democracy

So many political systems and ideologies claim the virtue of democracy that the word has become virtually meaningless in its everyday use; the label is used to legitimize almost every kind of political power arrangement.

The origins of democracy as an idea and a practice go back to the city-states of Greece in the fifth century BCE. At that time, it meant simply ‘rule of the citizens’ (the demos), and was designed to allow all citizens to have a voice in decisions that would affect all. This right was exercised at mass meetings, and approximated to what we would today call direct democracy. It is important to remember three things about this ancient Greek democracy: first, that it excluded women and a large class of slaves; second, that the demos acted as a collective or social body, rather than as isolated individuals; and, third, that this kind of collective decision-making could work only as long as the citizen body remained relatively small and homogeneous. Kirkpatrick Sale inHuman Scale (1980), building on the empirical work of Robert Dahl, has suggested that true democracy is difficult in groups larger than 10,000, and impossible in populations above 50,000: most West Europeans and Americans live in towns and cities larger than this. In fact the classic age of Greek democracy lasted only for about 200 years, in city-states of a few thousand privileged citizens, and was destroyed by invasion and war. Its long-term durability in the face of population growth was never tested.

Contemporary democracies are all very different from the ancient Greek model. The pattern that emerged in England in the seventeenth century and slowly became the model for the world was one of representative democracy. Here, citizens elect politicians who promise to represent the interests of those citizens in debates and decisions, which typically take place in some central national forum such as a parliament or congress. Thus, ideally, the parliament becomes a miniature demos.

In practice, politicians in a democracy usually belong to parties which propose general policies or programmes, rather than responding to citizens on an issue-by-issue basis. Parties thus become independent centres of power . The experience of the twentieth century seems to show that citizens' views are best represented by the proliferation of many small parties-as in Italy or Israel; but government can be carried on more efficiently where there are only two, or at most three parties-as in Britain or the United States. This is one of the many paradoxes of democracy which have engaged the attention of sociologists and political scientists.

Although there are many one-party systems in the world which claim to be democratic on the basis that they represent the collective will of the people, it is widely agreed that real inter-party competition and real representation of different interests is a necessary condition of democracy. Other necessary conditions include: free and fair elections, a genuine choice between candidates and polities, real parliamentary power, the separation of powers, civil rights for all citizens, and the rule of law. There is room for unlimited disagreement about the exact meaning of any and all of these conditions, which is why democracy continues to be the focus of intense public and academic debate. Researchers have explored the nature of the state as a sociological entity, political socialization , voting behaviour and political participation, the relationships between democracy and economic systems, and the manipulation of public opinion .

But the main thrust of research has been to investigate the reality of democracy itself-how widely power is distributed, and what role ordinary citizens play. In 1956 Robert A. Dahl published A Preface to Democratic Theory in which he argued that the modern industrial states were not democracies so much as polyarchies-shifting coalitions of powerful interest groups. This sparked off two decades of intense research and analysis. In the same year, C. Wright Mills produced The Power Elite which took the critique of democracy much further by claiming that, in the United States, democratic political practices had been obliterated by a power élite consisting of the institutional leaders of big business, the military, and what Mills called ‘the political directorate’ (the executive branch of government). Citizens had become docile and powerless in this mass society .

The counterpart of élite and class-rule theories of democracy has been the conservative tradition which, from Plato to Burke, has been suspicious of democracy as a dangerous and inefficient system which could easily lead to mob rule. The origins of popular democracy in the French Revolution of 1789 gave force to this view.

In the modern democracies there is little consensus about just how strong the voice of the people can or should be in a constitutional democracy. Politicians routinely ignore massive public opinion majorities-for example the majority for capital punishment or a balanced budget in the United States, or the majority against full integration into Europe, or against health privatization in Britain. Democracy mixes uneasily with traditional paternalism , international corporate capitalism , and welfare statism . Indeed, the complexity of political and economic decision-making today presents a formidable barrier to real public participation. In the future, new electronic techniques for supplying information and testing public opinion may bring democracy a little closer to its participatory origins.

Useful introductions to the voluminous literature surrounding these issues are Jack Lively's Democracy (1975) and the collection edited by, Democratic Theory and Practice (1983). See also bureaucracy ; industrial democracy.