On Democracy

1. Modern Democracy: A Recent Invention with Ancient Roots

If we accept universal adult suffrage as a requirement of democracy, there would be some persons in practically every democratic country who would be older than their democratic system of government.

Democracy's youth. Despite its ancient lineage in concept, modern democracy, as we understand it today with universal adult suffrage, is a relatively recent phenomenon, largely a product of the twentieth century. For millennia, even in "democracies" or "republics" like ancient Athens or Rome, most adults were excluded from political participation, particularly women and slaves.

Multiple origins. Democracy was not a singular invention that continuously spread, but rather emerged independently in different times and places, driven by a "logic of equality" among free men in specific favorable conditions. Early forms included:

• Greek city-states: Like Athens, where the term "demokratia" originated, featuring direct assembly participation for citizens.
• Roman Republic: A "republic" (res publica) with citizen participation, though limited and eventually undermined by expansion.
• Northern European assemblies: Such as the Viking Tings, where freemen met to settle disputes and approve laws.

Evolution to representation. The shift from small-scale assembly democracy to large-scale representative democracy was a "grand discovery of modern times," allowing democratic principles to be applied to vast nation-states. This adaptation, though initially viewed with suspicion due to its non-democratic origins, became essential for governing large populations and territories.

2. The Five Ideal Criteria for a Democratic Process

In order for the members to be political equals in governing the affairs of the association, then, it would have to meet all four criteria.

Political equality. To ensure that all members of an association are treated as politically equal in making decisions, a democratic process must satisfy five fundamental criteria. These standards define an ideal democratic system, against which actual political systems can be measured and improved.

The five criteria are:

• Effective participation: All members must have equal and effective opportunities to make their views known.
• Voting equality: Every member must have an equal and effective opportunity to vote, with all votes counted equally.
• Enlightened understanding: Members must have equal and effective opportunities to learn about alternative policies and their consequences.
• Control of the agenda: Members must have the exclusive opportunity to decide what matters are placed on the agenda, ensuring the process is never closed.
• Inclusion of adults: All, or most, adult permanent residents should have the full rights implied by the first four criteria.

Guiding principles. These criteria are not arbitrary but are logically necessary to uphold the principle of political equality. Any violation of these standards diminishes political equality, making them crucial guides for designing and evaluating democratic institutions, even if perfect attainment remains an elusive ideal.

3. Democracy's Ten Enduring Advantages Over Alternatives

In comparison with any feasible alternative to it, democracy has at least ten advantages.

Preventing tyranny. Perhaps democracy's most fundamental advantage is its capacity to prevent cruel and vicious autocratic rule, a persistent problem throughout human history. By distributing power and ensuring accountability, it safeguards citizens from despots who exploit state coercion for personal ends.

Core benefits:

• Guarantees fundamental rights: Democracy is inherently a system of rights, necessary for effective participation and fair elections.
• Ensures broader personal freedom: Beyond political rights, a democratic culture fosters a wider array of personal liberties.
• Protects fundamental interests: Citizens can best protect their own interests by participating in government decisions.
• Maximizes self-determination: It allows individuals to live under laws of their own choosing to the greatest feasible extent.
• Fosters moral responsibility: Citizens can act as morally responsible persons by influencing collective decisions.
• Promotes human development: Democratic systems provide conditions conducive to the development of desirable human qualities like honesty, fairness, and responsibility.
• Fosters political equality: It achieves a higher degree of political equality among citizens than any other system.

Modern advantages. Modern representative democracies also exhibit two additional benefits: they do not fight wars with one another, and they tend to be more prosperous due to their affinity with market economies. While not a panacea, democracy offers a far better gamble for human well-being than any attainable alternative.

4. Political Equality: A Moral Imperative, Not a Factual Claim

We ought to regard the good of every human being as intrinsically equal to that of any other.

Intrinsic equality. The assertion that "all men are created equal" is not a factual claim about human capacities, which are demonstrably unequal, but a profound moral judgment. It posits that one person's life, liberty, and happiness are not intrinsically superior or inferior to another's, thus demanding equal consideration of everyone's good and interests by the government.

Justifying the principle:

• Ethical and religious consistency: It aligns with fundamental ethical beliefs and tenets of major religions.
• Weakness of alternatives: Any claim to intrinsic superiority by an individual or group is implausible and often relies on coercion or myth.
• Prudence: Given the state's power to inflict harm, it is safer for individuals to insist on equal consideration of their interests.
• Acceptability: A principle of equal consideration is more likely to secure the assent and cooperation of all members.

