conclusion of democracy essay

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Essay on Democracy in 100, 300 and 500 Words

• Updated on  
• Jan 15, 2024

The oldest account of democracy can be traced back to 508–507 BCC Athens . Today there are over 50 different types of democracy across the world. But, what is the ideal form of democracy? Why is democracy considered the epitome of freedom and rights around the globe? Let’s explore what self-governance is and how you can write a creative and informative essay on democracy and its significance. 

Today, India is the largest democracy with a population of 1.41 billion and counting. Everyone in India above the age of 18 is given the right to vote and elect their representative. Isn’t it beautiful, when people are given the option to vote for their leader, one that understands their problems and promises to end their miseries? This is just one feature of democracy , for we have a lot of samples for you in the essay on democracy. Stay tuned!

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What is democracy , sample essay on democracy (100 words), sample essay on democracy (250 to 300 words), sample essay on democracy for upsc (500 words).

Democracy is a form of government in which the final authority to deliberate and decide the legislation for the country lies with the people, either directly or through representatives. Within a democracy, the method of decision-making, and the demarcation of citizens vary among countries. However, some fundamental principles of democracy include the rule of law, inclusivity, political deliberations, voting via elections , etc. 

Did you know: On 15th August 1947, India became the world’s largest democracy after adopting the Indian Constitution and granting fundamental rights to its citizens?

Must Explore: Human Rights Courses for Students 

Must Explore: NCERT Notes on Separation of Powers in a Democracy

Democracy where people make decisions for the country is the only known form of governance in the world that promises to inculcate principles of equality, liberty and justice. The deliberations and negotiations to form policies and make decisions for the country are the basis on which the government works, with supreme power to people to choose their representatives, delegate the country’s matters and express their dissent. The democratic system is usually of two types, the presidential system, and the parliamentary system. In India, the three pillars of democracy, namely legislature, executive and judiciary, working independently and still interconnected, along with a free press and media provide a structure for a truly functional democracy. Despite the longest-written constitution incorporating values of sovereignty, socialism, secularism etc. India, like other countries, still faces challenges like corruption, bigotry, and oppression of certain communities and thus, struggles to stay true to its democratic ideals.

Did you know: Some of the richest countries in the world are democracies?

Must Read : Consumer Rights in India

Must Read: Democracy and Diversity Class 10

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “democracy is the government of the people, by the people and for the people.” There is undeniably no doubt that the core of democracies lies in making people the ultimate decision-makers. With time, the simple definition of democracy has evolved to include other principles like equality, political accountability, rights of the citizens and to an extent, values of liberty and justice. Across the globe, representative democracies are widely prevalent, however, there is a major variation in how democracies are practised. The major two types of representative democracy are presidential and parliamentary forms of democracy. Moreover, not all those who present themselves as a democratic republic follow its values.

Many countries have legally deprived some communities of living with dignity and protecting their liberty, or are practising authoritarian rule through majoritarianism or populist leaders. Despite this, one of the things that are central and basic to all is the practice of elections and voting. However, even in such a case, the principles of universal adult franchise and the practice of free and fair elections are theoretically essential but very limited in practice, for a democracy. Unlike several other nations, India is still, at least constitutionally and principally, a practitioner of an ideal democracy.

With our three organs of the government, namely legislative, executive and judiciary, the constitutional rights to citizens, a multiparty system, laws to curb discrimination and spread the virtues of equality, protection to minorities, and a space for people to discuss, debate and dissent, India has shown a commitment towards democratic values. In recent times, with challenges to freedom of speech, rights of minority groups and a conundrum between the protection of diversity and unification of the country, the debate about the preservation of democracy has become vital to public discussion.

Did you know: In countries like Brazil, Scotland, Switzerland, Argentina, and Austria the minimum voting age is 16 years?

Also Read: Difference Between Democracy and Dictatorship

Democracy originated from the Greek word dēmokratiā , with dēmos ‘people’ and Kratos ‘rule.’ For the first time, the term appeared in the 5th century BC to denote the political systems then existing in Greek city-states, notably Classical Athens, to mean “rule of the people.” It now refers to a form of governance where the people have the right to participate in the decision-making of the country. Majorly, it is either a direct democracy where citizens deliberate and make legislation while in a representative democracy, they choose government officials on their behalf, like in a parliamentary or presidential democracy.

The presidential system (like in the USA) has the President as the head of the country and the government, while the parliamentary system (like in the UK and India) has both a Prime Minister who derives its legitimacy from a parliament and even a nominal head like a monarch or a President.

The notions and principle frameworks of democracy have evolved with time. At the core, lies the idea of political discussions and negotiations. In contrast to its alternatives like monarchy, anarchy, oligarchy etc., it is the one with the most liberty to incorporate diversity. The ideas of equality, political representation to all, active public participation, the inclusion of dissent, and most importantly, the authority to the law by all make it an attractive option for citizens to prefer, and countries to follow.

The largest democracy in the world, India with the lengthiest constitution has tried and to an extent, successfully achieved incorporating the framework to be a functional democracy. It is a parliamentary democratic republic where the President is head of the state and the Prime minister is head of the government. It works on the functioning of three bodies, namely legislative, executive, and judiciary. By including the principles of a sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic republic, and undertaking the guidelines to establish equality, liberty and justice, in the preamble itself, India shows true dedication to achieving the ideal.

It has formed a structure that allows people to enjoy their rights, fight against discrimination or any other form of suppression, and protect their rights as well. The ban on all and any form of discrimination, an independent judiciary, governmental accountability to its citizens, freedom of media and press, and secular values are some common values shared by all types of democracies.

Across the world, countries have tried rooting their constitution with the principles of democracy. However, the reality is different. Even though elections are conducted everywhere, mostly, they lack freedom of choice and fairness. Even in the world’s greatest democracies, there are challenges like political instability, suppression of dissent, corruption , and power dynamics polluting the political sphere and making it unjust for the citizens. Despite the consensus on democracy as the best form of government, the journey to achieve true democracy is both painstaking and tiresome. 

Did you know: Countries like Singapore, Peru, and Brazil have compulsory voting?

Must Read: Democracy and Diversity Class 10 Notes

Democracy is a process through which the government of a country is elected by and for the people.

Yes, India is a democratic country and also holds the title of the world’s largest democracy.

Direct and Representative Democracy are the two major types of Democracy.

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By the People: Essays on Democracy

Harvard Kennedy School faculty explore aspects of democracy in their own words—from increasing civic participation and decreasing extreme partisanship to strengthening democratic institutions and making them more fair.

Winter 2020

By Archon Fung , Nancy Gibbs , Tarek Masoud , Julia Minson , Cornell William Brooks , Jane Mansbridge , Arthur Brooks , Pippa Norris , Benjamin Schneer

The basic terms of democratic governance are shifting before our eyes, and we don’t know what the future holds. Some fear the rise of hateful populism and the collapse of democratic norms and practices. Others see opportunities for marginalized people and groups to exercise greater voice and influence. At the Kennedy School, we are striving to produce ideas and insights to meet these great uncertainties and to help make democratic governance successful in the future. In the pages that follow, you can read about the varied ways our faculty members think about facets of democracy and democratic institutions and making democracy better in practice.

Explore essays on democracy

Archon fung: we voted, nancy gibbs: truth and trust, tarek masoud: a fragile state, julia minson: just listen, cornell william brooks: democracy behind bars, jane mansbridge: a teachable skill, arthur brooks: healthy competition, pippa norris: kicking the sandcastle, benjamin schneer: drawing a line.

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Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Forms of Government — Democracy

Essays on Democracy

Democracy essay topics and outline examples, essay title 1: the evolution of democracy: historical origins, principles, and contemporary challenges.

Thesis Statement: This essay explores the historical roots of democracy, its foundational principles, and the contemporary challenges it faces in the context of modern societies.

• Introduction
• Origins of Democracy: Ancient Greece and Beyond
• Democratic Principles: Rule of Law, Freedom, and Participation
• Democracy in Practice: Case Studies of Democratic Nations
• Challenges to Democracy: Populism, Authoritarianism, and Erosion of Institutions
• Electoral Systems: Voting Methods and Representation
• Media and Democracy: The Role of Information and Misinformation
• Conclusion: Safeguarding Democracy in the 21st Century

Essay Title 2: The Democratic Experiment: Comparative Analysis of Democratic Systems Worldwide

Thesis Statement: This essay conducts a comparative analysis of democratic systems in different countries, highlighting variations in practices, governance structures, and outcomes.

• Democratic Models: Presidential vs. Parliamentary Systems
• Democratic Variations: Federalism and Unitarism
• Elections and Representation: Proportional vs. First-Past-the-Post Systems
• Citizen Participation: Direct Democracy and Referendums
• Case Studies: Analyzing Democracies in Europe, Asia, and the Americas
• Democratic Challenges: Corruption, Voter Suppression, and Civic Engagement
• Conclusion: Lessons Learned from Global Democratic Experiences

Essay Title 3: The Digital Age and Democracy: Technology, Social Media, and the Shaping of Political Discourse

Thesis Statement: This essay examines the influence of technology and social media on democratic processes, including their impact on political communication, public opinion, and election outcomes.

• The Digital Revolution: Internet Access and Political Engagement
• Social Media Platforms: Their Role in Disseminating Information and Disinformation
• Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers: The Polarization of Political Discourse
• Online Activism: Grassroots Movements and Their Impact
• Regulation and Ethics: Balancing Free Speech and Accountability Online
• Case Studies: Examining Elections and Political Campaigns in the Digital Age
• Conclusion: Navigating the Intersection of Technology and Democracy

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• Democracy Essay for Students in English

Essay on Democracy

Introduction.

Democracy is mainly a Greek word which means people and their rules, here peoples have the to select their own government as per their choice. Greece was the first democratic country in the world. India is a democratic country where people select their government of their own choice, also people have the rights to do the work of their choice. There are two types of democracy: direct and representative and hybrid or semi-direct democracy. There are many decisions which are made under democracies. People enjoy few rights which are very essential for human beings to live happily. 

Our country has the largest democracy. In a democracy, each person has equal rights to fight for development. After the independence, India has adopted democracy, where the people vote those who are above 18 years of age, but these votes do not vary by any caste; people from every caste have equal rights to select their government. Democracy, also called as a rule of the majority, means whatever the majority of people decide, it has to be followed or implemented, the representative winning with the most number of votes will have the power. We can say the place where literacy people are more there shows the success of the democracy even lack of consciousness is also dangerous in a democracy. Democracy is associated with higher human accumulation and higher economic freedom. Democracy is closely tied with the economic source of growth like education and quality of life as well as health care. The constituent assembly in India was adopted by Dr B.R. Ambedkar on 26 th November 1949 and became sovereign democratic after its constitution came into effect on 26 January 1950.

What are the Challenges:

There are many challenges for democracy like- corruption here, many political leaders and officers who don’t do work with integrity everywhere they demand bribes, resulting in the lack of trust on the citizens which affects the country very badly. Anti-social elements- which are seen during elections where people are given bribes and they are forced to vote for a particular candidate. Caste and community- where a large number of people give importance to their caste and community, therefore, the political party also selects the candidate on the majority caste. We see wherever the particular caste people win the elections whether they do good for the society or not, and in some cases, good leaders lose because of less count of the vote.

