democratic rule: an overview

At a minimum, it requires open and responsive government, free elections, freedom of speech,
the protection of individual rights, respect for the rule of law, and government by ‘the people’.
Government OFF the people, POOR the people, BUY the people
Government OF the people, FOR the people and BY the people.
But the precise meaning of these phenomena remains open to debate, and many democracies
continue to be plagued by elitism, limits on representation, rule by a political class, barriers to
equality, and the impingement of the rights of individuals and groups upon one another. It is
hard to find a government that does not claim to be democratic, because to do otherwise
would be to admit that it was restricting the rights of its citizens. But some states have stronger
claims to being democratic than others; these are what the Democracy Index describes either
as full or flawed democracies
Until recently we could say with some confidence that many states were undergoing a process
of democratization, where political institutions and processes are developing greater stability,
where individual rights are built on firmer foundations, and where the voice of the people is
heard more clearly.
The core principle of democracy is self-rule; the word itself comes from the Greek demokratia,
meaning power (kratos) by the people (demos). From this perspective, democracy refers not to
the election of rulers by the ruled but to the denial of any separation between the two. The
model democracy is a form of self-government in which all qualified citizens participate in
shaping in an atmosphere of equality and deliberation, and in which state and society become
one. But this is no more than an ideal, rarely found in practice except at the local level in
decentralized systems of government.
Features of democratic rule
◆Representative systems of government based on regular, fair, secret, and competitive
elections.

◆ Well-defined, stable, and predictable political institutions and processes, based on a

distribution of powers and a system of political checks and balances.

◆ A variety of institutionalized forms of political participation and representation, including

multiple political parties with different platforms.

◆ Limits on the powers of government, and protection of individual rights and freedoms under
the law, sustained by an independent judiciary.

◆ An active, effective, and protected opposition.

◆ A diverse and independent media establishment, subject to few political controls and free to
share a wide variety of opinions.

direct democracy
The purest form of democracy is the type of direct democracy that was exemplified in the government
of Athens between 461 and 322 BCE. During this time, Greece consisted of several hundred small,
independent city-communities known as poleis (singular: polis), each typically containing an urban core
and a rural hinterland.

The Athenians believed that direct popular involvement and open deliberation were educational in
character, encouraging informed and committed citizens who were sensitive both to the public good
and to the range of interests and opinions found even in small communities.
To engage in democracy was to become informed about the polis, and an educated citizenry meant a
stronger whole. However, there were flaws in the system:

◆ Because citizenship was restricted to men whose parents were citizens, most adults – including
women, slaves, and foreign residents – were excluded.

◆ Turnout was a problem, with most citizens being absent from most assembly meetings even after the
introduction of an attendance payment.

◆ The system was time-consuming, expensive, and over-complex, especially for such a small society.

◆ The principle of self-government did not always lead to coherent policy, and the lack of a permanent
bureaucracy eventually contributed to a period of ineffective governance, leading to the fall of the
Athenian republic after defeat in war.

The Athenian democratic experiment proved that – in the right circumstances – direct democracy was
an achievable goal, and yet it is hard to find in modern political systems.

There has been some recent talk of the possibilities of electronic direct democracy, or e-democracy via
the internet. This includes being able to vote online, launching or signing online petitions, and organizing
demonstrations via social media.

On the one hand, the internet provides for the instant availability of more political information, allows
political leaders to communicate more often and more directly with voters (helping change the way
that electoral campaigns are run), and can help people engage more directly in political discussions. But
there are several problems with e-democracy:

◆ The opinions expressed online are not methodically collected and assessed as they would be in a true
direct democracy; the voices that are heard tend to be those of people who post most often, and there
is often a bandwagon effect reflected – for example – in the phenomenon of trending hashtags on
Twitter.

◆Many of those who express themselves via social media are either partisan or deliberately
provocative, as reflected in the often inflammatory postings of anonymous internet ‘trolls’. The result is
to skew the direction taken by debates, and we can never be sure exactly who is behind the opinions
posted.

◆ The use of social media has led to heightened concerns about privacy, perhaps feeding in to the kind
of mistrust of government that has led to reduced support for conventional forms of participation.

◆ E-democracy relies upon having access to the internet, which is a problem in poor countries, and
even, sometimes, in poorer regions of wealthy countries.

representative democracy
In its modern state form, the democratic principle has transmuted from self-government to elected
government, resulting in the phenomenon of representative democracy, an indirect form of
government.
As late as the eighteenth century, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) warned that
‘the moment a people gives itself representatives, it is no longer free. It ceases to exist.’

