anarchy.

Furthermore, democracy lets people have equal rights. This ensures that equality prevails all over the country. Subsequently, it also gives them duties. These duties make them better citizens and are also important for their overall development.

Most importantly, in a democracy, the people form the government. So, this selection of the government by the citizens gives everyone a chance to work for their country. It allows the law to prevail efficiently as the rules are made by people whom they have selected.

In addition, democracy allows people of various religions and cultures to exist peacefully. It makes them live in harmony with one another. People of democracy are more tolerant and accepting of each other’s differences. This is very important for any country to be happy and prosper.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

India: A Democratic Country

India is known to be the largest democracy all over the world. After the rule of the British ended in 1947 , India adopted democracy. In India, all the citizens who are above the age of 18 get the right to vote. It does not discriminate on the basis of caste, creed, gender, color, or more.

Although India is the largest democracy it still has a long way to go. The country faces a lot of problems which do not let it efficiently function as a democracy. The caste system is still prevalent which hampers with the socialist principle of democracy. Moreover, communalism is also on the rise. This interferes with the secular aspect of the country. All these differences need to be set aside to ensure the happiness and prosperity of the citizens.

In short, democracy in India is still better than that in most of the countries. Nonetheless, there is a lot of room for improvement which we must focus on. The government must implement stringent laws to ensure no discrimination takes place. In addition, awareness programs must be held to make citizens aware of their rights and duties.

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Essay on Democracy in 100, 300 and 500 Words

Updated on
Jan 15, 2024

The oldest account of democracy can be traced back to 508–507 BCC Athens . Today there are over 50 different types of democracy across the world. But, what is the ideal form of democracy? Why is democracy considered the epitome of freedom and rights around the globe? Let’s explore what self-governance is and how you can write a creative and informative essay on democracy and its significance.

Today, India is the largest democracy with a population of 1.41 billion and counting. Everyone in India above the age of 18 is given the right to vote and elect their representative. Isn’t it beautiful, when people are given the option to vote for their leader, one that understands their problems and promises to end their miseries? This is just one feature of democracy , for we have a lot of samples for you in the essay on democracy. Stay tuned!

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What is democracy , sample essay on democracy (100 words), sample essay on democracy (250 to 300 words), sample essay on democracy for upsc (500 words).

Democracy is a form of government in which the final authority to deliberate and decide the legislation for the country lies with the people, either directly or through representatives. Within a democracy, the method of decision-making, and the demarcation of citizens vary among countries. However, some fundamental principles of democracy include the rule of law, inclusivity, political deliberations, voting via elections , etc.

Did you know: On 15th August 1947, India became the world’s largest democracy after adopting the Indian Constitution and granting fundamental rights to its citizens?

Must Explore: Human Rights Courses for Students

Must Explore: NCERT Notes on Separation of Powers in a Democracy

Democracy where people make decisions for the country is the only known form of governance in the world that promises to inculcate principles of equality, liberty and justice. The deliberations and negotiations to form policies and make decisions for the country are the basis on which the government works, with supreme power to people to choose their representatives, delegate the country’s matters and express their dissent. The democratic system is usually of two types, the presidential system, and the parliamentary system. In India, the three pillars of democracy, namely legislature, executive and judiciary, working independently and still interconnected, along with a free press and media provide a structure for a truly functional democracy. Despite the longest-written constitution incorporating values of sovereignty, socialism, secularism etc. India, like other countries, still faces challenges like corruption, bigotry, and oppression of certain communities and thus, struggles to stay true to its democratic ideals.

Did you know: Some of the richest countries in the world are democracies?

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Must Read: Democracy and Diversity Class 10

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “democracy is the government of the people, by the people and for the people.” There is undeniably no doubt that the core of democracies lies in making people the ultimate decision-makers. With time, the simple definition of democracy has evolved to include other principles like equality, political accountability, rights of the citizens and to an extent, values of liberty and justice. Across the globe, representative democracies are widely prevalent, however, there is a major variation in how democracies are practised. The major two types of representative democracy are presidential and parliamentary forms of democracy. Moreover, not all those who present themselves as a democratic republic follow its values.

Many countries have legally deprived some communities of living with dignity and protecting their liberty, or are practising authoritarian rule through majoritarianism or populist leaders. Despite this, one of the things that are central and basic to all is the practice of elections and voting. However, even in such a case, the principles of universal adult franchise and the practice of free and fair elections are theoretically essential but very limited in practice, for a democracy. Unlike several other nations, India is still, at least constitutionally and principally, a practitioner of an ideal democracy.