India is considered to be the largest democracy around the globe, with a population of 1.3 billion. Even though being the biggest democratic nation, India still has a long way to becoming the best democratic system. The caste system still prevails in some parts, which hurts the socialist principle of democracy. Communalism is on the rise throughout the globe and also in India, which interferes with the secular principle of democracy. All these differences need to be set aside to ensure a thriving democracy.

Principles of Democracy:

There are mainly five principles like- republic, socialist, sovereign, democratic and secular, with all these quality political parties will contest for elections. There will be many bribes given to the needy person who require food, money, shelter and ask them to vote whom they want. But we can say that democracy in India is still better than the other countries.

Basically, any country needs democracy for development and better functioning of the government. In some countries, freedom of political expression, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, are considered to ensure that voters are well informed, enabling them to vote according to their own interests.

Let us Discuss These Five Principles in Further Detail

Sovereign: In short, being sovereign or sovereignty means the independent authority of a state. The country has the authority to make all the decisions whether it be on internal issues or external issues, without the interference of any third party.

Socialist: Being socialist means the country (and the Govt.), always works for the welfare of the people, who live in that country. There should be many bribes offered to the needy person, basic requirements of them should be fulfilled by any means. No one should starve in such a country.

Secular: There will be no such thing as a state religion, the country does not make any bias on the basis of religion. Every religion must be the same in front of the law, no discrimination on the basis of someone’s religion is tolerated. Everyone is allowed to practice and propagate any religion, they can change their religion at any time.

Republic: In a republic form of Government, the head of the state is elected, directly or indirectly by the people and is not a hereditary monarch. This elected head is also there for a fixed tenure. In India, the head of the state is the president, who is indirectly elected and has a fixed term of office (5 years).

Democratic: By a democratic form of government, means the country’s government is elected by the people via the process of voting. All the adult citizens in the country have the right to vote to elect the government they want, only if they meet a certain age limit of voting.

Merits of Democracy:

better government forms because it is more accountable and in the interest of the people.

improves the quality of decision making and enhances the dignity of the citizens.

provide a method to deal with differences and conflicts.

A democratic system of government is a form of government in which supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodic free elections. It permits citizens to participate in making laws and public policies by choosing their leaders, therefore citizens should be educated so that they can select the right candidate for the ruling government. Also, there are some concerns regarding democracy- leaders always keep changing in democracy with the interest of citizens and on the count of votes which leads to instability. It is all about political competition and power, no scope for morality.

Factors Affect Democracy:

capital and civil society

economic development

modernization

Norway and Iceland are the best democratic countries in the world. India is standing at fifty-one position.

India is a parliamentary democratic republic where the President is head of the state and Prime minister is head of the government. The guiding principles of democracy such as protected rights and freedoms, free and fair elections, accountability and transparency of government officials, citizens have a responsibility to uphold and support their principles. Democracy was first practised in the 6 th century BCE, in the city-state of Athens. One basic principle of democracy is that people are the source of all the political power, in a democracy people rule themselves and also respect given to diverse groups of citizens, so democracy is required to select the government of their own interest and make the nation developed by electing good leaders.

FAQs on Democracy Essay for Students in English

1. What are the Features of Democracy?

Features of Democracy are as follows

Equality: Democracy provides equal rights to everyone, regardless of their gender, caste, colour, religion or creed.

Individual Freedom: Everybody has the right to do anything they want until it does not affect another person’s liberty.

Majority Rules: In a democracy, things are decided by the majority rule, if the majority agrees to something, it will be done.

Free Election: Everyone has the right to vote or to become a candidate to fight the elections.

2. Define Democracy?

Democracy means where people have the right to choose the rulers and also people have freedom to express views, freedom to organise and freedom to protest. Protesting and showing Dissent is a major part of a healthy democracy. Democracy is the most successful and popular form of government throughout the globe.

Democracy holds a special place in India, also India is still the largest democracy in existence around the world.

3. What are the Benefits of Democracy?

Let us discuss some of the benefits received by the use of democracy to form a government. Benefits of democracy are: 

It is more accountable

Improves the quality of decision as the decision is taken after a long time of discussion and consultation.

It provides a better method to deal with differences and conflicts.

It safeguards the fundamental rights of people and brings a sense of equality and freedom.

It works for the welfare of both the people and the state.

4. Which country is the largest democracy in the World?

India is considered the largest democracy, all around the world. India decided to have a democratic Govt. from the very first day of its independence after the rule of the British. In India, everyone above the age of 18 years can go to vote to select the Government, without any kind of discrimination on the basis of caste, colour, religion, gender or more. But India, even being the largest democracy, still has a long way to become perfect.

5. Write about the five principles of Democracy?

There are five key principles that are followed in a democracy. These Five Principles of Democracy of India are -  secular, sovereign, republic, socialist, and democratic. These five principles have to be respected by every political party, participating in the general elections in India. The party which got the most votes forms the government which represents the democratic principle. No discrimination is done on the basis of religion which represents the secular nature of democracy. The govt. formed after the election has to work for the welfare of common people which shows socialism in play.

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The tension between leadership and popular sovereignty can never be resolved. If true, this has major implications for democratic leaders and democracies more generally. The most important of these is the insight that by compelling leaders to negotiate the challenge of democratic leadership, democracies are strengthened precisely because they impose and thereby affirm the sovereignty of the people. The problem that seems to pose the greatest challenge to democracy—the problem of democratic leadership—proves to be its greatest strength.

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Deliberative Democracy : Essays on Reason and Politics

James Bohman is Danforth Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. He is the author, editor, or translator of many books.

William Rehg is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. He is the translator of Jürgen Habermas's Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1996) and the coeditor of Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics and Pluralism (1997) and The Pragmatic Turn: The Transformation of Critical Theory (2001), all published by the MIT Press.

Ideals of democratic participation and rational self-government have long informed modern political theory. As a recent elaboration of these ideals, the concept of deliberative democracy is based on the principle that legitimate democracy issues from the public deliberation of citizens. This remarkably fruitful concept has spawned investigations along a number of lines. Areas of inquiry include the nature and value of deliberation, the feasibility and desirability of consensus on contentious issues, the implications of institutional complexity and cultural diversity for democratic decision making, and the significance of voting and majority rule in deliberative arrangements.The anthology opens with four key essays—by Jon Elster, Jürgen Habermas, Joshua Cohen, and John Rawls—that helped establish the current inquiry into deliberative models of democracy. The nine essays that follow represent the latest efforts of leading democratic theorists to tackle various problems of deliberative democracy. All the contributions address tensions that arise between reason and politics in a democracy inspired by the ideal of achieving reasoned agreement among free and equal citizens. Although the authors approach the topic of deliberation from different perspectives, they all aim to provide a theoretical basis for a more robust democratic practice.

Contributors James Bohman, Thomas Christiano, Joshua Cohen, Jon Elster, David Estlund, Gerald F. Gaus, Jürgen Habermas, James Johnson, Jack Knight, Frank I. Michelman, John Rawls, Henry S. Richardson, Iris Marion Young

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Deliberative Democracy : Essays on Reason and Politics Edited by: James Bohman, William Rehg https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.001.0001 ISBN (electronic): 9780262268936 Publisher: The MIT Press Published: 1997

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Table of Contents

• [ Front Matter ] Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0020 Open the PDF Link PDF for [ Front Matter ] in another window
• Acknowledgments Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0001 Open the PDF Link PDF for Acknowledgments in another window
• Introduction Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0002 Open the PDF Link PDF for Introduction in another window
• 1: The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory By Jon Elster Jon Elster Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0004 Open the PDF Link PDF for 1: The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory in another window
• 2: Popular Sovereignty as Procedure By Jürgen Habermas Jürgen Habermas Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0005 Open the PDF Link PDF for 2: Popular Sovereignty as Procedure in another window
• 3: Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy By Joshua Cohen Joshua Cohen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0006 Open the PDF Link PDF for 3: Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy in another window
• 4: The Idea of Public Reason By John Rawls John Rawls Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0007 Open the PDF Link PDF for 4: The Idea of Public Reason in another window
• 5: How Can the People Ever Make the Laws? A Critique of Deliberative Democracy By Frank I. Michelman Frank I. Michelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0009 Open the PDF Link PDF for 5: How Can the People Ever Make the Laws? A Critique of Deliberative Democracy in another window
• 6: Beyond Fairness and Deliberation: The Epistemic Dimension of Democratic Authority By David Estlund David Estlund Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0010 Open the PDF Link PDF for 6: Beyond Fairness and Deliberation: The Epistemic Dimension of Democratic Authority in another window
• 7: Reason, Justification, and Consensus: Why Democracy Can’t Have It All By Gerald F. Gaus Gerald F. Gaus Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0011 Open the PDF Link PDF for 7: Reason, Justification, and Consensus: Why Democracy Can’t Have It All in another window
• 8: The Significance of Public Deliberation By Thomas Christiano Thomas Christiano Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0012 Open the PDF Link PDF for 8: The Significance of Public Deliberation in another window
• 9: What Sort of Equality Does Deliberative Democracy Require? By Jack Knight , Jack Knight Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar James Johnson James Johnson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0013 Open the PDF Link PDF for 9: What Sort of Equality Does Deliberative Democracy Require? in another window
• 10: Deliberative Democracy and Effective Social Freedom: Capabilities, Resources, and Opportunities By James Bohman James Bohman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0014 Open the PDF Link PDF for 10: Deliberative Democracy and Effective Social Freedom: Capabilities, Resources, and Opportunities in another window
• 11: Democratic Intentions By Henry S. Richardson Henry S. Richardson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0015 Open the PDF Link PDF for 11: Democratic Intentions in another window
• 12: Difference as a Resource for Democratic Communication By Iris Marion Young Iris Marion Young Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0016 Open the PDF Link PDF for 12: Difference as a Resource for Democratic Communication in another window
• 13: Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy By Joshua Cohen Joshua Cohen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0017 Open the PDF Link PDF for 13: Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy in another window
• Contributors Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0018 Open the PDF Link PDF for Contributors in another window
• Index Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0019 Open the PDF Link PDF for Index in another window
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Conclusion: Rethinking the Value of Democracy

• First Online: 22 July 2018

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• Renske Doorenspleet 4  

Part of the book series: The Theories, Concepts and Practices of Democracy ((PSTCD))

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My book showed that there has been no consensus in the quantitative literature on the instrumental value of democracy. Some scholars claim there is a consensus, but they only do so by ignoring the huge amount of studies which rejects their own point of view. After undertaking a large-scale analysis of hundreds of articles published on the topic, this concluding chapter argues that the connections between democracy and expected outcomes are not as strong as they seem. This conclusion has implications for future research. First, we need to rethink the concept of democracy, as well as the measurements as used in statistical analyses; different solutions are proposed. Second, we need to rethink the boundaries within the discipline of political science, particularly between empirical studies of democracy on the one hand, and normative political theory on the other hand. Third, we need to rethink—and break down—the boundaries between disciplines. Results around the value of democracy have been dispersed over the disciplines of political science, comparative politics and IR, economics, sociology and development studies. Different disciplines focused on the same conventional questions in a strikingly similar way while providing different insights. Finally, we need to rethink the choice to focus on instrumental values in comparative research. Intrinsic and constructive values of democracy deserve our attentionas well, while it is also recommended to investigate whether democracy is working better with regard to other outcomes (e.g. health, education, socio-economic equality and access to clean water). This chapter gives ideas how to make (the study of) the value of democracy valuable again.