As for elections, Schumpeter saw them not as a means by which voters could elect representatives to
carry out their will, but simply as a device to produce a government. From this perspective, the voter
becomes a political accessory, restricted to choosing among broad packages of policies and leaders
prepared by the parties. The deciding of issues by the electorate, Schumpeter argued, was made
secondary to the election of the people who are to do the deciding. Representation, it could be argued,
offers a valuable division of labor, allowing those who want to participate to do so, and everyone else to
limit their participation to monitoring government and voting at elections (Schudson, 1998). After all,
how serious would our commitment to a free society be if we tried to force people to participate who
would rather be doing something else? But there are many questions regarding how representation
works in practice:

◆ The standard means for choosing representatives is through elections, but there are problems with
the ways in which elections are structured, and therefore with the ways voices are counted and citizens
are represented.

◆ Political parties and candidates are never given the same amount of attention by the media, and
money and special interests often skew the attention paid to competing sets of policy choices.

◆ Questions are raised about varying and often declining rates of voter turnout; rates vary by age,
gender, education, race, income, and other factors.

◆ Elections can be manipulated in many ways, including complex or inconvenient registration

procedures, the intimidation of voters, the poor organization of polling stations, and the miscounting of
ballots. New challenges have been created by charges that Russia has interfered in US and European
elections by manipulating social media and hacking computerized electoral systems.

◆ There are questions about the manner in which elected officials actually represent the needs and
opinions of voters. Specifically, how should they guard against being influenced excessively by interest
groups, big business, social movements, or the voices of those with the means to make themselves
heard most loudly?
liberal democracy
In practice, modern democracies are liberal democracies, meaning that they are both representative
and also liberal in the sense of adopting limited government. Reflecting Locke’s notion of natural rights,
liberalism seeks to ensure that even a representative government bows to the will of the people, who
should be defended against its rulers. In particular, minorities can be protected from another of
democracy’s inherent dangers: tyranny by the majority. Another way of describing liberal democracy is
majority rule with minority rights.

The protection of civil liberties is a key part of the meaning of liberal democracy. This is based on the
understanding that there are certain rights and freedoms that citizens must have relative to government
and that cannot be infringed by the actions of government. These include the right to liberty, security,
privacy, life, equal treatment, and a fair trial, as well as freedom of speech and expression, of assembly
and association, and of the press and religion. This is all well and good, but it is not always easy to define
what each of these means and where the limitations fall in defining them. Even the most democratic
societies have had difficulty deciding where the rights of one group of citizens ends and those of another
begin, and where the actions of government (particularly in regard to national security) restrict those of
citizens.

The concept of a flawed democracy contained within the Democracy Index is particularly interesting in
what it suggests about the limits on rights and liberties. For example, India is often described as the
world’s biggest democracy, and yet it is classified in the index as flawed. At least part of the problem
stems from the generalized phenomenon of structural violence. This is a term used to describe
intangible forms of oppression, or the ‘violence’ concealed within a social and political system. Hence
the oppression of women is a form of structural violence perpetrated by male-dominated political
systems, and extreme poverty is a form of violence perpetrated by one part of society on another.

Some democracies emphasize the liberal in liberal democracy more than others. The Founding Fathers
wanted, above all, to forestall a dictatorship of any kind, including tyranny by the majority. To prevent
any government – and, especially, elected ones – from acquiring excessive power, the constitution set
up an intricate system of checks and balances.

modernization and democracy

Why are some countries democratic and others not? What, in other words, are the economic and social
requisites of sustainable democracy? A frequent answer is that liberal democracy flourishes in modern
conditions: in high-income industrial or post-industrial states with an educated population. By contrast,
middle-income states are more likely to be flawed democracies, and low-income countries will tend to
be authoritarian.

The political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset (1959) provided the classic statement of the impact of
modernization, suggesting that ‘the more well-to-do a [country], the greater the chances that it will
sustain democracy’.

Not everyone agrees that there is a link between modernization and democracy, however – see
Przeworski and Limongi (1997) – and there continue to be exceptions to the argument, both apparent
and real. The record of the oil-rich kingdoms of the Middle East suggests that affluence, and even mass
affluence, is no guarantee of democracy. But these seeming counter-examples show only that modernity
consists of more than income per head; authoritarian monarchs in the Middle East rule societies that
may be wealthy, but are also highly traditional. A more important exception is India, a lower-middle-
income country with a consolidated, if distinctive, democracy.

Several possible answers:

◆ Wealth softens class differences, producing a more equal distribution of income and turning the
working class away from ‘leftist extremism’, while the presence of a large middle class tempers class
conflict between rich and poor.

◆ Economic security raises the quality of governance by reducing incentives for corruption.

◆ High-income countries have more interest groups to reinforce liberal democracy.

