I enjoyed Schmitter and Karl’s article; it serves as a fitting introduction for the content of this course. The definition of democracy proposed by Schmitter and Karl is as follows: “Modern political democracy is a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives.”

While it is not an inaccurate  per se, Karl and Schmitter’s definition does not suffice  for me. It seems that this definition is more consequence-oriented, implying that the ability to hold leaders accountable, via the entitlement to vote, is sufficient for determining what is and what is not a democracy. Accountability of elected officials is certainly one of the most basic tenets of democracy, and is, for me, a necessary component, but it is by no means sufficient for my conceptualization of democracy. The concept of accountability emphasis a cyclical version of democracy,  regular, regulated elections to reward or punish incumbents for their actions by either re-election or electing a new person into office. However, by capitalizing so much on this single cyclical process, Schmitter and Karl are reducing the citizen’s duty to the simple act of voting, which, for me, can guarantee only a bare minimum standard of democracy (to go beyond this bare minimum, citizen participation in various aspects of civil society is essential).

With this minimalist definition of what democracy is, what do they have to say about what it is not? Among many mistaken assumptions they address, Schmitter and Karl present a key criticism: “Democracies are not necessarily more efficient economically than other forms of government. Their rates of aggregate growth, savings, and investment may be no better than those of non democracies”. This touches on the nature of the relationship, or lack thereof, between capitalism and democracy, one that I am quite interested in observing. While the two seem to be intrinsically linked throughout history, must they occur hand-in-hand? I personally believe that there is a system of one-way dependency; a country can be capitalist but not democratic, but a country cannot be democratic if it is not capitalist. Democracy, for me, requires limitations on the role of the state in the marketplace; a centralized economy places an exorbitant amount of control in the hands of government, and strongly detracts away from the underlying liberal tendencies prevalent in most successful democracies today.