CHARACTERISTICS OF A DEMOCRACY

Arguments for and against democracy in cambodia

Characteristics of a democracy?

MOST ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF A DEMOCRACY

For at least four reasons, democracy and kindred terms such as democrat and democratic have proved resistant to consensual definition by social scientists. First of all, from the revolutionary moment of the late eighteenth century, “democratic” has been a term of approbation or disapprobation deployed in political conflicts in support of or in opposition to particular rulers, movements, policies, regimes, or entire systems of rule. It has therefore been a term used by actors as much as analysts and, like other such terms, has been implicitly and explicitly redefined as it has been deployed in struggles.

Second, the transference of a terminology developed for ancient city-states to the developing national states in the late eighteenth century posed the challenge of identifying analogous institutions, a conceptual issue exacerbated by both the changing character of the chief ancient exemplar and the enormous gaps in detailed description and knowledge of it. Nineteenth-century champions and opponents of democracy had a good deal of wiggle room in precisely what they might choose to mean by that term.

Third, the known institutions from antiquity and the comments upon them by ancient and modern writers were so varied that individual writers might place very different weights on different institutions and practices. For one analyst, for example, severe term limits might seem an essential feature of a democratic order; for another, intensive citizen participation would be the key; while a third might stress the zones of citizen equality. Even before the revolutionary eighteenth century, democracy was a multifaceted concept, and the accumulated history of conflict and debate since that time has generated no consensus on the weighting of the different facets.

Fourth, modern democracy (and ancient democracy, for that matter) seems inherently to have been subject to change born of conflict. Very few people in the twenty-first century, including social scientists, would be comfortable characterizing as democratic any of the political arrangements widely characterized by that label in, say, the early nineteenth century. In the new United States, for example, slavery was widespread, women had no vote and limited property rights, voting were often public, and organizations for the purpose of contesting elections were commonly regarded as scandalous. (Heywood, 2000, 174)

Among the elements that analysts have identified as defining characteristics of democratic rule have been freedom, equality, accountability, competition, and authoritative decision making.

CHARACTERISTICS OF DEMOCRACY

Freedom

Persons subject to democratic authority would enjoy protected spheres within which governmental authority would be sharply circumscribed and defined by laws so that actions of authority would be predictable. Such freedoms commonly include freedoms to express one in various media, to engage in varied and self-chosen religious practices, and to be able to defend oneself against accusations of criminality. Some theorists do and others do not regard extensive property rights as essential to viable democracy. Since collective purposes generally imply some limitation on each of these areas, the precise sphere of freedom from state constraint is inherently subject to considerable ...