BRITISH POLITICS

British Politics



British Politics

What is distinctive about the British variant of liberal democracy?

The term "liberal democracy" was used during the Cold War in opposition to that of "popular democracy "to describe the political system of democracies involving Western ideas of democracy and liberalism. The goal was to focus on a political guarantor of liberties individual, pluralistic and based on universal suffrage. A liberal democracy is also characterized by an economy capitalist governed by the law of the market. The legitimacy of liberal democracy rests on the people sovereign, according to the democratic ideal, with separation and limitation of powers according to the liberal ideal. After the demise of democracies, the term "liberal democracy" remained to characterize Western democracies. It opposes systems totalitarian.

The values ??of liberal democracy are: political freedom, personal freedom, political pluralism, limited government, local government. The key seems to be a selection made by the Italian historian of ideas Norberto Bobbio, that democracy should be identified with the procedure, the methods of governance, and liberalism - in the context of the types of political systems - as the character of the state (Saunders, 2011, 25).

The nature of the liberal state to define the main values ??proclaimed by liberals, and put into practice democratic. Liberal democracy provides and cares for human rights, and freedom of the individual poses as the highest good. It is fundamental to the authority - no matter how chosen - was limited. The ideal of limited government rests on the concern here is that nobody freely did not interfere with the life and the will of the people. This security will be ensured by the political constitution - of course, having the nature of Emancipation, which guarantees to protect the freedoms and rights. Distribution system and peer review authorities, decentralization and local government, independent judiciary - these are the elements of liberal democracy and constitutional provisions. From the procedural it is also important that citizens have the right and the right to political, electoral participation. Liberal democracy must also ensure the instruments of social control authorities (Villis, 2006, 33). What counts here is not only the transparency of the political process - is all about so that citizens have a formal (legal) measures to control the decision-making process carried out in the authorities at every level.

The influence of liberalism in the nineteenth century could not better manifest itself in the gradual release model of liberal democracy, regime in which occurs the reconciliation of political liberalism and economic liberalism. If, in the late nineteenth century, Western Europe, mainly, and North America are the main areas of diffusion model of liberal democracy, a growing number of countries have adopted during the twentieth century. The regime of liberal democracy is defined above all by participation, direct or indirect, of citizens in public life: this is why it is democratic. But it is also liberal regime has in fact designed to maintain and defend individual freedoms gradually acquired in the West since the late sixteenth century (Ken et al, 1998, ...