Democracy

Introduction: Theories of democracy

The origins of the word “democracy” are greek. “Democracy” is derived from “demokratia”, the
root meanings of which are “demos” (meaning people” and “kratos” (meaning rule). So
democracy means a form of government in which the people rule. In entails a political
community in which there is some form of political equality among the people.

We start with this very simple idea of “rule by the people”, but it is in fact an ambiguous concept:
What does “rule” mean? What does “the people” mean? Who are considered to be the people?
What kind of participation is envisaged for them?

The concept of democracy is about people ruling rather than some smaller group. This seems to
be some kind of egalitarian notion, but the history of democracy is full of attempts to restrict the
meaning of “the people” to a smaller set of people - and apparently inegalitarian or elites notion.
There is much significant history in the attempt to restrict the meaning of “the people” to certain
groups: sometimes it has just meant the owners of property; white men; educated men; men;
adults; …

Lively (1975) summarized a variety of conceptions or theories of democracy; of what “rule by the
people” might mean (from more radical to more restrictive notions of democracy):

1. That all should govern, in the sense that all should be involved in legislating, in deciding on
general policy, in applying laws, and in governmental administration.

2. That all should be personally involved in crucial decision-making.

3. That rulers should be accountable to the ruled - i.e. they should be obliged to justify their
actions to the rules and be removable by the ruled.

4. That rulers should be accountable to the representatives of the ruled.

5. That rulers should be chosen by the ruled.

6. That rulers should be chosen by the representatives of the ruled.

7. That rulers should act in the interests of the ruled.

Then there is another question - how can the different conceptions of democracy be justified?
There have been different fundamental values on which democracy has been justified. Some
people justify democracy on the basis of some form of political equality; on rightful authority; on
the need for liberty; on moral self-development; on the common interest; on a fair and goal
compromise; on binding decisions for everyone’s interests; on social utility; on the satisfaction of
wants; on efficient decisions; …

Does democracy mean some kind of popular power -a form of life in which citizens are involved in
self-government and self-regulation-, or is it simply an aid to decision-making and a means of
legitimating the decisions of those in power?

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Classical Democracy: Athens
There was direct participation in public affairs by the citizens. Citizens were actively involved
in a process of self-government.

The key sovereign body on politics in Athens was the Assembly. The citizenry as a whole -every
single citizen- was a member of this Assembly. The Assembly met over 40 times a year, and had a
quorum of 6,000 citizens - that is, any piece of business, to pass through the Assembly, needed a
minimum of 6,000 citizens to turn up and make that decision.

All major issues -such as the legal framework for the maintenance of the public order, finance and
direct taxation, foreign affairs (including the declaration of war and concluding the peace)…- came
before the Assembly.

The Assembly was too large a body to prepare its own agenda, to draft legislation, and to be a
focal point for the reception of political initiatives and proposals. In addition to this Assembly,
there was a Council of 500 citizens, who took responsibility for organizing and proposing
decisions. This Council was aided in turn by a smaller and more streamline Committee of 50
citizens, who could only serve in it for one month. Above this Committee there was the President,
a single citizen who was President for just one day.

The courts were organized in a similar basis to the Assembly. The executive functions of the city
were carried out by so-called magistrates, although their own power was diffused -weakened- by
ensuring that even these administrative posts were held by a board of 10 citizens. Nearly all such
officials were elected for a period of one year, and service was typically restricted to two
occasions in your whole lifetime.

In addition, in order to avoid the danger of autocratic politics, a variety of methods of elections
were deployed to preserve the accountability of political administrators and the state system more
generally - this included the rotation of tasks, or the drawing of lots out of a hat… It was
designated to try to avoid potential corruption of a democratic system by just a mean of direct
elections.

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These extraordinary innovations of democracy rested in a large part on exclusivity: only athenian
men over the age of 80 were eligible for citizenship. Women had not political rights, and their
civil rights were strictly limited. The achievements of classical democracy were directly linked to
the politically unrecognized work and domestic service of women and children. There were also
large numbers of residents in Athens who were ineligible to participate in political life, in addition
to the ineligibility of women. The biggest category of politically marginalized people was slave
population, who were used in agriculture, industry, mining, and in the domestic setting. This slave
economy created “free” time for the citizens. The domestic service (the labour of women) also
freed men for the public duties. Athenian slavery and democracy were indivisible.

Contemporary form of liberal (representative) democracy

The contemporary form of liberal democracy can be defined as a cluster of rules and institutions
permitting the broadest participation of the majority of citizens in the selection of representatives
who alone can make political decisions. This cluster of rules and institutions includes elected
government; free and fair elections in which every citizen’s vote has an equal weight; a suffrage
which embraces all citizens irrespective of distinctions of race, gender, religion, class, or sex;
freedom of information and expression on all public matters; association autonomy; …

Liberal tradition:
There are two variants of the classical model of liberal democracy: protective democracy and
developmental democracy. We are going to focus on protective democracy.