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Doorenspleet, R. (2019). Conclusion: Rethinking the Value of Democracy. In: Rethinking the Value of Democracy. The Theories, Concepts and Practices of Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91656-9_7

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Normative democratic theory deals with the moral foundations of democracy and democratic institutions, as well as the moral duties of democratic representatives and citizens. It is distinct from descriptive and explanatory democratic theory, which aim to describe and explain how democracy and democratic institutions function. Normative democracy theory aims to provide an account of when and why democracy is morally desirable as well as moral principles for guiding the design of democratic institutions and the actions of citizens and representatives. Of course, normative democratic theory is inherently interdisciplinary and must draw on the results of political science, sociology, psychology, and economics in order to give concrete moral guidance.

This brief outline of normative democratic theory focuses attention on seven related issues. First, it proposes a definition of democracy. Second, it outlines different approaches to the question of why democracy is morally valuable at all. Third, it discusses the issue of whether and when democratic institutions have authority and different conceptions of the limits of democratic authority. Fourth, it explores the question of what it is reasonable to demand of citizens in large democratic societies. This issue is central to the evaluation of normative democratic theories. A large body of opinion has it that most classical normative democratic theory is incompatible with what we can reasonably expect from citizens. Fifth, it surveys different accounts of the proper characterization of equality in the processes of representation and the moral norms of representation. Sixth, it discusses the relationship between central findings in social choice theory and democracy. Seventh, it discusses the question of who should be included in the group that makes democratic decisions.

1. Democracy Defined

2.1.1.1 the production of relatively good laws and policies: responsiveness theories, 2.1.1.2 the production of relatively good laws and policies: epistemic theories, 2.1.1.3 character-based arguments, 2.1.2 instrumental arguments against democracy, 2.1.3 grounds for instrumentalism, 2.2.1 liberty, 2.2.2 democracy as public justification, 2.2.3 equality, 3.1 instrumentalist conceptions of democratic authority, 3.2.1 democracy as collective self-rule, 3.2.2 freedom and democratic authority, 3.2.3 equality and authority, 3.3.1 internal limits to democratic authority, 3.3.2 the problem of persistent minorities, 3.3.3 external limits to democratic authority, 4.1 the problem of democratic participation, 4.2.1 elite theory of democracy, 4.2.2 interest group pluralism, 4.2.3 neo-liberalism.

• 4.2.4. The self-interest assumption

4.2.5 The Division of Democratic Labor

4.3.1 the duty to vote, 4.3.2 principled disobedience of the law, 4.3.3 accommodate disagreement through compromise and consensus, 5.1 what sort of representative system is best, 5.2 the ethics of representation, 6. social choice and democracy, 7. the boundary problem: constituting the demos, other internet resources, related entries.

The term “democracy”, as we will use it in this entry, refers very generally to a method of collective decision making characterized by a kind of equality among the participants at an essential stage of the decision-making process. Four aspects of this definition should be noted. First, democracy concerns collective decision making, by which we mean decisions that are made for groups and are meant to be binding on all the members of the group. Second, we intend for this definition to cover many different kinds of groups and decision-making procedures that may be called democratic. So there can be democracy in families, voluntary organizations, economic firms, as well as states and transnational and global organizations. The definition is also consistent with different electoral systems, for example first-past-the-post voting and proportional representation. Third, the definition is not intended to carry any normative weight. It is compatible with this definition of democracy that it is not desirable to have democracy in some particular context. So the definition of democracy does not settle any normative questions. Fourth, the equality required by the definition of democracy may be more or less deep. It may be the mere formal equality of one-person one-vote in an election for representatives to a parliament where there is competition among candidates for the position. Or it may be more robust, including substantive equality in the processes of deliberation and coalition building leading up to the vote. “Democracy” may refer to any of these political arrangements. It may involve direct referenda of the members of a society in deciding on the laws and policies of the society or it may involve the participation of those members in selecting representatives to make the decisions.

The function of normative democratic theory is not to settle questions of definition but to determine which, if any, of the forms democracy may take are morally desirable and when and how. To evaluate different moral justifications of democracy, we must decide on the merits of the different principles and conceptions of human beings and society from which they proceed.

2. The Justification of Democracy

In this section, we examine different views concerning the justification of democracy. Proposed justifications of democracy identify values or reasons that support democracy over alternative forms of decision-making, such as oligarchy or dictatorship. It is important to distinguish views concerning the justification of democracy from views concerning the authority of democracy, which we examine in section 3 . Attempts to establish democratic authority identify values or reasons in virtue of which subjects have a duty to obey democratic decisions. Justification and authority can come apart (Simmons 2001: ch. 7)—it is possible to hold that the balance of values or reasons supports democracy over alternative forms of decision-making while denying that subjects have a duty to obey democratic decisions.

We can evaluate the justification of democracy along at least two different dimensions: instrumentally, by reference to the outcomes of using it compared with other methods of political decision; or intrinsically, by reference to values that are inherent in the method.

2.1 Instrumentalism

2.1.1 instrumental arguments in favor of democracy.

Two kinds of in instrumental benefits are commonly attributed to democracy: (1) the production of relatively good laws and policies and (2) improvements in the characters of the participants.

It is often argued that democratic decision-making best protects subjects’ rights or interests because it is more responsive to their judgments or preferences than competing forms of government. John Stuart Mill, for example, argues that since democracy gives each subject a share of political power, democracy forces decision-makers to take into account the rights and interests of a wider range of subjects than are taken into account under aristocracy or monarchy (Mill 1861: ch. 3). There is some evidence that as groups are included in the democratic process, their interests are better advanced by the political system. For example, when African Americans regained the right to vote in the United States in 1965, they were able to secure many more benefits from the state than previously (Wright 2013). Economists argue that democracy promotes economic growth (Acemoglu et al. 2019). Several contemporary authors defend versions of this instrumental argument by pointing to the robust empirical correlation between well-functioning democratic institutions and the strong protection of core liberal rights, such as rights to a fair trial, bodily integrity, freedom of association, and freedom of expression (Gaus 1996: ch. 13; Christiano 2011; Gaus 2011: ch. 22).

A related instrumental argument for democracy is provided by Amartya Sen, who argues that

no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free press. (Sen 1999: 152)

The basis of this argument is that politicians in a multiparty democracy with free elections and a free press have incentives to respond to the expressions of needs of the poor.

Epistemic justifications of democracy argue that, under the right conditions, democracy is generally more reliable than alternative methods at producing political decisions that are correct according to procedure-independent standards. While there are many different explanations for the reliability of democratic decision-making, we outline three of the most prominent explanations here: (1) Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, (2) the effects of cognitive diversity, and (3) information gathering and sharing.

The most prominent explanation for democracy’s epistemic reliability rests on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (CJT), a mathematical theorem developed by eighteenth-century mathematician the Marquis de Condorcet that builds on the so-called “law of large numbers”. CJT states that, when certain assumptions hold, the probability that a majority of voters support the correct decision increases and approaches one as the number of voters increases. The assumptions are (Condorcet 1785):

• each voter is more likely than not to identify the correct decision (the competence assumption );
• voters vote for what they believe is the correct decision (the sincerity assumption );
• votes are statistically independent of one another (the independence assumption ).

While Condorcet’s original proof was restricted to decisions with only two choices, more recent work argues that CJT can be extended to decisions with three or more choices (List & Goodin 2001). The use of CJT to explain democracy’s reliability is often thought to originate with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s claim that

[i]f, when a sufficiently informed populace deliberates, the citizens were to have no communication among themselves, the general will would always result from the large number of small differences, and the deliberation would always be good. (Rousseau 1762: Book III, ch. IV)

Contemporary theorists continue to rely on CJT, or variants of it, to justify democracy (Barry 1965; Cohen 1986; Grofman and Feld 1988; Goodin & Spiekermann 2019).

The appeal of CJT for epistemic democrats derives from the fact that, if its underlying assumptions are satisfied, decisions produced by even moderately-sized electorates are almost certain to be correct. For example, if the assumptions of CJT hold for an electorate of 10,000 voters, and if each voter is 51 percent likely to identify the correct decision of two options, then the probability that a majority will select the correct decision is 99.97 percent. The formal mathematics of CJT are not subject to dispute. However, critics of CJT-based arguments for democracy argue that the assumptions underlying CJT are rarely, if ever, satisfied in actual democracies (see Black 1963: 159–65; Ladha 1992; Estlund 1997b; 2008: ch. XII; Anderson 2006). First, many have remarked that voters’ opinions are not independent of each other. Indeed, the democratic process seems to emphasize persuasion and coalition building. Second, the theorem does not seem to apply to cases in which the information that voters have access to, and on the basis of which they make their judgments, is segmented in various ways. Segmentation occurs when some sectors of the society do not have the relevant information while others do have it. Modern societies and politics seem to instantiate this kind of segmentation in terms of class, race, ethnic groupings, religion, occupational position, geographical place and so on. Finally, all voters approach issues they have to make decisions on with strong ideological biases that undermine the claim that each voter is bringing a kind of independent observation on the nature of the common good to the vote.

Advocates of CJT-based justifications of democracy generally respond to these sorts of criticisms by attempting to develop variations of CJT with weaker assumptions. These assumptions are more easily satisfied in democracies and so the revised theorems may show that even moderately-sized electorates are almost certain to produce correct decisions (Grofman & Feld 1988; Austen-Smith 1992; Austen-Smith & Banks 1996).

A second common epistemic justification for democracy—which is often traced to Aristotle ( Politics , Book II, Ch. 11; see Waldron 1995)—argues that democratic procedures are best able to exploit the underlying cognitive diversity of large groups of citizens to solve collective problems. Since democracy brings a lot of people into the process of decision making, it can take advantage of many sources of information and perspectives in assessing proposed laws and policies. More recently, Hélène Landemore (2013) has drawn on the “diversity-trumps-ability” theorem of Scott Page and Lu Hong (Hong & Page 2004; Page 2007)—which states that a random collection of agents drawn from a large set of limited-ability agents typically outperforms a collection of the very best agents from that same set—to argue that democracy can be expected to produce better decisions than rule by experts. Both Page and Hong’s original theorem and Landemore’s use of it to justify democracy are subject to dispute (see Quirk 2014; Brennan 2014; Thompson 2014; Bajaj 2014).

A third common epistemic justification for democracy relies on the idea that democratic decision-making tends to be more informed than other forms of decision-making about the interests of citizens and the causal mechanisms necessary to advance those interests. John Dewey argues that democracy involves “a consultation and a discussion which uncovers social needs and troubles”. Even if experts know how best to solve collective problems, they need input from the masses to correct their biases tell them where the problems lie (Dewey 1927 [2012: 154–155]; see also Anderson 2006; Knight & Johnson 2011).

