Feb 06 2011
Mini-Assignment 4: What is Democracy, Anyway?
“So what is democracy, anyway?”
I guess the easy way out would be to open a dictionary and look it up but unfortunately “democracy” is not just a 4 syllable noun derived from the Greek work demokratia meaning -dēmos ‘the people’ + -kratia ‘power, rule.’ Democracy is not a word that resonates the same meaning whenever and wherever it is said because it is an abstract idea that has taken many forms over the years.
Political scientists have been trying to standardize ‘democracy’ for a long time. However, this has in reality created various ideas and ideals. Schumpeter strives for a minimalist definition of democracy based on free elections. Dahl creates an idealistic concept of democracy that includes 8 variables that must be met (all the while accepting that this definition is unattainable). Sartori proposes a ladder of generality having forms of democracy move up or down from the root meaning and there is also the idea of diminished subtypes that refer to what is missing from a regime being fully democratic. Finally, there’s either the question of whether democracy conceptualization should be dichotomous or graded?
My definition of democracy is somewhere between Schumpeter and Dahl. I think that there should be an attainable target of a few variables (fair elections, suffrage and protection of civil liberties) that defines countries that are democracies from ones that are not. These regimes labeled “democracies” can then be graded based on how democratic they are. This flexibility of describing democracies based on how democratic they are (opposed to yes or no), allows for changes to be observed while the democracy develops or deteriorates.