The origins of this theory can be traced back to writers such as Hobbes and Locke:

> Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

For Hobbes, humans beings are self-interested. Conflicts of interest and the struggle for power
define the human condition. The state of nature without a government is “war of every one against
ever one”, and life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Only a strong protective state could
reduce adequately the dangers citizens faced when left to their own devices. There is a need to
protect the liberty of the individual. The state should have sufficient power to guarantee social and
political order. Hobbes sought to defend a sphere free from state interference in which trade,
commerce, and the patriarchal family could flourish - that is what the state is protecting.

> John Locke (1632-1704)

In contrast to Hobbes, for Locke there are mere “inconveniences” in the state of nature, such as
the inadequate regulation of the right to “life, liberty and estate (property)”. These
“inconveniences” impel men to get together and contract to set up a government. The
government’s purpose is to protect “life, liberty and estate”. Locke is objecting to Hobbes: it is
hardly credible that people who do not fully trust each other would place their trust in an all-
powerful. The threats for Locke come not just from your neighbors but from the state itself. What
is needed is a constitutional government in which public power is legally circumscribed; and a
separation of powers. For Locke the government rules, and its legitimacy is by the consent of the
individuals. The contract setting up the government is conditional on the government sticking to
its powers.

> Protective theory of liberal democracy - Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and James Mill
(1773-1836)
This theory received its clearest expression in the works of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. The
protection of liberty requires a form of political equality (i.e. democracy) among all mature
individuals. A formally equal capacity to protect their interest from the arbitrary acts of either the
state or the fellow citizens.

The argument of Bentham and James Mill in brief is as follows: we have this Hobbesian figure of
the restless, competitive, interest-pursuing individual motivated to pursue pleasure or utility and
avoid pain. What is paramount for these rights is the free movement, interaction and competition
of citizens in civil society. These citizens must be protected not simply from state oppression, but
from unnecessary interference of any kind. This requires minimalist government, accountable at
regular elections, confined to securing a framework within which the largely self-organizing and
self-regulating citizens can go about their business - and the word business has the meaning of
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enterprise. The free vote and the free market are the ideas at the core of 19th century English
liberalism. The idea of freedom from overarching political authority -so called negative freedom- is
the perfect complement to the growing market society. Freedom of the market meant in practice
leaving the circumstances of people’s lives to be determined by private initiatives in production
and in the distribution and exchange of goods. So it was generally the male property-owning
individual who was the focus of so much attention in this kind of liberal writing. And the new
freedoms that they are discussing were first and foremost for the men of the new middle classes
or bourgeoisie.

> Direct democracy - Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Marx rejects the notion of “the individual” at the basis of liberal political theory. He views man as a
social being, and social classes as the key political actors. Marx attacks the idea that the starting
point of the analysis of political life and its more desirable political form can be the individual. For
Marx individuals only exist in interaction with and in relation to other people. The key to
understanding relationships between people is the class structure.

For Marx, in Capitalism there are two main classes: capitalists and workers. The capitalists own
the factories and technology. The workers, in contrast, are property-less. The capitalists do not
work, and live off of the productive activity of the workers. The value generated by the workers in
the productive process over and above their wages is appropriated by the capitalists. This is the
sense in which the capitalists exploit the workers: the workers work, they produce something,
some of that comes back to the workers in the form of wage, but there is an extra part that the
capitalists take. So clearly capitalists and workers have distinct interests in conflict. This is the
central element of society for Marx.

In this context, Marx attacks the idea of a “neutral” liberal state. Central to the idea of liberal
democratic traditions is the idea that the state can claim to represent the community or pubic as a
whole - but according to Marx this claim is an illusion. Marx denies that the state can ever be a
neutral force, impartially arbitrating social conflicts. On the contrary, he thinks the state plays a
central role in the maintenance of class divided societies, and must, over the long-term, protect
the interests of the economically dominant class (which in Capitalism it is the capitalists).

So Marx is making three points:

- He rejects the liberal separation of the narrow political sphere from the wider operation of the
market and economic forces is society. For Marx, the organization of the economy cannot be
regarded as non-political. The relations of production are central to the nature and distribution
of power in society.

- When the state defends the private ownership of the means of production, the state is taking
the side of the capitalists.

- Irrespective of the views of the representatives and the extent of the franchise, even if all the
representatives were all socialists, there are limits to state action within capitalist society. The
state is dependent on the capitalist economy, so it can’t undermine it. The state is dependent
on the economy, and on the capitalists to invest and to employ people for two reasons: (1) the
state needs to finance itself - so it is reliant on the capitalist for economic activity to get its
taxation and borrow money; (2) citizens hold the state responsible for their economic
livelihoods - the state needs the capitalists to invest and to create jobs because otherwise the
citizens won’t vote for it. So the state is reliant in a capitalist society on the reproduction of
Capitalism.