◆ Education and urbanization also make a difference. Education inculcates democratic and tolerant
values, while towns have always been the wellspring of democracy.
huntington’s waves of democracy
When and why did modern democracies emerge? As with the phases of decolonization, so today’s
democracies emerged – argues political scientist Samuel Huntington (1991) – in a series of distinct
waves of democratization. Just as each period of decolonization deposited a particular type of state on
the political shore, so too did each democratic wave differ in the character of the resulting democracies.

First wave
This took place between 1828 and 1926, when the earliest representative democracies emerged. During
this first period, nearly 30 countries established at least minimally democratic national institutions,
including Argentina, Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the
Scandinavian countries, and the United States. However, some backsliding occurred as fledgling
democracies were overthrown by fascist, communist, or military dictatorships during what Huntington
describes as the ‘first reverse wave’ from 1922 to 1942.

A distinctive feature of many first wave transitions was their slow and sequential character. Political
competition, traditionally operating within a privileged elite, gradually broadened as the right to vote
extended to the wider population. Unhurried transitions lowered the political temperature; in the first
wave, democracy was as much outcome as intention.

Second wave
Huntington’s second wave of democratization began during World War II and continued until the early
1960s. As with the first wave, some of the new democracies created at this time did not consolidate; for
example, elected rulers in several Latin American states were quickly overthrown by military coups. But
established democracies did emerge after 1945 from the ashes of defeated dictatorships, not just in
Germany, but also in Austria, Japan, and Italy. These post-war democracies were introduced by the
victorious allies, supported by local partners. The second-wave democracies established firm roots,
helped by an economic recovery which was nourished by US aid. During this second wave, democracy
also consolidated in the new state of Israel and newly independent India.

Political parties played a key role in the transition. First-generation democracies had emerged when
parties were seen as a source of faction, rather than progress. By the time of the second wave, parties
had emerged as the leading instrument of democracy in a mass electorate.

Third wave
This was a product of the final quarter of the twentieth century, and included the following elements:

◆ The ending of right-wing dictatorships in Greece, Portugal, and Spain in the 1970s.

◆ The retreat of the military in much of Latin America in the 1980s.

◆ The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s.

The third wave transformed the global political landscape, providing an inhospitable environment for
those non-democratic political systems that survived. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, presidents subjected
themselves to re-election (though rarely to defeat). With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of
any realistic alternative to democracy, the European Union and the United States also became more
encouraging of democratic transitions while still, of course, keeping a close eye on their own shorter-
term interests.

Democratization

The stages of democratization outlined by O’Donnell et al. (1986) offer one perspective. The first step in
the process comes with the liberalization of an authoritarian political regime. Much as we would like to
believe in the power of public opinion, transitions are rarely initiated by mass demonstrations against a
united dictatorship. Rather, democracy is typically the outcome – intended or unintended – of
recognition within part of the ruling group that change is inevitable, or even desirable.

In the more liberal environment that emerges, opportunities increase to express public opposition,
inducing a dynamic of reform, moving the process to the second stage of a fraught and often lengthy
transition to democracy.

During the second stage- transition-, the existing rulers will look for political opportunities in the new
democratic order. For example, military rulers may seek to repackage themselves as the only party
capable of guaranteeing order and security. In any event, the current elite will seek to protect its future
by negotiating privileges, such as exemption from prosecution. The transition is substantially complete
with the installation of the new arrangements, most visibly through a high-turnout election which is seen
as the peak moment of democratic optimism (Morlino, 2012).

The third stage in the process – consolidation – only occurs when new institutions provide an accepted
framework for political competition, or – as Przeworski (1991) puts it – ‘when a particular system of
institutions becomes the only game in town and when no one can imagine acting outside the democratic
institutions’. It takes time, for example, for the armed forces to accept their more limited role as a
professional, rather than a political, body. While consolidation is a matter of attitudes, its achievement is
measured through action and, in particular, by the peaceful transfer of power through elections. The
first time a defeated government relinquishes office, democracy’s mechanism for elite circulation is
shown to be effective, contributing further to political stability. So, consolidation is the process through
which democratic practices become habitual – and the habit of democracy, as any other, takes time to
form (Linz and Stepan, 1996). Transition establishes a new political system but consolidation secures its
continuation.

Finally, in the fourth stage, there is a deepening of democracy as the new system moves towards full
liberal democracy. The term deepening emerged as academic awareness grew that many third-wave
transitions had stalled midway between authoritarianism and democracy, with accompanying popular
disenchantment. Democracy in emerging democracies is ‘superficial rather than deep and the new order
consolidates at a low level of ‘democratic quality’ (Morlino, 2012: Part III). So, the point of the term
‘deepening’ is not so much to describe a universal stage in transitions as to acknowledge that the
outcome of a transition, especially in less modern countries, may be a democracy which is both
consolidated and superficial.