Many have endorsed democracy on the grounds that democracy has beneficial effects on the characters of subjects. Many agree with Mill and Rousseau that democracy tends to make people stand up for themselves more than other forms of rule do because it makes collective decisions depend on their input more than monarchy or aristocracy do. Hence, in democratic societies individuals are encouraged to be more autonomous. Relatedly, by giving citizens a share of control over political-decision-making, democracy cultivates citizens with active and productive characters rather than passive characters. In addition, it has been argued that democracy tends to get people to think carefully and rationally more than other forms of rule because it makes a difference to political outcomes whether they do or not. Finally, some argue that democracy tends to enhance the moral qualities of citizens. When they participate in making decisions, they have to listen to others, they are called upon to justify themselves to others and they are forced to think in part in terms of the interests of others. Some have argued that when people find themselves in this kind of circumstance, they can be expected genuinely to think in terms of the common good and justice. Hence, some have argued that democratic processes tend to enhance the autonomy, rationality, activity, and morality of participants. Since these beneficial effects are thought to be worthwhile in themselves, they count in favor of democracy and against other forms of rule (Mill 1861 [1991: 74]; Elster 1986 [2003: 152]; Hannon 2020).

Some argue in addition that the above effects on character tend to enhance the quality of legislation as well. A society of autonomous, rational, active, and moral decision-makers is more likely to produce good legislation than a society ruled by a self-centered person or a small group of persons who rule over slavish and unreflective subjects. Of course, the soundness of any of the above arguments depends on the truth of the causal theories of the consequences of different institutions.

Not all instrumental arguments favor democracy. Plato argues that democracy is inferior to various forms of monarchy, aristocracy and even oligarchy on the grounds that democracy tends to undermine the expertise necessary to the proper governance of societies (Plato 1974, Book VI). Most people do not have the kinds of intellectual talents that enable them to think well about the difficult issues that politics involves. But in order to win office or get a piece of legislation passed, politicians must appeal to these people’s sense of what is right or not right. Hence, the state will be guided by very poorly worked out ideas that experts in manipulation and mass appeal use to help themselves win office. Plato argues instead that the state should be ruled by philosopher-kings who have the wisdom and moral character required for good rule. He thus defends a version of what David Estlund calls “epistocracy”, a form of oligarchy that involves rule by experts (Estlund 2003).

Mill defends a form of epistocracy that is sometimes referred to as the “plural voting” scheme (1861: ch. 4). While all rational adults get at least one vote under this scheme, some citizens get a greater number of votes based on satisfying some measure of political expertise. While Mill identifies the relevant measure of expertise in terms of formal education, the plural voting scheme is consistent with other measures. This scheme might be thought to combine the instrumental value of political expertise with the intrinsic value of broad inclusion.

One objection to any form of epistocracy—the demographic objection —holds that any criterion of expertise is likely to select demographically homogeneous individuals who are be biased in ways that undermine their ability to produce political outcomes that promote the general welfare (Estlund 2003).

Hobbes argues that democracy is inferior to monarchy because democracy fosters destabilizing dissension among subjects (Hobbes 1651: chap. XIX). On his view, individual citizens and even politicians are apt not to have a sense of responsibility for the quality of legislation because no one makes a significant difference to the outcomes of decision making. As a consequence, citizens’ concerns are not focused on politics and politicians succeed only by making loud and manipulative appeals to citizens in order to gain more power, but all lack incentives to consider views that are genuinely for the common good. Hence the sense of lack of responsibility for outcomes undermines politicians’ concern for the common good and inclines them to make sectarian and divisive appeals to citizens.

Many contemporary theorists expand on these Platonic and Hobbesian criticisms. A good deal of empirical data shows that citizens of large-scale democracies are ill-informed and apathetic about politics. This makes room for special interests to control the behavior of politicians and use the state for their own limited purposes all the while spreading the costs to everyone. Moreover, there is empirical evidence that democratic citizens often engage in motivated reasoning that unconsciously aims to affirm their existing political identities rather than arrive at correct judgments (Lord, Ross, & Lepper 1979; Bartels 2002; Kahan 2013; Achen & Bartels 2016). Some theorists argue that these considerations justify abandoning democracy altogether, while modest versions of these arguments have been used to justify modification of democratic institutions (Caplan 2007; Somin 2013; Brennan 2016). Relatedly, some theorists argue that rather than having beneficial effects on the characters of subjects as Mill and others argue, democracy actually has deleterious effects on the subjects’ characters and relationships (Brennan 2016: ch. 3).

Pure instrumentalists argue that these instrumental arguments for and against the democratic process are the only bases on which to evaluate the justification of democracy or compare it with other forms of political decision-making. There are a number of different kinds of argument for pure instrumentalism. One kind of argument proceeds from a more general moral theory. For example, classical utilitarianism has no room in its monistic axiology for the intrinsic values of fairness and liberty or the intrinsic importance of an egalitarian distribution of political power. Its sole concern with maximizing utility—understood as pleasure or desire satisfaction—guarantees that it can provide only instrumental arguments for and against democracy.

But one need not be a thoroughgoing utilitarian to argue for instrumentalism in democratic theory. There are arguments in favor of instrumentalism that pertain directly to the question of democracy and collective decision making generally. One argument states that political power involves the exercise of power of some over others. And it argues that the exercise of power of one person over another can only be justified by reference to the protection of the interests or rights of the person over whom power is exercised. Thus no distribution of political power could ever be justified except by reference to the quality of outcomes of the decision making process (Arneson 1993 [2002: 96–97]; 2003; 2004; 2009). Another sort of argument for instrumentalism proceeds negatively, attempting to show that the non-instrumental values most commonly used in attempted justifications for democracy do not actually justify democracy, and that an instrumental justification for democracy is therefore the only available sort of justification (Wall 2007).

Other arguments question the coherence of the idea of intrinsically fair collective decision making processes. For instance, social choice theory questions the idea that there can be a fair decision making function that transforms a set of individual preferences into a rational collective preference. The core objection is that no general rule satisfying reasonable constraints can be devised that can transform any set of individual preferences into a rational social preference. And this is taken to show that democratic procedures cannot be intrinsically fair (Riker 1982: 116). Ronald Dworkin argues that the idea of equality, which is for him at the root of social justice, cannot be given a coherent and plausible interpretation when it comes to the distribution of political power among members of the society. The relation of politicians to citizens inevitably gives rise to inequality; the process of democratic deliberation inevitably gives those with superior argument making abilities and greater willingness to participate more influence and therefore more power, than others, so equality of political power cannot be intrinsically fair or just (Dworkin 2000). In later work, Dworkin has pulled back from this originally thoroughgoing instrumentalism (Dworkin 1996).

2.2 Non-instrumentalism

Few theorists deny that political institutions must be at least in part evaluated in terms of the outcomes of having those institutions. Some argue in addition, that some forms of decision making are morally desirable independent of the consequences of having them. A variety of different approaches have been used to show that democracy has this kind of intrinsic value.

One prominent justification for democracy appeals to the value of liberty. According to one version of the view, democracy is grounded in the idea that each ought to be master of his or her life. Each person’s life is deeply affected by the larger social, legal and cultural environment in which he or she lives. Only when each person has an equal voice and vote in the process of collective decision-making will each have equal control over this larger environment. Thinkers such as Carol Gould conclude that only when some kind of democracy is implemented, will individuals have a chance at self-government (Gould 1988: 45–85). Since individuals have a right of self-government, they have a right to democratic participation. The idea is that the right of self-government gives one a right, within limits, to do wrong. Just as an individual has a right to make some bad decisions for himself or herself, so a group of individuals have a right to make bad or unjust decisions for themselves regarding those activities they share.

One major difficulty with this line of argument is that it appears to require that the basic rule of decision-making be consensus or unanimity. If each person must freely choose the outcomes that bind him or her then those who oppose the decision are not self-governing. They live in an environment imposed on them by others. So only when all agree to a decision are they freely adopting the decision (Wolff 1970: ch. 2). The trouble is that there is rarely agreement on major issues in politics. Indeed, it appears that one of the main reasons for having political decision making procedures is that they can settle matters despite disagreement.

One liberty-based argument that might seem to escape this worry appeals to an irreducibly collective right to self-determination. It is often argued that political communities have a right as a community to organize themselves politically in accordance with their values, principles, or commitments. Some argue that the right to collective self-determination requires democratic institutions that give citizens collective control over their political and legal structure (Cassese 1995). However, many argue democratic institutions are sufficient but not necessary to realize the right to collective self-determination because political communities might exercise this right to implement non-democratic institutions (Altman & Wellman 2009; Stilz 2016).

Another non-instrumental justification of democracy appeals to the ideal of public justification. The idea behind this approach is that laws and policies are legitimate to the extent that they are publicly justified to the citizens of the community. Public justification is justification to each citizen as a result of free and reasoned debate among equals.

Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of deliberative democracy has been highly influential in the development of this approach. Habermas analyses the form and function of modern legal systems through the lens of his theory of communicative action. This analysis yields the Democratic Principle:

[O]nly those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in turn has been legally constituted. (Habermas 1992 [1996: 110])

Habermas advances a conception of democratic legitimacy according to which law is legitimate only if it results from a free and inclusive democratic process of “opinion and will-formation”. What might such a process look like in a complex and differentiated society? Habermas answers by advancing a “two-track” model that understands democratic legitimation in terms of the relationship between institutionalized deliberative bodies (e.g legislatures, agencies, courts) and informal communication in the public sphere, which is “wild”, and not centrally coordinated.

One possible objection to this view is that free and inclusive democratic procedures are insufficient to satisfy the demand for deliberative consensus embodied in the Democratic Principle. This demand is unlikely to be satisfied in diverse societies, since deep disagreements about which laws ought to be enacted is likely to remain after the relevant process of opinion and will-formation. The Democratic Principle might thus be thought to embody an overly idealistic conception of democratic legitimacy (Estlund 2008: ch.10). Another possible worry is that the Discourse Principle is not a genuine moral principle, but a principle that embodies the felicity conditions of practical discourse. As such, the Discourse Principle cannot ground a conception of democratic legitimacy that yields robust moral prescriptions (Forst 2016).

Drawing on Habermas and John Rawls, among others, Joshua Cohen (1996 [2003]) develops a conception of democracy in which citizens justify laws and policies on the basis of mutually acceptable reasons. Democracy, properly understood, is the context in which individuals freely engage in a process of reasoned discussion and deliberation on an equal footing. The ideas of freedom and equality provide guidelines for structuring democratic institutions.

The aim of Cohen’s conception of democracy as public justification is reasoned consensus among citizens. But a serious problem arises when we ask about what happens when disagreement remains. Two possible replies have been suggested. It has been urged that forms of consensus weaker than full consensus are sufficient for public justification and that the weaker varieties are achievable in many societies. For instance, there may be consensus on the list of reasons that are acceptable publicly but disagreement on the weight of the different reasons. Or there may be agreement on general reasons abstractly understood but disagreement about particular interpretations of those reasons. What would have to be shown here is that such weak consensus is achievable in many societies and that the disagreements that remain are not incompatible with the ideal of public justification.