With our three organs of the government, namely legislative, executive and judiciary, the constitutional rights to citizens, a multiparty system, laws to curb discrimination and spread the virtues of equality, protection to minorities, and a space for people to discuss, debate and dissent, India has shown a commitment towards democratic values. In recent times, with challenges to freedom of speech, rights of minority groups and a conundrum between the protection of diversity and unification of the country, the debate about the preservation of democracy has become vital to public discussion.

Did you know: In countries like Brazil, Scotland, Switzerland, Argentina, and Austria the minimum voting age is 16 years?

Also Read: Difference Between Democracy and Dictatorship

Democracy originated from the Greek word dēmokratiā , with dēmos ‘people’ and Kratos ‘rule.’ For the first time, the term appeared in the 5th century BC to denote the political systems then existing in Greek city-states, notably Classical Athens, to mean “rule of the people.” It now refers to a form of governance where the people have the right to participate in the decision-making of the country. Majorly, it is either a direct democracy where citizens deliberate and make legislation while in a representative democracy, they choose government officials on their behalf, like in a parliamentary or presidential democracy.

The presidential system (like in the USA) has the President as the head of the country and the government, while the parliamentary system (like in the UK and India) has both a Prime Minister who derives its legitimacy from a parliament and even a nominal head like a monarch or a President.

The notions and principle frameworks of democracy have evolved with time. At the core, lies the idea of political discussions and negotiations. In contrast to its alternatives like monarchy, anarchy, oligarchy etc., it is the one with the most liberty to incorporate diversity. The ideas of equality, political representation to all, active public participation, the inclusion of dissent, and most importantly, the authority to the law by all make it an attractive option for citizens to prefer, and countries to follow.

The largest democracy in the world, India with the lengthiest constitution has tried and to an extent, successfully achieved incorporating the framework to be a functional democracy. It is a parliamentary democratic republic where the President is head of the state and the Prime minister is head of the government. It works on the functioning of three bodies, namely legislative, executive, and judiciary. By including the principles of a sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic republic, and undertaking the guidelines to establish equality, liberty and justice, in the preamble itself, India shows true dedication to achieving the ideal.

It has formed a structure that allows people to enjoy their rights, fight against discrimination or any other form of suppression, and protect their rights as well. The ban on all and any form of discrimination, an independent judiciary, governmental accountability to its citizens, freedom of media and press, and secular values are some common values shared by all types of democracies.

Across the world, countries have tried rooting their constitution with the principles of democracy. However, the reality is different. Even though elections are conducted everywhere, mostly, they lack freedom of choice and fairness. Even in the world’s greatest democracies, there are challenges like political instability, suppression of dissent, corruption , and power dynamics polluting the political sphere and making it unjust for the citizens. Despite the consensus on democracy as the best form of government, the journey to achieve true democracy is both painstaking and tiresome.

Difference-between-Democracy-and-Dictatorship

Did you know: Countries like Singapore, Peru, and Brazil have compulsory voting?

Must Read: Democracy and Diversity Class 10 Notes

Democracy is a process through which the government of a country is elected by and for the people.

Yes, India is a democratic country and also holds the title of the world’s largest democracy.

Direct and Representative Democracy are the two major types of Democracy.

Hope you learned from our essay on democracy! For more exciting articles related to writing and education, follow Leverage Edu .

Sonal is a creative, enthusiastic writer and editor who has worked extensively for the Study Abroad domain. She splits her time between shooting fun insta reels and learning new tools for content marketing. If she is missing from her desk, you can find her with a group of people cracking silly jokes or petting neighbourhood dogs.

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Definition of democracy

Frequently asked questions.

Is the United States a democracy or a republic?

The United States is both a democracy and a republic. Democracies and republics are both forms of government in which supreme power resides in the citizens. The word republic refers specifically to a government in which those citizens elect representatives who govern according to the law. The word democracy can refer to this same kind of representational government, or it can refer instead to what is also called a direct democracy , in which the citizens themselves participate in the act of governing directly.

What is the basic meaning of democracy ?

The word democracy most often refers to a form of government in which people choose leaders by voting.

What is a democratic system of government?

self-government

Examples of democracy in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'democracy.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

borrowed from Middle French democracie, democratie, borrowed from Late Latin dēmocratia, borrowed from Greek dēmokratía, from dēmo- demo- + -kratia -cracy

1539, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

Phrases Containing democracy

pure democracy
social democracy

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Cite this entry.

“Democracy.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy. Accessed 21 Apr. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of democracy.

from early French democratie "democracy," from Latin democratia (same meaning), from Greek demokratia "democracy," from dēmos "people, the masses" and -kratia "rule, government," from kratos "strength, power, authority" — related to epidemic

Legal Definition

Legal definition of democracy, more from merriam-webster on democracy.

