Democracy

Democracy

What Democracy is:

Democracy is a unique system for organizing relations between rulers and the ruled. Democracy does not consist of a single unique set of institutions. There are many types of democracy. The specific form of democracy takes is contingent upon a country's socioeconomic conditions as well as its entrenched state structures and policy practices. Democracies depend upon the presence of rulers, persons who occupy specialized authority roles and can give legitimate commands to others. What distinguishes democratic rulers from undemocratic ones are the norms that condition how the former come to power and the practices that hold them accountable for their actions.

Citizens are the most distinctive element in democracies. All regimes have rulers and a public realm, but only to the extent that they are democratic do they have citizens. Competition has not always been considered an essential defining condition of democracy. The most popular definition of democracy equates it with regular elections, fairly conducted and honestly counted. Another commonly accepted image of democracy identifies it with majority rule. Any governing body that makes decisions by combining the votes of more than half of those eligible and present is said to be democratic, whether that majority emerges within an electorate, a parliament, a committee, a city council, or a party caucus. Cooperation has always been a central feature of democracy. Actors must voluntarily make collective decisions binding on polity as a whole. They must cooperate in order to compete. But democracy's freedoms should also encourage citizens to deliberate among themselves, to discover their common needs, and to resolve their differences without relying on some supreme central authority. Representatives do most of the real work in modern democracies. Most are professional politicians who orient their careers around the desire to fill key offices.

What Democracy is not:

There is an understandable temptation to load too many expectations on this concept and to imagine that by attaining democracy, a society will have resolved all of its political, social, economic, administrative, and cultural problems. Unfortunately, "all good things do not necessarily go together". First, democracies are not necessarily more efficient economically than other forms of government. This