The basic principle seems to be the principle of reasonableness according to which reasonable persons will only offer principles for the regulation of their society that other reasonable persons can reasonably accept. One only offers principles that others, who restrain themselves in the same way, can accept. Such a principle implies a kind of principle of restraint which requires that reasonable persons avoid proposing laws and policies on the basis of controversial moral or philosophical principles. When individuals offer proposals for the regulation of their society, they ought not to appeal to the whole truth as they see it but only to that part of the whole truth that others can reasonably accept. To put the matter in the way Rawls puts it: political society must be regulated by principles on which there is an overlapping consensus (Rawls 2005: Lecture IV). This is meant to obviate the need for a complete consensus on the principles that regulate society.

However, it is hard to see how this approach avoids the need for a complete consensus, which is highly unlikely to occur in any even moderately diverse society. The reason for this is that it is not clear why it is any less of an imposition on me when I propose legislation or policies for the society that I must restrain myself to considerations that other reasonable people accept than it is an imposition on others when I attempt to pass legislation on the basis of reasons they reasonably reject. For if I do restrain myself in this way, then the society I live in will not live up to the standards that I believe are essential to evaluating the society. I must then live in and support a society that does not accord with my conception of how it ought to be organized. It is not clear why this is any less of a loss of control over society than for those who must live in a society that is partly regulated by principles they do not accept. If one is a problem, then so is the other, and complete consensus is the only solution (Christiano 2009).

Many democratic theorists have argued that democracy is a way of treating persons as equals when there is good reason to impose some kind of organization on their shared lives but they disagree about how best to do it. Peter Singer argues that when people insist on different ways of arranging matters properly, each person in a sense claims a right to be dictator over their shared lives (Singer 1973: 30–41). But these claims to dictatorship cannot all hold up. Democracy embodies a kind of peaceful and fair compromise among these conflicting claims to rule. Each compromises equally on what he claims as long as the others do, resulting in each having an equal say over decision making. In effect, democratic decision making respects each person’s point of view on matters of common concern by giving each an equal say about what to do in cases of disagreement (Singer 1973; Waldron 1999: chap. 5).

What if people disagree on the democratic method or on the particular form democracy is to take? Are we to decide these latter questions by means of a higher order procedure? And if there is disagreement on the higher order procedure, must we also democratically decide that question? The view seems to lead to an infinite regress.

An alternative way of justifying democracy on the basis of equality is to ground democracy in public equality. Public equality is a principle of equality which ensures that people can see that they are being treated as equals. This view arises from three ideas. First, there is the basic egalitarian idea that people’s interests ought to be equally advanced, or at least that they ought to have equal opportunities to advance them. Second, human beings generally have highly fallible and biased understandings of their own and other people’s interests. Third, persons have fundamental interests in being able to see that they are being treated as equals. Public equality is an egalitarian principle that can be seen to be realized among persons despite the dramatically incomplete forms of knowledge people have. It is not all of justice, but it is essential that the principle be realized in a pluralistic society.

Democracy is a uniquely publicly egalitarian way to make collective decisions when there is substantial disagreement and conflict of interest among persons about how to shape the society they share. Each can see that the only plausible way of overcoming persistent disagreement over how to shape the society they all live in, while still publicly treating all persons as equals in the face of bias and fallibility, is to give each person an equal say in the process of shaping that society. Thus, democracy is necessary to the realization of public equality in a political society. Within the framework determined by this publicly realized equality, persons are permitted to attempt to bring about their more particular ideas about justice and the common good that they think are right.

The idea of public equality also grounds limits to democratic decision making. The thought is that a society cannot democratically decide to abolish the democratic rights of some of its members. Public equality also requires that basic liberal and civil rights be respected as well, by the democratic process and so serves as a limit to democratic decision making (Christiano 2008; Valentini 2013).

A number of worries attend this kind of view. First, it is generally thought that majority rule is required for treating persons as equals in collective decision making. This is because only majority rule is neutral towards alternatives in decision making. Unanimity tends to favor the status quo as do various forms of supermajority rule. But if this is so, the above view raises the twin dangers of majority tyranny and of persistent minorities, i.e., groups of persons who find themselves always losing in majority decisions. Surely these latter phenomena must be incompatible with public equality. Second, the kind of view defended above is susceptible to the worry that political equality is not a coherent ideal in any modern state with a complex division of labor and the need for representation. This last worry will be discussed in more detail in the next sections on democratic citizenship and legislative representation. The first worry will be discussed more in the discussion on the limits to democratic authority.

A related approach grounds democracy in the ideal of relational equality . A concern with relational equality is a concern for

human relationships that are, in certain crucial respects at least, unstructured by differences of rank, power, or status. (Scheffler 2010: 225)

Niko Kolodny argues that democratic institutions are an essential component of relational equality (Kolodny 2014a,b). One line of Kolodny’s argument holds that political decisions involve the use of coercive force. Inequalities in the power to use force undermine equal social status at least in part because the power to use force is “the power that usually determines the distribution of other powers” (Kolodny 2014b: 307). Individuals who have superior power to use force on others have a superior social status. An egalitarian distribution of political power is thus essential for realizing social equality. And only democratic institutions provide an egalitarian distribution of political power. We will discuss the relationship between relational equality and democracy further when we discuss the authority of democracy in Part 3 below.

3. The Authority of Democracy

Since democracy is a collective decision process, the question naturally arises about whether there is any duty of citizens to obey democratic decisions when they disagree with it.

There are three main concepts of the legitimate authority of the state. First, a state has legitimate authority to the extent that it is morally justified in coercively imposing its rule on the members. Legitimate authority on this account has no direct implications concerning the obligations or duties that citizens may hold toward that state. It simply says that if the state is morally justified in doing what it does, then it has legitimate authority. Second, a state has legitimate authority to the extent that its directives generate duties in citizens to obey. The duties of the citizens need not be owed to the state but they are real duties to obey. The third is that the state has a right to rule that is correlated with the citizens’ duty to it to obey it. This is the strongest notion of authority and it seems to be the core idea behind the legitimacy of the state. The idea is that when citizens disagree about law and policy it is important to be able to answer the question, who has the right to choose?

Instrumental arguments for democracy give some reason for why one ought to respect the democracy when one disagrees with its decisions. There may be many instrumental considerations that play a role in deciding on the question of whether one ought to obey. And these instrumental considerations are pretty much the same whether one is considering obedience to democracy or some other form of rule.

There is one instrumentalist approach which is quite unique to democracy and that seems to ground a strong conception of democratic authority. That is the epistemic approach inspired by the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which we discussed in section 2.1.1.2 above. There, we discussed a number of difficulties with the application of the Condorcet Jury Theorem to the case of voting in elections and referenda in large-scale democracies, including lack of independence, informational segmentation, and the existence of ideological biases.

One further worry about the Jury Theorem’s epistemic conceptions of authority is that it would prove too much since it undermines the common practice of the loyal opposition in democracies. If the background conditions of the Jury Theorem are met, a large-scale democracy majority is practically certain to produce the right decisions. On what basis can citizens in a political minority rationally hold on to their competing views? The members of the minority have a powerful reason for shifting their allegiance to the majority position, since each has very good reason to think that the majority is right. The epistemic conception of authority based on the Jury Theorem thus threatens to be objectionably authoritarian, since it looks like it demands not only obedience of action but obedience of thought as well. Even in scientific communities the fact that a majority of scientists favor a particular view does not make the minority scientists think that they are wrong, though it does perhaps give them pause (Goodin 2003: ch. 7).

Some theories of democratic authority combine instrumental and non-instrumental considerations. David Estlund argues that democratic procedures have legitimate authority because they are better than random and epistemically the best of the political systems that are acceptable to all reasonable citizens (Estlund 2008). They must be better than random because, otherwise, why wouldn’t we use a fair random procedure like a lottery or coin flip? Democratic authority must have an epistemic element. And the justification of democratic procedure must be acceptable to all reasonable citizens in order to respect their freedom and equality. Estlund’s conception of democratic authority—which he calls “epistemic proceduralism”— thus combines the ideal of public justification with a concern for the tendency of democracies to produce good decisions.

3.2 Intrinsic Conceptions of Democratic Authority

Some theorists argue that there is a special relation between democracy and legitimate authority grounded in the value of collective self-rule. John Locke argues that when a person consents to the creation of a political society, they necessarily consent to the use of majority rule in deciding how the political society is to be organized (Locke 1690: sec. 96). Locke thinks that majority rule is the natural decision rule when there is disagreement. He argues that a society is a kind of collective body that must move in the direction of the greater force. One way to understand this argument is as follows. If we think of each member of society as an equal and if we think that there is likely to be disagreement beyond the question of whether to join society or not, then we must accept majority rule as the appropriate decision rule. This interpretation of the greater force argument assumes that the expression “greater force” is to be understood in terms of the equal worth of each person’s interests and rights, so the society must go in the direction in which the greater number of persons wants it to go.

Locke thinks that a people, which is formed by individuals who consent to be members, could choose a monarchy by means of majority rule and so this argument by itself does not give us an argument for democracy. But Locke refers back to this argument when he defends the requirement of representative institutions for deciding when property may be regulated and taxes levied. He argues that a person must consent to the regulation or taxation of his property by the state. But he says that this requirement of consent is satisfied when a majority of the representatives of property holders consent to the regulation and taxation of property (Locke, 1690: sec. 140). This does seem to be moving towards a genuinely democratic conception of legitimate authority.

Rousseau argues that when individuals consent to form a political community, they agree to put themselves under the direction of the “general will” (Rousseau 1762). The general will is not a mere aggregation of individuals’ private wills. It is, rather, the will of the political community as a whole. And since the general will can only emerge as the product of a properly organized democratic procedure, individuals consent to put themselves under the direction of a properly organized democratic procedure. On one interpretation of Rousseau, democratic procedures are properly organized only when they (1) define rights that apply equally to all, (2) via a procedure that considers everyone’s interests equally, and (3) everyone who is coerced to obey the laws has a voice in that procedure.

There are at least two ways of understanding the idea of the general will. On what might be called the constitutive interpretation, the general will is constituted by the results of a properly organized democratic procedure. That is, the results of a properly organized democratic procedure are the general will in virtue of the fact that they emerge from a properly organized democratic procedure, and not because they reflect some procedure-independent truth about the common good. On what might be called the epistemic interpretation, the results of a properly organized democratic procedure are the way of tracking the procedure-independent truth about the common good. As we discussed in section 3.1 , Rousseau is often interpreted as appealing to Condorcet’s Jury Theorem to support the epistemic credentials of a properly organized democratic procedure.

