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Democracy

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-S017-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-S017-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/democracy/v-1

1. What democracy is

Democracy means rule by the people. It is a form of decision making or government whose meaning can be made more precise by contrast with rival forms, such as dictatorship, oligarchy or monarchy. In these rival forms a single person or a select group rules. With democracy this is not so. The people themselves rule and they rule themselves. The same body is both ruler and ruled.

Philosophical accounts of democracy analyse its nature and discuss its value. The two cannot be completely separated. Any account which explains the value of democracy has to provide or presuppose an account of what it is holding to be of value. Conversely, supposedly neutral analyses of the nature of democracy are influenced by values. For example, someone who thinks that democracy is a good thing is liable to analyse it in terms of other features also thought to be good.

The concept of democracy therefore may naturally be thought of as what W.B. Gallie called an essentially contested concept. Such concepts are concepts whose analysis is unresolvable because different analysts read into it their favoured values. For example, before the reunification of Germany, both East and West Germany called themselves democracies. Yet each had very different political systems, one being a Marxist single-party state, the other having economic and political competition with several parties and contested elections. A dispute about which one was really a democracy would be irresolvable.

This account and this example presuppose that democracy is desirable, so there is a competition to lay claim to the honorific title. However, for most of the time since the invention of the concept of democracy it has not been taken to be a term of honour. A kind of democracy did exist in ancient Athens. But, this was a form of government criticized by the leading Greek thinkers of the time, Plato and Aristotle. For most of the time since this early democracy ended, democracy has neither existed nor been thought to be desirable.

Much later, with the creation of the USA, we reach a system which most people today would take to be a paradigmatic example of democracy. Unsurprisingly it was defended by its founding fathers. However, what might surprise us more today is that in one of the most famous of these defences, James Madison was careful not to use ‘democracy’ as the name for the system he supported. He identifies things called democracies and does not support them; the description he uses instead for the fledgling USA is ‘republic’ (Madison, Hamilton and Jay 1787–8).

What Madison means by a republic is ‘a government in which the scheme of representation takes place’, and by a democracy ‘a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person’ (Madison, Hamilton and Jay [1787–8] 1987: 126). It might be thought that the central question here is one of size. Commentators writing just before Madison, such as Rousseau (§3) (1762) and Montesquieu (§3) (1748), held that democracy was only possible in small states; and Madison can be taken to be marking the transition to the modern world, with large states rather than small ones; and a corresponding move from direct democracy to representative government. What is today standardly called democracy is very different from what was standardly so called in the ancient world.

However, size is not the only important distinction here. Individuals in very large modern political units can now be so linked together by modern technology that they can relate to each other much as if they all met together. On the other hand, political decisions by and for small groups are still made in the modern world. It can still be asked of these whether they should be made democratically; and, if so, which sort of democracy is appropriate. So, whatever the size of political unit, questions can arise about the importance of participation or discussion before decisions are made. It can be asked whether democracy should be seen primarily as a mechanism in which people vote for policies or representatives without assembly, participation or discussion. At one extreme (as with Joseph Schumpeter (§3) (1943)), we could analyse democracy as a competition for votes between professional politicians. At the other extreme, we could analyse democracy as a system in which unanimous decisions are reached after a prolonged discussion which respects the equal autonomy and participation of everyone involved. The former seems more practical, but may not uphold any (other) ideals; the latter seems impressively ideal, but may be ineffective in practice.

It has just been said that voting and representation is at least practical. However, this ignores one prominent problem. This is that the collective view which results from voting may not be related in the way we would wish to the individual views expressed in the votes. In particular this applies if there are three or more options to be arranged in order of preference and there are three or more such individual orderings (see Social choice). These problems will not be discussed further here; although it should be recognized that many people (such as W.H. Riker (1982)) think that they are an insuperable objection to democratic decision making.

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Citing this article:
Harrison, Ross. What democracy is. Democracy, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-S017-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/democracy/v-1/sections/what-democracy-is.
Copyright © 1998-2024 Routledge.

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