Freedom for Marx entails the complete democratization of society as well as the state. It can only
be established with the destruction of social classes, and ultimately the abolition of class power in
all forms, including the form of the state. Marx barely wrote in any detail about how socialism or
communism should look like; he was against the development of blueprints (“the music of the
future could not and should not be composed in advance; rather it must emerge in the struggle to
abolish Capitalism”). But we can see the model of the Paris Commune as a kind of Marxian
model of direct democracy:

The 1871 witnessed a major uprise in Paris, in which thousands of workers took to the streets to
overthrow what they regarded was an old and corrupt government structure. Although the
movement was eventually crashed by the French army, Marx thought of it as the glorious avenger
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of a new society. The rebellion lasted long enough for the planning of a remarkable series of
institutional innovations and a new form of government, the Commune. The machinery of the
liberal state would be replace by this Commune structure. According to Marx, all aspects of
government would then be fully accountable to the majority. The smallest communities would
administer their own affairs. The would elect delegates to a larger administrative unit - districts or
towns. These districts and towns would in turn elect candidates to still larger areas of
administration - the national delegation. This arrangement is known as the pyramid structure of
direct or delegated democracy. All delegates are revocable. All delegates are bound by the
instructions of their constituencies (this is not like representative democracy). The post-capitalist
state would therefore bear no resemblance to a parliamentary regime. According to Marx,
Parliaments create unacceptable barriers between the ruled and the representatives. A vote once
in a while is a wholly insufficient basis to ensure adequate representation of the people’s view.
This system of direct delegation overcomes this difficulty, and it also overcomes a second
difficulty: for Marx, the fundamental lack of accountability introduced into state by the principle of
the separation of powers. This separation leaves branches of the state out of the direct control of
the electorate. Instead all state agencies must be brought within a sphere of a single set of direct
accountable institutions.

Deliberative democracy
This is a contemporary model of democracy outside both the kind of direct or participatory
democracy, and the kind of liberal or representative democracy.

“Deliberation” means long and careful consideration or discussion. Theorists of deliberative

democracy criticize liberal democracy too, like the Marxist were doing. They are critical of both
the behavior of citizens and politicians; of the political process; of the quality of decision-making;
and of the quality of political discussion and debate. As one deliberative democrat put it - political
equality (that is, democracy) without deliberation is not much use, for it amounts to nothing more
than power without the opportunity to think about how that power might be exercised.
Democracy should be built around reasonable or rational political judgement. According to some
theorists, reasonable political judgement should meet three criteria:

1. They should be fact-regarding - as opposed to ignorant, doctrinaire, or uninformed.

2. They should be future-regarding - as opposed to short-sighted.

3. They should be other-regarding - as opposed to selfish or self-interested.

People must be able to justify their political judgements, and to justify their political judgments to
others. Individuals points of view need to be tested in and through social encounters, which take
account the views of other people. People must be able to defend their views in a social setting
with people with opposed views. The justification of a deliberative form of democracy is that there
needs to be mutually justifiability of political decisions. This is the legitimate basis for seeking
solutions to collective problems.

Democracy should be built around serious public debates and deliberation, and institutions must
be there to making that possible.

A number of ways of increasing the deliberative element in modern democracy have been
suggested. One idea is deliberative polls - as opposed to traditional opinion polls. While ordinary
opinion polls assess what the electorate thinks given how little he knows, deliberative polls would
be designed to reveal what the electorate would think if hypothetically it could be immersed in an
intensive deliberative process. The idea of a deliberative poll is to bring together a representative
sample of the population in one place for a few days in order to deliberate on a pressing matter of
pubic concern. Deliberation then takes place involving two elements: (1) exposure to and
questioning of a range of experts on the issue at stake (this is where the fact-regarding element
comes in); and (2) debate among the participants in a more publicly defensible position (mutual
justifiability). After this everyone is polled again, and the results of the opinion polls before and
after the deliberation are compared (after the deliberation, people’s opinions will have shifted).
Apart from the immediate impact of the poll in its participants, it is hoped that if the results are
published, the general public will be stimulated to consider their own views more carefully.
Another idea are citizen juries.

General conditions of deliberative democracy:

Deliberative democracy has hoped to trigger a culture of far reaching civic participation. Integral
to this possibility is a strong civic education program, to help cultivate the capacity for public
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reasoning and for political choice. In addition, public funding of civic societies associations which
actively promote deliberative practices is needed.

Some theorists see deliberation as simply renewing or enriching liberal democracy via these
deliberative polls or citizen juries. Other see deliberation as an alternative model of democracy - a
radical, deliberative, participatory democracy.

Recap
- “Rule by the people”

- Two broad types:

- Direct or participatory democracy - a system of decision-making about public affairs in

which citizens are directly involved.

- Liberal or representative democracy - a system of rule embracing elected officers, who

represent the interest and views of the citizens within the framework of the rule of law.

- Deliberative democracy