Rejecting guardianship. This principle leads to the rejection of "Guardianship," the idea that experts should rule, because no one is so definitively better qualified to govern that they should have complete authority. Instead, it implies that all adults, with few exceptions, are sufficiently competent to participate in governing the state.

5. Six Essential Institutions for Large-Scale Representative Democracy

Taken in their entirety, then, these six political institutions constitute not only a new type of political system but a new kind of popular government, a type of “democracy” that had never existed throughout the twenty-five centuries of experience since the inauguration of “democracy” in Athens and a “republic” in Rome.

Polyarchal democracy. For a country to be governed democratically, it requires a specific set of political institutions that collectively define modern representative democracy, or "polyarchy." These institutions are necessary to meet the ideal democratic criteria on a large scale.

The six institutions are:

• Elected officials: Control over government policy decisions is vested in elected representatives.
• Free, fair, and frequent elections: Officials are chosen in regular, uncoerced, and fairly conducted elections.
• Freedom of expression: Citizens can express political views without severe punishment.
• Access to alternative sources of information: Citizens have rights to and actual access to diverse, independent information.
• Associational autonomy: Citizens can form independent organizations, including political parties and interest groups.
• Inclusive citizenship: All adult permanent residents, with minimal exceptions, possess these rights.

Historical development. These institutions did not emerge simultaneously; universal adult suffrage, for instance, is largely a twentieth-century achievement. Their development, often driven by demands for inclusion, transformed the concept of democracy from small-scale assembly rule to a robust, large-scale representative system.

6. The Inescapable Dilemma of Democratic Scale: Participation vs. Effectiveness

The smaller a democratic unit, the greater its potential for citizen participation and the less the need for citizens to delegate government decisions to representatives. The larger the unit, the greater its capacity for dealing with problems important to its citizens and the greater the need for citizens to delegate decisions to representatives.

The law of time and numbers. The fundamental democratic dilemma arises from the inverse relationship between the size of a political unit and the feasibility of direct citizen participation. As the number of citizens increases, direct participation in decision-making becomes impractical, necessitating the delegation of authority to representatives.

Trade-offs:

• Small-scale (assembly democracy): Offers maximum opportunities for direct participation and deliberation (e.g., town meetings). However, it struggles with effectiveness in addressing large-scale problems like defense, economy, or complex social issues.
• Large-scale (representative democracy): Provides greater capacity to deal with complex, widespread problems. But it inherently reduces direct citizen participation, leading to a "dark side" of elite bargaining and potential disconnect from popular will.

Internationalization's challenge. This dilemma extends to international organizations, which are even harder to democratize effectively due to immense scale, diverse populations, and the prevalence of elite bargaining. While national governments can be democratized, achieving comparable democratic control at the international level remains highly unlikely.

7. Constitutional Design: A Crucial Factor in Democracy's Survival and Quality

If the underlying conditions are mixed in a country, and some are favorable but others are unfavorable, a well-designed constitution might help democratic institutions to survive, whereas a badly designed constitution might contribute to the breakdown of democratic institutions.

Variety of forms. Democratic constitutions exhibit wide variations in structure, including written/unwritten, federal/unitary systems, judicial review, and presidential/parliamentary executives. There is no single "best" democratic constitution, as each design involves trade-offs among desirable goals.

Impact of design:

• Stability: In countries with highly favorable underlying conditions, almost any constitution can sustain democracy. Where conditions are highly unfavorable, no constitution can save it.
• Mixed conditions: Constitutional design becomes critical in countries with mixed conditions, where a thoughtful framework can bolster democratic institutions against challenges.
• Quality of democracy: Beyond mere survival, constitutional choices affect fairness of representation, governmental effectiveness, accountability, transparency, and legitimacy.

Key constitutional options:

• Parliamentary with PR (Continental European): Common in Europe, favors proportional representation and coalition governments.
• Parliamentary with FPTP (British/Westminster): Prevalent in English-speaking democracies, tends to amplify winning party's majority.
• Presidential with FPTP (U.S.): Unique among older democracies, with independent executive and legislature.
• Presidential with PR (Latin American): A combination that some scholars link to democratic breakdowns.

Constitutional reform requires careful judgment of trade-offs and an understanding of a country's specific context, as the American system, for instance, is not easily replicable.

8. Five Underlying Conditions That Favor Democratic Development and Stability

The prospects for stable democracy in a country are improved if its citizens and leaders strongly support democratic ideas, values, and practices.

Beyond institutions. The establishment and endurance of democratic institutions are not solely dependent on constitutional design but are profoundly shaped by five crucial underlying conditions. These factors explain both democracy's successes and failures throughout the twentieth century.