Anna Stilz develops an account of democratic authority that appeals to the value of “freedom as independence” (Stilz 2009). Freedom as independence is freedom from being subject to the will of another. In order not to be subject to the will of others, individuals need property rights and a protected sphere of autonomy to pursue one’s plans. Drawing on Kant, Stilz argues that attempts by particular individuals, no matter how conscientious, to define and secure rights to property and autonomy in a state of nature will be inconsistent with freedom as independence. Such attempts unilaterally impose new obligations on others through acts of private will in the face of competing claims. But even if individuals in a state of nature do agree to a resolution of their competing claims, they are dependent on the will of others to honor this agreement. Stilz thus argues that justice must be administered by an authoritative legal system which can coercively impose one set of objective rules—rules we must respect even when we disagree—to adjudicate our conflicting claims. But if such a system is to be consistent with the freedom of subjects, it cannot be imposed by the private wills of rulers. The solution, Stilz argues, lies in Rousseau’s idea of the general will. When subjects obey the general will, they are not obeying the private will of any individual; they are obeying a will that arises from all and applies to all.

One worry with this account is that those who oppose democratically-enacted laws or policies can complain that those laws or policies are imposed against their will. Perhaps they are not subject to the will of a particular individual, but they are subject to the will of a majority. This might be thought to constitute a significant threat to individuals’ freedom as independence. Another worry, which Stilz’s view arguably inherits from Rousseau, is that the conditions for the general will to emerge are so demanding that the view implies that no state that exists or has existed has legitimate political authority. Stilz’s view might thus be thought to entail what A.J. Simmons calls “a posteriori anarchism” (Simmons 2001).

Another approach to democratic authority asserts that failing to obey the decisions of a democratic assembly amounts to treating one’s fellow citizens as inferiors (Christiano 2008: ch. 6). In the face of disagreement about substantive law and policy, democracy realizes a kind of public equality by giving each individual an equal say in determining which laws or policies will be enacted. Citizens who skirt laws made by suitably egalitarian procedures act contrary to the equal right of all citizens to have a say in making laws. Those who refuse to pay taxes or respect property laws on the grounds that they are unjust are affirming a superior right to that of others in determining how the shared aspects of social life ought to be arranged. Thus, they violate the duty to treat others publicly as equals. And there is reason to think this duty must normally have some pre-eminence. Public equality is the most important form of equality and democracy is required by public equality. The other forms of equality in play in substantive disputes about law and policy are ones about which people can have reasonable disagreements (within limits specified by the principle of public equality). Citizens thus have obligations to abide by the democratic process even if their favored conceptions of justice or equality are passed by in the decision making process.

Daniel Viehoff develops an egalitarian conception of democratic authority based on the ideal of relational equality (Viehoff 2014; see section 2.2.3 above for more on relational equality). Viehoff argues that relational equality is threatened by “subjection” in a relationship, which occurs when individuals have significantly different power over how they interact with and relate to one another. According to Viehoff, obeying the outcomes of egalitarian democratic procedures is necessary and sufficient for citizens to achieve coordination on common rules without subjection. It is sufficient because democratic procedures distribute decision-making power equally, which ensures that coordination is not determined by unequal power advantages. It is necessary because parties must set aside the considerations of greater and lesser power to realize non-subjection in their relationship.

Fabienne Peter develops a fairness-based conception of democratic authority that incorporates epistemic considerations (Peter 2008; 2009). Drawing on insights from proceduralist epistemology, Peter’s “pure epistemic proceduralism” holds that suitably egalitarian democratic decisions are binding at least in part because they result from a fair procedure of knowledge-production. This account differs from Estlund’s epistemic proceduralism (see section 5.1 above) because it does not condition the authority of democratic procedures on their ability to produce decisions that track the procedure-independent truth. Rather, the authority of democratic procedures is grounded in their fairness. And it differs from pure procedural accounts because the relevant notion of fairness is fairness in knowledge-production.

3.3 Limits to the Authority of Democracy

What are the limits to democratic authority? A limit to democratic authority is a principle violation of which defeats democratic authority. When the principle is violated by the democratic assembly, the assembly loses its authority in that instance or the moral weight of the authority is overridden. A number of different views have been offered on this issue. We can distinguish between internal and external limits to democratic authority. An internal limit arises from the constitutive requirements of the democratic process or from the principles that ground democracy. An external limit arises from principles that are independent of the values or requirements that ground democracy.

External limits to democratic authority are rebutting limits, which are principles that weigh against—and may sometimes outweigh the principles that ground democracy. So in a particular case, an individual may see that there are reasons to obey the assembly and some reasons against obeying the assembly and in the case at hand the reasons against obedience outweigh the reasons in favor of obedience. Internal limits to democratic authority are undercutting limits. These limits function not by weighing against the considerations in favor of authority, they undercut the considerations in favor of authority altogether; they simply short circuit the authority. When an undercutting limit is in play, it is not as if the principles which ground the limit outweigh the reasons for obeying the democratic assembly, it is rather that the reasons for obeying the democratic assembly are undermined altogether; they cease to exist or at least they are severely weakened.

Some have argued that the democratic process ought to be limited to decisions that are not incompatible with the proper functioning of the democratic process. So they argue that the democratic process may not legitimately take away the political rights of its citizens in good standing. It may not take away rights that are necessary to the democratic process such as freedom of association or freedom of speech. But these limits do not extend beyond the requirements for proper democratic functioning. They do not protect non political artistic speech or freedom of association in the case of non political activities (Ely 1980: chap. 4).

Another kind of internal limit is a limit that arises from the principles that underpin democracy. And the presence of this limit would seem to be necessary to making sense of the first limit because in order for the first limit to be morally important we need to know why a democracy ought to protect the democratic process.

Locke gives an account of the internal limits of democracy in his idea that there are certain things to which a citizen may not consent (Locke 1690: ch. XI). She may not consent to arbitrary rule or the violation of fundamental rights including democratic and liberal rights. Since consent is the basis of democratic authority for Locke, this account provides an explanation of the idea behind the first internal limit, that democracy may not be suspended by democratic means but it goes beyond that limit to suggest that rights that are not essentially connected with the exercise of the franchise may also not be violated because one may not consent to their violation.

More recently, Ronald Dworkin has defended an account of the limits of democratic authority (Dworkin 1996). He argues that democracy is justified by appeal to a principle of self-government. He argues that self-government cannot be realized unless all citizens are treated as full members of the political community, because, otherwise, they are not able to identify as members of the community. Among the conditions of full membership, he argues, are rights to be treated as equals and rights to have one’s moral independence respected. These principles support robust requirements of non-discrimination and of basic liberal rights.

The conception of democratic authority that grounds it in public equality also provides an account of the limits of that authority (Christiano 2008: ch. 6). Since democracy is founded in public equality, it may not violate public equality in any of its decisions. The basic idea is that overt violation of public equality by a democratic assembly undermines the claim that the democratic assembly embodies public equality. Democracy’s embodiment of public equality is conditional on its protecting public equality. To the extent that liberal rights are grounded in public equality and the provision of an economic minimum is also so grounded, this suggests that democratic rights and liberal rights and rights to an economic minimum create a limit to democratic authority. This account also provides a deep grounding for the kinds of limits to democratic authority defended in the first internal limit and it goes beyond these to the extent that protection of rights that are not connected with the exercise of the franchise is also necessary to public equality.

This account of the authority of democracy also provides some help with a vexing problem of democratic theory. This problem is the difficulty of persistent minorities. There is a persistent minority in a democratic society when that minority always loses in the voting. This is always a possibility in democracies because of the use of majority rule. If the society is divided into two or more highly unified voting blocks in which the members of each group votes in the same ways as all the other members of that group, then the group in the minority will find itself always on the losing end of the votes. This problem has plagued some societies, particularly those with indigenous peoples who live within developed societies. Though this problem is often connected with majority tyranny it is distinct from the problem of majority tyranny because it may be the case that the majority attempts to treat the minority well, in accordance with its conception of good treatment. It is just that the minority never agrees with the majority on what constitutes proper treatment. Being a persistent minority can be highly oppressive even if the majority does not try to act oppressively. This can be understood with the help of the very ideas that underpin democracy. Persons have interests in being able to correct for the cognitive biases of others and to be able to make the world in such a way that it makes sense to them. These interests are set back for a persistent minority since they never get their way.

The conception of democracy as grounded in public equality can shed light on this problem. It can say that the existence of a persistent minority violates public equality (Christiano 2008: chap. 7). In effect, a society in which there is a persistent minority is one in which that minority is being treated publicly as an inferior because it is clear that its fundamental interests are being set back. Hence to the extent that violations of public equality undercut the authority of a democratic assembly, the existence of a persistent minority undermines the authority of the democracy at least with respect to the minority. This suggests that certain institutions ought to be constructed so that the minority is not persistent.

One natural kind of limit to democratic authority is the external kind of limit. Here the idea is that there are certain considerations that favor democratic decision making and there are certain values that are independent of democracy that may be at issue in democratic decisions. For example, many theories recognize core liberal rights—such as rights to property, bodily integrity, and freedom of thought and expression—as external limits to democratic authority. Locke is often interpreted as arguing that individuals have natural rights to property in themselves and the external world that democratic laws must respect in order to have legitimate authority (Locke 1690).

Some views may assert that there are only external limits to democratic authority. But it is possible to think that there are both internal and external limits. Such an issue may arise in decisions to go to war, for example. In such decisions, one may have a duty to obey the decision of the democratic assembly on the grounds that this is how one treats one’s fellow citizens as equals but one may also have a duty to oppose the war on the grounds that the war is an unjust aggression against other people. To the extent that this consideration is sufficiently serious it may outweigh the considerations of equality that underpin democratic authority. Thus one may have an overall duty not to obey in this context. Issues of foreign policy in general seem to give rise to possible external limits to democracy.

4. The Demands of Democratic Participation

In this section, we examine the demands of participation in large-scale democracies. We begin by examining a core challenge to the idea that democratic citizens are capable of governing a large and complex society. We then explore different proposed solutions to the core challenge. Finally, we examine the moral duties of democratic citizens in large-scale democracies in light of the core challenge.

A vexing problem of democratic theory has been to determine whether ordinary citizens are up to the task of governing a large and complex society. There are three distinct problems here:

• Plato argued that some people are more intelligent and informed about political matters than others and have a superior moral character, and that those persons ought to rule ( The Republic , Book VI)
• Others have argued that a society must have a division of labor. If everyone were engaged in the complex and difficult task of politics, little time or energy would be left for the other essential tasks of a society. Conversely, if we expect most people to engage in other difficult and complex tasks, how can we expect them to have the time and resources sufficient to devote themselves intelligently to politics?
• Since individuals have so little impact on the outcomes of political decision making in large societies, they have little sense of responsibility for the outcomes. Some have argued that it is not rational to vote since the chances that an individual’s vote will a decide the outcome of an election (i.e., will determine whether a candidate gets elected or not) are nearly indistinguishable from zero. For example, one widely accepted estimate puts the odds of an individual casting the deciding vote in a United States presidential election at 1 in 100 million. Many estimates put the odds much lower. Worse still, Anthony Downs has argued that almost all of those who do vote have little reason to become informed about how best to vote (Downs 1957: ch.13). On the assumption that citizens reason and behave roughly according to the Downsian model, either the society must in fact be run by a relatively small group of people with minimal input from the rest or it will be very poorly run. As we can see these criticisms are echoes of the sorts of criticisms Plato and Hobbes made.

