some notes on democracy

Typically, when the term democracy is used, it is intended to mean representative democracy which can be defined as a system in which the people rule through the election--in free, frequent, and competitive elections--of officeholders who make binding decisions for members of the community. (Just having elections is not sufficient, as is illustrated by a news item on Myanmar ["When it comes to politics, Burmese say" NYT 28 May 08] that would be funny if it wasn't also tragic; the elections must be free, frequent, and competitive.)  Representative democracy is also known as indirect democracy or a republican form of government.  As such, it differs from direct democracy, aka Athenian democracy, in which citizens vote directly on the rules (contemporary examples of direct democracy would include the New England town meeting and the use of referendums/initiatives).

While free, frequent, and competitive elections are necessary for any system claiming to be a representative democracy, more is involved than just the opportunity to cast your own ballot (a point nicely made by Michael Slackman in a piece in the International Herald Tribune).  Following, in part, Robert Dahl, one can identify four institutional requirements that must be well satisfied for a political system to merit the honor of being recognized as a representative democracy.  To wit:

• political equality, defined as one person, one equally weighted vote
• a free flow of information
  • the putinization of television in Russia is a troubling violation of this requirement ("It isn't magic" NYT 3 Jun 08)
• citizen participation, which is itself composed of seven institutional subrequirements
  • three of these center on participation
    • there should be high rates of participation
    • there should be no unreasonable legal barriers to participation
    • there should be no systematic biases in participation where some sectors of the citizenry are more likely or less likely to participate than others
  • four of them center on expectations of citizens, who should be
    • interested in politics
    • well-informed about political matters
    • capable of good judgment about political matters
    • committed to the principles of democracy and their full implementation
• collective agreement on the decision rules to be applied in making decisions

To complicate matters further, representative democracies can be organized in different ways, or, in other words, can have different constitutional arrangements.  As Lijphart shows, there is a majoritarian model of representative democracy and then there is a whole range of other arrangements that are not majoritarian.