The political changes witnessed by Mexico since the 1990s offer an example of this model at work. It had
been governed without a break since 1929 by the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which
was able to maintain control in part because of its ability to incorporate key sectors of Mexican society,
offering them rewards in return for their support. But as Mexicans became better educated, and with
PRI unable to blame anyone else for the country’s growing economic problems in the 1990s, the
pressures for democratic change began to grow.

A different story is told by one of the most dramatic waves of political upheaval of recent decades: the
Arab Spring. It certainly signaled a desire for democracy on the part of many in the affected countries,
but it was to prove a long-term disappointment because few of the rulers in the affected countries were
ready to change.

A critical point confirmed by the experience of the Arab Spring was that a transition from an
authoritarian regime did not entail an immediate or even medium-term transition to liberal democracy:
alternative outcomes included the replacement of one authoritarian order with another, or the
emergence of a failed state. The Arab Spring peaked between 2010 and 2012, it brought significant
change only to Tunisia (listed as a flawed democracy in 2017), Libya is today in a more desperate
situation than it had been before the Arab Spring, while the Syrian civil war has resulted in the deaths of
hundreds of thousands and a massive refugee crisis with implications far beyond Syria’s borders.

the future of democracy Just before Huntington’s book on waves of democratization was published, the
political economist Francis Fukuyama was inspired by the end of the Cold War and the speed of the
democratic transition in Eastern Europe to borrow from Hegel, Marx, and others in declaring the end of
history, or the final triumph of democracy: What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold
War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history … That is, the end
point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the
final form of human government. (Fukuyama, 1989)

Continuing with the economic analogy, Francis Fukuyama (quoted in Luce, 2017) has argued that it
remains an open question as to whether the backsliding of democracy is a market correction or a global
depression. Wherever we go from here, many of today’s political conversations are not about the health
or the spread of democracy but about the challenges it faces even within those states we once thought
to be firmly liberal democratic. Among those challenges are the following: social disintegration, voter
alienation, the tensions between individual rights and democracy, and the manner in which competitive
politics and economics can undermine the sense of community. For Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018),
democracy can either end suddenly as the result of a military coup, or slowly and deceptively with the
abuse of power and the suppression of opposition.

The more specific challenges faced by democracies include the following:

◆ Women have less political power and opportunity than men, do not earn as much as men for equal
work, and are still prevented from rising to positions of political and corporate power as easily as men.

◆ Racial and religious intolerance remain critical challenges, with minorities often continuing to be
pushed to the margins of society, and a backlash to migration posing a challenge to the progressive
credentials of even the most open of societies.

◆ There is a persistent income gap between the rich and the poor, and levels of unemployment and
poverty often remain disturbingly high. With both comes reduced political influence, and sometimes
political radicalization.

The most serious challenge faced by democracy, though, is that faith and trust in government has been
falling, reflecting less a concern with the concept of democracy than with the manner in which it is
practiced. Many see government as being dominated by elites, have less trust in their leaders, and feel
that government is doing a poor job of dealing with pressing economic and social problems. As a result,
they are either voting in smaller numbers, or moving away from established political parties and
mainstream political engagement, or switching their support to candidates running on a platform of
populism. Recent examples of populist leaders associated with populist ideas include Hugo Chávez in
Venezuela, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Donald Trump in the United States, Rodrigo Duterte in the
Philippines, and Narendra Modi in India.

Populism

A political program or movement based on championing the rights and interests of the people in the
face of the ruling elite. The term populist is often used pejoratively to criticize a politician for pandering
to a people’s fear and enthusiasm.

Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about the future of democracy? It is true that no country with a
sustained history of liberal democracy has ever freely or deliberately opted for an alternative form of
government. It is also true that liberal democracies never go to war with one another, and have
developed a solid record of interstate cooperation. The broad goals of the liberal democratic model –
including freedom, choice, security, and wealth – are widely shared. But all is not well: democracies face
significant internal inequalities, many of them are deeply divided within themselves, and they face new
challenges and threats from abroad. They clearly need to do much better in terms of meeting the core
principles of democracy and making sure that the message of the benefits of democracy is sustained at a
global level.
Discussion questions
◆ Is democracy – in practice – truly government by the people, or have other voices come to be heard
more loudly?
◆ Does the internet allow the recreation of Athenian-style direct democracy in today’s states?

◆ What are the appropriate limits on government in a democracy?

◆ What conditions are needed in order for democracy to flourish?

◆ How can democracies respond to the international threats posed by authoritarian regimes?

◆ Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about the future of democracy? Why?