These observations pose challenges for any robustly egalitarian or deliberative conception of democracy. Without the ability to participate intelligently in politics one cannot use one’s votes to advance one’s aims nor can one be said to participate in a process of reasoned deliberation among equals. So, either equality of political power implies a kind of self-defeating equal participation of citizens in politics or a reasonable division of labor seems to undermine equality of power. And either substantial participation of citizens in public deliberation entails the relative neglect of other tasks or the proper functioning of the other sectors of the society requires that most people do not participate intelligently in public deliberation.

4.2 Proposed Solutions to the Problem of Democratic Participation

Some modern theorists of democracy, called elite theorists, have argued against any robustly egalitarian or deliberative forms of democracy in light of the problem of democratic participation. They argue that high levels of citizen participation tend to produce bad legislation designed by demagogues to appeal to poorly informed and overly emotional citizens. They look upon the alleged uninformedness of citizens evidenced in many empirical studies in the 1950s and 1960s as perfectly reasonable and predictable. Indeed they regard the alleged apathy of citizens in modern states as highly desirable social phenomena.

Political leaders are to avoid divisive and emotionally charged issues and make policy and law with little regard for the fickle and diffuse demands made by ordinary citizens. Citizens participate by voting but since they know very little they are not effectively the ruling part of the society. The process of election is usually just a fairly peaceful way of maintaining or changing those who rule (Schumpeter 1942 [1950: 269]).

On Schumpeter’s view, however, citizens do have a role to play in avoiding serious disasters. When politicians act in ways that nearly anyone can see is problematic, the citizens can throw the bums out.

So the elite theory of democracy does seem compatible with some of the instrumentalist arguments given above but it is strongly opposed to the intrinsic arguments from liberty, public justification and equality. To be sure, there can be an elite deliberative democracy wherein elites deliberate, perhaps even out of sight of the population at large, on how to run the society.

A view akin to the elite theory but less pessimistic about citizens’ political agency and competence argues that a well-functioning representative democracy can function as a kind of “defensible epistocracy” (Landa & Pevnick 2020). This view holds that, under the right conditions, elected officials can be expected to exercise political power more responsibly than citizens in a direct democracy because each official is far more likely to cast the deciding vote in legislative assemblies (the “pivotality effect”) and officials have more incentive to exercise power with due regard for the general welfare (the “accountability effect”). Moreover, under the right conditions, representative democracy allows individuals to assess the competence of candidates for office and to select candidates who are best able to help the community pursue its commitments.

One approach that is in part motivated by the problem of democratic citizenship but which attempts to preserve some elements of equality against the elitist criticism is the interest group pluralist account of politics. Robert Dahl’s early statement of the view is very powerful.

In a rough sense, the essence of all competitive politics is bribery of the electorate by politicians… The farmer… supports a candidate committed to high price supports, the businessman…supports an advocate of low corporation taxes… the consumer…votes for candidates opposed to a sales tax. (Dahl 1959: 69)

In this conception of the democratic process, each citizen is a member of an interest group with narrowly defined interests that are closely connected to their everyday lives. On these subjects citizens are supposed to be quite well informed and interested in having an influence. Or at least, elites from each of the interest groups that are relatively close in perspective to the ordinary members are the principal agents in the process. On this account, democracy is not rule by the majority but rather rule by coalitions of minorities. Policy and law in a democratic society are decided by means of bargaining among the different groups.

This approach is conceivably compatible with the more egalitarian approach to democracy. This is because it attempts to reconcile equality with collective decision making by limiting the tasks of citizens to ones which they are able to perform reasonably well. It is not particularly compatible with the deliberative public justification approach because it takes the democratic process to be concerned essentially with bargaining among the different interest groups where the preferences are not subject to further debate in the society as a whole.

A third approach inspired by the problem of participation may be called the neo-liberal approach to politics favored by public choice theorists such as James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock (1962). Against elite theories, they contend that elites and their allies will tend to expand the powers of government and bureaucracy for their own interests and that this expansion will occur at the expense of a largely inattentive public. For this reason, they argue for severe restrictions on the powers of elites. They argue against the interest group pluralist theorists that the problem of participation occurs within interest groups more or less as much as among the citizenry at large. Only powerful economic interests are likely to succeed in organizing to influence the government and they will do so largely for their own benefit. Since economic elites will advance their own interests in politics while spreading the costs to others, policies will tend to be more costly (because imposed on everyone in society) than they are beneficial (because they benefit only the elites in the interest group.)

Neo-liberals infer that one ought to transfer many of the current functions of the state to the market and limit the state to the enforcement of basic property rights and liberties. These can be more easily understood and brought under the control of ordinary citizens.

But the neo-liberal account of democracy must answer to two large worries. First, citizens in modern societies have more ambitious conceptions of social justice and the common good than are realizable by the minimal state. The neo-liberal account thus implies a very serious curtailment of democracy of its own. More evidence is needed to support the contention that these aspirations cannot be achieved by the modern state. Second, the neo-liberal approach ignores the problem of large private concentrations of wealth and power that are capable of pushing small states around for their own benefit and imposing their wills on populations without their consent.

Somin (2013) also argues that government be significantly reduced in size so that citizens have a lesser knowledge burden to carry. But he calls for government decentralization so that citizens can vote with their feet in favor of or against competing units of government, in effect creating a kind of market in governments among which citizens can choose.

4.2.4 The self-interest assumption

A considerable amount of the literature in political science and the economic theory of the state are grounded in the assumption that individuals act primarily and perhaps even exclusively in their self-interest narrowly construed. The problem of participation and the accounts of the democratic process described above are in large part dependent on this assumption. When the preferences of voters are not assumed to be self-interested the calculations of the value of participation change. For example, if a person is a motivated utilitarian, the small chance of making a difference is coupled with a huge accumulated return to many people if there is a significant difference between alternatives. It may be worth it in this case to become reasonably well informed (Parfit 1984: 74). Even more weakly altruistic moral preferences could make a big difference to the rationality of becoming informed, for example if one had a preference to comply with perceived civic duty to vote responsibly (see section 4.3.1 for discussion of the duty to vote). Any moral preference can be formulated in consistent utility functions.

Moreover, defenders of deliberative democracy often claim that concerns for the common good and justice are not merely given prior to politics but that they can evolve and improve through the process of discussion and debate in politics (Elster 1986 [2003]; Gutmann & Thompson 2004; Cohen 1989 [2009]). They assert that much debate and discussion in politics would not be intelligible were it not for the fact that citizens are willing to engage in open minded discussion with those who have distinct morally informed points of view. Empirical evidence suggests that individuals are motivated by moral considerations in politics in addition to their interests (Mansbridge 1990).

Public deliberation in any large-scale democracy will occur within a complex and differentiated “deliberative system”, a

wide variety of institutions, associations, and sites of contestation accomplish political work. (Mansbridge et. al. 2012)

Moreover, the deliberative system of a complex democracy will be characterized by a division of democratic labor , with different parts of the system making different contributions to the overall system. The question arises: what is the appropriate role for a citizen in this division of labor? Philosophically, we should ask two questions. What ought citizens have knowledge about in order to fulfill their role? What standards ought citizens’ beliefs live up to in order to be adequately supported? One promising view is that citizens must think about what ends the society ought to aim at and leave the question of how to achieve those aims to experts (Christiano 1996: ch 5). The rationale for this division of labor is that expertise is not as fundamental to the choice of aims as it is to the development of legislation and policy. Citizens are capable in their everyday lives of understanding and cultivating deep understandings of values and of their interests. And if citizens genuinely do choose the aims and others faithfully pursue the means to achieving those aims, then citizens are in the driver’s seat in society and they can play this role as equals.

To be sure, citizens need to know who to vote for and whether those they vote for are genuinely advancing their aims. This would appear to require some basic knowledge of about how best to achieve their political aims. How is this possible without extensive knowledge? In addition, there is empirical evidence that those who are better informed have more influence on representatives (Erikson 2015). So, if this task requires some kind of knowledge to do well, how can this be compatible with equality?

One promising response is that ordinary citizens do not need individually to have a lot of knowledge of social science and particular facts in order to make political decisions based on such knowledge. Recent research in cognitive science indicates the individuals use “cognitive shortcuts” to save on time in acquiring information about the world they live in (Lupia & McCubbins 1998). This use of shortcuts is common and essential throughout economic and political life. In political life, we see part of the rationale for the many intermediate institutions between government and citizens (Downs 1957: 221–229). Citizens save time by making use of institutions such as the press, unions and other interest group associations, political parties, and opinion leaders to get information about politics. They also rely on interactions in the workplace as well as conversations with friends and families. Political parties can connect ordinary citizens in various ways to expertise because each one contains a division of labor within them that mirrors that in the state. Experts in parties have incentives to make their expertise intelligible to other members (Christiano 2012). In addition, under favorable conditions, political parties stimulate the development of citizens’ normative perspectives and facilitate a healthy public competition of political justifications based on those perspectives (White & Ypi 2016).

People are dependent on social networks in other ways in a democracy. People receive “free” information (which they do not deliberately seek out) about politics and law in school, through their jobs, in discussion with friends, colleagues and family and incidentally through the media. And this can form a better or worse basis on which to pursue other information. Institutions can make a difference to the stream of free information individuals receive. Education can be distributed in a more or less egalitarian way. The circumstances of work can provide more or less free information about politics and law. People who have jobs with a significant amount of power such as lawyers, business persons, government officials will be beneficiaries of very high quality free information. They need to know about law and politics to do their jobs properly. Those who hold low skilled and non-unionized jobs will receive much less free information about politics at work. To the extent that we can alter the economic division of labor by for example giving more place to unions or having greater worker participation, we might be able to reduce inequalities of information among citizens.

4.3 The Moral Duties of Democratic Citizens

What are the moral duties of democratic citizens in complex democracies? In this section, we discuss three important democratic duties: (1) the duty to vote, (2) the duty to promote justice through principled disobedience of the law, and (3) duties to accommodate disagreement through compromise and consensus.

It is often thought that democratic citizens have a moral duty to vote in elections. But this is not obvious. Individual votes are a causally insignificant contribution to the democratic process. In large-scale democracies, the chance that any particular citizen’s vote will decide the outcome of an election is minuscule. What moral reason do democratic citizens have to participate in politics even though they’re almost certain not to make the difference to who gets elected? Why shouldn’t they seek to promote the good or justice in other ways?

Parfit develops an act-utilitarian answer to this question (Parfit 1984: 73–75). Act-utilitarians hold that morally right actions maximize the total expected sum of the utilities of all persons in the society. Parfit argues that voting might nonetheless maximize expected utility if one candidate is significantly superior to the other(s). If we add the benefits to each member of the society of having the superior candidate win, we get a very large difference in value. So when we multiply that value by the probability of casting the deciding vote, which is often thought to be about 1/100,000,000 in a United States presidential election, we might still get a reasonably high expected value. When we subtract the cost to the voter and others of voting, which is often quite low, from this number, we may still have a good reason to vote.