Nglish: Translation of democracy for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of democracy for Arabic Speakers

Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about democracy

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Essay on Democracy for Students and Children in 1000+ Words

Here, you will read Essay on Democracy for Students and Children in 1000+ Words. It will include meaning, importance of democracy in India.

Table of Contents

Introduction (Essay on Democracy)

This is a very simple word known by all nowadays. Mostly in all countries democracy system is available. Public administration is called a democracy because the election of the people forms it.

Therefore, there is no system without an election. Democracy is the representative system of the people. It shows the goodwill of the entire community.

Meaning of democracy

Democracy is a governance system under which the people have the right to choose their own ruler on their own.

Under this, every adult citizen, using his vote, chooses a ruler who will help in the development of the country. Along with it, it will maintain the unity and integrity of the country, and protect it from all wars.

Under which every citizen of India was given the right to choose his ruler on his own free will, while under democracy, permission to use his vote by removing the feeling of inequality spread on caste, religion, gender, color, sects etc.

Democracy in India

India is one of the world’s largest democratic countries, where people have the right to choose their favorite representatives.

In a democratic system, the people hand over the reins of the country for the benefit of their country and for the development of the country in the hands of a person who deserves it and helps in maintaining the unity and integrity of the country.

At the same time, India’s democracy works on five main principles, such as sovereign, that there is no interference of any foreign power in India; it is completely free. Socialists, vote is to provide social and economic equality to all citizens.

Secularism, whose vote ball is the freedom to adopt or refuse to adopt any religion. Democratic, which means the citizens of the country elect the government of India. Republic, which means the head of the country, is not a single hereditary king or queen.

There are many types of political parties in the country that stand to contest elections at the state and national levels every five years. But only that political party is ruled by the people who get the maximum vote of the people.

Role of democracy in election and voting system of India

Elections are an essential and important system in India’s universal, socialist, secular, and democratic republic. The election is an important system to form a government and to elect a representative.

Elections to the Lok Sabha or to the Legislative Assembly, in which all citizens of the country unite and exercise their franchise and elect their representative, every citizen over 18 years of age in the country can use his vote.

The citizens of the country are also made aware of giving their votes from time to time. Let us tell you that elections are held every five years in our country, in which the citizens of the country use their votes to elect their representatives for the country’s development and progress.

India is a democratic country with 29 states and seven union territories in which elections are held every five years. At the same time, in these elections, political parties form their government by getting more votes of the people in the center and the state.

As we know, during elections, political parties make many promises to the people and encourage them to vote for their party. In such a situation, it is a challenge to choose the right and deserving candidate in front of the public. This is the fact that there are many political parties in India.

Democratic Principles of India

India is a democratic country that primarily works on five democratic principles – such as sovereign, socialist, secularism and democratic which are below –

The Democratic Republic of India operates on the sovereign’s principle, which means that India is free from interference by any foreign power, its rules, and regulations.

Socialists are also a democratic principle of India, whose vote is to provide economic equality and sociality to every citizen of our country by ignoring caste, religion, sect., gender, color, and creed.

India is a secular republic whose vote is that all citizens of India have the freedom to adopt and practice any religion as per their choice and choice, as there is no official religion in India.

India is a democratic republic, which means that India’s government is elected by the citizens of India without any caste discrimination and economic inequality.

Here, all citizens are given the right to vote in the same manner so that they choose the government of choice so that the country’s development can be strengthened and the country can become financially strong.

Ever since our country’s constitution came into force, India has been declared a secular and democratic republic; that is, the head of our country is not a hereditary king or queen, but it is elected by the Lok Sabha. The Rajya Sabha, which is decided by the people of Janardan, Is in hand.

10 Lines on Democracy

Abraham Lincoln has told the meaning of democracy – for the people only- the people’s rule.
Democracy consists of folk loyalty and folk spirit.
In this, the importance of elections is first and foremost. This reflects public welfare.
The Constitution has given place to democratic governance.
The parliamentary system has been adopted in India and UK.
In this, the elected representatives of the people run the country’s rule, keeping the public interest in view.
There is a kind of representative democracy, in which clean and fair elections take place.
It is difficult to give a completely correct and acceptable definition of democracy.
Our Country India is well known in the world as the biggest democracy
The age of casting a vote, and using its democratic right is 18 years.

At last, we can say that democracy system is the most popular and accepted of governance. Our country India’s democratic system is appreciated all over the country.

However, in India’s democracy, all the factors like illiteracy, poverty, and unemployment need to be eradicated to strengthen the country’s democracy and strengthen the country’s development.

But, still there a need for the improvement in the current democratic system of India. I hope you liked this informative essay on democracy.

Thanks for reading.