Favorable conditions:

• Absence of hostile foreign control: External intervention by anti-democratic powers can stifle or overturn nascent democracies.
• Civilian control over military and police: Democratic institutions cannot endure if coercive forces are not firmly subordinate to elected officials.
• Weak subcultural pluralism: Homogeneous societies or those with manageable cultural divisions are more conducive to democratic compromise than those with deep, intractable conflicts.
• Democratic beliefs and political culture: Widespread support for democratic ideas, values, and practices among citizens and leaders is essential for weathering crises.
• Modern market economy and society: Economic growth and a market economy foster a middle class and disperse resources, creating a more fertile ground for democracy.

India's improbable case. India, despite its immense poverty and cultural divisions, demonstrates that democracy can persist even with mixed conditions, partly due to its military's obedience to civilian rule, a strong national democratic ideology, and the sheer fragmentation of its minorities, which makes authoritarian takeover difficult.

9. Market-Capitalism's Dual Impact: Fostering and Harming Democracy

Democracy and market-capitalism are locked in a persistent conflict in which each modifies and limits the other.

Antagonistic symbiosis. Democracy and market-capitalism exist in a complex, often contradictory relationship. While polyarchal democracy has only endured in countries with predominantly market-capitalist economies, this economic system also poses significant challenges to democratic ideals.

Market-capitalism favors democracy by:

• Economic growth: Reduces poverty, mitigates social conflict, and provides resources for education.
• Middle class formation: Creates a large, educated middle class that often champions democratic values.
• Decentralization of power: Disperses economic decision-making, preventing the concentration of power in a central authoritarian government.

Market-capitalism harms democracy by:

• Generating inequality: It inevitably creates disparities in wealth and income, which translate into unequal access to political resources.
• Requiring intervention: Unregulated markets inflict harm, necessitating government intervention, which becomes a battleground for unequal political influence.

A permanent tension. The inherent inequalities produced by market-capitalism fundamentally impair political equality, creating a permanent tension with democratic goals. While it facilitates the development of polyarchal democracy, it simultaneously limits the potential for democracy to evolve beyond this level.

10. The Corrosive Effect of Inequality on Democratic Quality

When he wrote that, economic inequality had been increasing in the United States for three decades.

Undermining political equality. Economic inequality, particularly the extreme concentration of wealth, directly compromises the quality of democracy by granting disproportionate political influence to a small, affluent minority. This violates the democratic ideal of equal capacity to influence the political agenda.

Mechanisms of influence:

• Electoral politics: Supreme Court decisions, notably Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United, equated money with free speech, leading to unlimited and often anonymous spending in campaigns. This drowns out other voices and skews election outcomes.
• Skewed participation: Wealthier individuals participate more in politics (voting, donations), shifting policy incentives for politicians away from the interests of the poor and middle class.
• Institutional complexity: In complex political systems, well-resourced groups can exploit legislative and bureaucratic intricacies to shape policies in their favor, as seen in the lobbying efforts around financial regulations.

Erosion of democratic principles. The cumulative effect of these influences is a "corrosion of democratic politics by money," where judicial review, ironically, has sometimes subverted rather than protected democratic principles. This raises serious questions about whether highly unequal societies can truly maintain their democratic character.

11. The Unfinished Journey: Enduring Challenges for Democracies

The nature and quality of democracy will greatly depend on how well democratic citizens and leaders meet the challenges I am about to describe.

Persistent problems. Despite democracy's triumphs in the twentieth century, it faces daunting challenges that will shape its future quality and reach. These are not new issues but are likely to intensify, demanding creative solutions from citizens and leaders.

Key challenges include:

• The economic order: The inherent tension between democratic goals and market-capitalism's inequality-generating tendencies will persist, requiring innovative ways to mitigate its adverse effects on political equality.
• Internationalization: The increasing shift of decision-making to international bodies, often dominated by elite bargaining, threatens to expand the "democratic deficit" and reduce popular control over crucial global issues.
• Cultural diversity: Growing internal identity movements and increased immigration are magnifying cultural diversity in older democracies, demanding new arrangements for political accommodation beyond assimilation or simple majority rule.
• Civic education: The rising scale and complexity of public affairs, coupled with an overwhelming volume of information, necessitate improved civic education and new methods for citizens to achieve enlightened understanding and effective participation.

A call to action. The future of democracy is not predetermined; it depends on the willingness of democratic societies to confront these challenges. Success in transforming existing democracies into "truly advanced democracies" would serve as a vital beacon for the rest of the world.