One worry with Parfit’s view is that it faces a version of what Jason Brennan calls “the particularity problem” (Brennan 2011). This is the problem of explaining why citizens ought to promote value through political participation as opposed to through non-political acts. Voting is just one way of promoting overall utility; we need to know the expected utility of the different acts they might perform instead. Even if the argument above is correct, it might be the case that many individuals maximize expected utility by not voting and doing something even more beneficial with their time.

Alex Guerrero argues that citizens have moral reasons to vote because candidates who win by a larger proportion of votes can claim a greater “normative mandate” to govern (Guerrero 2010). Still each individual vote makes only a tiny contribution to the proportion of votes a candidate receives. So, we might doubt the strength of the reason to vote that Guerrero identifies.

Some theorists argue that individuals have a moral duty to vote in order to absolve themselves of complicity in state injustices (Beerbohm 2012; Zakaras 2018). All states commit injustices—they make and enforce unjust laws, wage unjust wars, and much else. And citizens of large-scale democracies have a kind of standing responsibility, by paying taxes and obeying laws, for their state’s injustices of which they must actively absolve themselves The complicity account argues that citizens avoid shared responsibility for their state’s injustices if they oppose those injustices through voting and of public advocacy (Beerbohm 2012).

One worry is that it is unclear why voting and publicly advocating against injustice should be thought to absolve responsibility that is established by paying taxes and obeying laws. Another worry is that one’s concern to oppose injustice should derive from a more direct concern for the wrongs suffered by victims of injustice rather than a concern with keeping one’s hands clean.

One sort of account that avoids this worry grounds the moral duty to vote in the importance of doing one’s fair share of the demands of political justice consistent with public equality. The demands of creating and sustaining just institutions distribute fairly among all citizens (Maskivker 2019). If one fails to do one’s fair share of these demands, then one fails to show due regard for the eventual victims of injustice. Furthermore, voting provides citizens with a mechanism for doing their fair shares of the demands of making their institutions just in a way that is consistent with respecting the public equality of fellow citizens. By showing up and casting a vote, citizens can contribute to the collective achievement of justice while maintaining equal decision-making power with fellow citizens.

Civil disobedience has long been recognized as a central mechanism through which democratic citizens may legitimately promote political justice in their society. According to the standard view, civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law that aims to change laws or government policies. People who engage in civil disobedience are willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions in order to show fidelity to the law (Bedau 1961; Rawls 1971: ch. 55). The standard definition of civil disobedience has been subjected to challenge. For example, some argue that the private acts in which the disobedient seeks to evade legal consequences can count as instances of civil disobedience (Raz 1979; Brownlee 2004, 2007, 2012).

Perhaps the most common way of justifying civil disobedience argues that the same considerations that ground the pro tanto duty to obey the law sometimes make it appropriate to engage in civil disobedience of the law (see, e.g., Rawls 1971: ch. 57; Sabl 2001; Markovits 2005; Smith 2011). For example, Rawls argues that while citizens of a “nearly just” society have a pro tanto duty to obey its laws in virtue of it being nearly just, civil disobedience can be justified as a way of making the relevant society more just (Rawls 1971: ch. 57). Similarly, Daniel Markovits argues that members of a society with suitably egalitarian and inclusive democratic procedures have a general duty to obey its laws because they are produced by procedures that are suitably egalitarian and inclusive, but that civil disobedience can be justified as a way of making the relevant procedures more egalitarian or inclusive (Markovits 2005).

It is easy to see why this constitutes an attractive way of justifying civil disobedience, since it justifies it by appeal to the same values that ground the pro tanto duty to obey the law. On the other hand, as Simmons notes, if there is no general duty to obey the law, there would seem to be no presumption in favor of obedience and thus no special need for a justification of civil disobedience; obedience and disobedience would stand equally in need of justification (Simmons 2007: ch 4).

Advocates of the standard approach generally assume that only civil disobedience can be justified in this way. However, some argue civil disobedience does not enjoy a special normative presumption over uncivil disobedience. The core idea that insofar as the values that ground a pro tanto duty to obey the law—for example, justice or democratic equality—are sometimes best served by civil disobedience of the law, they are sometimes best served by covert, evasive, anonymous, or even violent disobedience of the law (Delmas 2018; Lai 2019; Pasternak 2018).

Disagreement about what laws, policies, or principles ought to be implemented is a persistent feature of democratic societies. It is often argued that citizens and officials have duties to moderate their political activity in order to accommodate the competing views of fellow citizens or officials. Two duties of accommodation are widely discussed in the literature: duties of compromise and duties of public justification.

A compromise can be understood as an agreement between parties to advance laws or policies that all regard as suboptimal because they disagree about which laws or policies are optimal (May 2005). While it is widely accepted that there are sometimes compelling instrumental reasons to compromise, whether there are intrinsic moral reasons to compromise is more controversial. Some defend intrinsic reasons to compromise based on democratic values like inclusion, mutual respect, and reciprocity (Gutmann and Thompson 2014; Wendt 2016; Weinstock 2013). However, Simon May argues that such arguments fail and that all reasons to compromise are pragmatic (May 2005).

Advocates of the public justification approach to democracy (see section 2.2.2 ) often argue that democratic citizens and officials have individual moral duties of public justification. John Rawls argues for a “duty of civility” that requires citizens and officials to be prepared to give mutually acceptable justifications for important laws when voting and engaged in public advocacy. Given the inevitability of disagreement about comprehensive moral and philosophical truth in free democracies, the duty of civility requires citizens to appeal to a reasonable “political” conception of justice that can be the object of an “overlapping consensus” between different comprehensive doctrines. While different theorists motivate duties of public justification in different ways, many appeal to the need for exercises of coercive political authority to respect citizens’ freedom and equality.

5. Democratic Representation

Representation is an essential part of the division of labor of large-scale democracies. In this section, we examine two moral questions concerning representation. First, what sort of representative system is best? Second, by what moral principles are representatives bound?

A number of debates have centered on the question of what kinds of representative systems are best for a democratic society. What choice we make here will depend heavily on our underlying moral justification of democracy, our conception of citizenship as well as on our empirical understanding of political institutions and how they function. The most basic types of formal political representation available are single member district representation, proportional representation and group representation. In addition, many societies have opted for multicameral legislative institutions. In some cases, combinations of the above forms have been tried.

Single member district representation returns single representatives of geographically defined areas containing roughly equal populations to the legislature and is prominent in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India, among other places. The most common form of proportional representation is party list proportional representation. In a simple form of such a scheme, a number of parties compete for election to a legislature that is not divided into geographical districts. Parties acquire seats in the legislature as a proportion of the total number of votes they receive in the voting population as a whole. Group representation occurs when the society is divided into non-geographically defined groups such as ethnic or linguistic groups or even functional groups such as workers, farmers and capitalists and returns representatives to a legislature from each of them.

Many have argued in favor of single member district legislation on the grounds that it has appeared to them to lead to more stable government than other forms of representation. The thought is that proportional representation tends to fragment the citizenry into opposing homogeneous camps that rigidly adhere to their party lines and that are continually vying for control over the government. Since there are many parties and they are unwilling to compromise with each other, governments formed from coalitions of parties tend to fall apart rather quickly. The post war experience of governments in Italy appears to confirm this hypothesis. Single member district representation, in contrast, is said to enhance the stability of governments by virtue of its favoring a two party system of government. Each election cycle then determines which party is to stay in power for some length of time.

Charles Beitz argues that single member district representation encourages moderation in party programs offered for citizens to consider (Beitz 1989: ch. 7). This results from the tendency of this kind of representation towards two party systems. In a two party system with majority rule, it is argued, each party must appeal to the median voter in the political spectrum. Hence, they must moderate their programs to appeal to the median voter. Furthermore, they encourage compromise among groups since they must try to appeal to a lot of other groups in order to become part of one of the two leading parties. These tendencies encourage moderation and compromise in citizens to the extent that political parties, and interest groups, hold these qualities up as necessary to functioning well in a democracy.

In criticism, advocates of proportional and group representation have argued that single member district representation tends to muffle the voices and ignore the interests of minority groups in the society (Mill 1861; Christiano 1996). Minority interests and views tend to be articulated in background negotiations and in ways that muffle their distinctiveness. Furthermore, representatives of minority interests and views often have a difficult time getting elected at all in single member district systems so it has been charged that minority views and interests are often systematically underrepresented. Sometimes these problems are dealt with by redrawing the boundaries of districts in a way that ensures greater minority representation. The efforts are invariably quite controversial since there is considerable disagreement about the criteria for apportionment.

In proportional representation, by contrast, representatives of different groups are seated in the legislature in proportion to citizens’ choices. Minorities need not make their demands conform to the basic dichotomy of views and interests that characterize single member district systems so their views are more articulated and distinctive as well as better represented.

Advocates of group representation, like Iris Marion Young, have argued that some historically disenfranchised groups may still not do very well under proportional representation (Young 1990: ch. 6). They may not be able to organize and articulate their views as easily as other groups. Also, minority groups can still be systematically defeated in the legislature and their interests may be consistently set back even if they do have some representation. For these groups, some have argued that the only way to protect their interests is legally to ensure that they have adequate and even disproportionate representation.

One worry about group representation is that it tends to freeze some aspects of the agenda that might be better left to the choice of citizens. For instance, consider a population that is divided into linguistic groups for a long time. And suppose that only some citizens continue to think of linguistic conflict as important. In the circumstances a group representation scheme may tend to be biased in an arbitrary way that favors the views or interests of those who do think of linguistic conflict as important.

What moral norms apply to representatives carrying out their official duties? We can get a better handle on possible answers by introducing Hannah Pitkin’s famous distinction between trustees and delegates (Pitkin 1967). Representatives who act as trustees rely on their own independent judgments in carrying out their duties. Norms of trusteeship are supported in recognition that, given a natural division of democratic labor, officials are in a much better position to make well-reasoned and well-informed political decisions than ordinary citizens.

Representatives who act as delegates defer to the judgments of their citizens. These norms might be thought to reflect the value of democratic accountability. Because the people authorize representatives to govern, it is natural to think that representatives are accountable to the people to enact their judgments. If representatives are not accountable in this way, citizens lose democratic control over their representatives’ actions.

Which norms should win out when they conflict? Pitkin argues that the answer varies by context. This seems plausible. For example, if we take the view that citizens primarily have the role of determining the aims of the society, we might think that representatives ought to be delegates with regard to the aims, but trustees with regard to the ways of realizing the aims (Christiano 1996). See Suzanne Dovi’s discussion of representation for a deeper and more nuanced discussion of these issues.

Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem is thought by some to provide a major set of difficulties for democratic theory (Arrow 1951). William Riker, Russell Hardin, and others have thought that the impossibility theorem shows that there are deep problems with democratic ideals (Riker 1982; Hardin 1999). Neither of these thinkers are opposed to democracy itself, they both think that there are good instrumental reasons for having democracy.

The basic results of social choice theory are laid out in detail elsewhere in the encyclopedia (List 2013). Here we will simply articulate the basic result and an illustration. The question of Arrowian social choice theory is: how do we determine a social preference for a society overall on the basis of the set of the individual preferences of the members? Arrow shows that a social choice function that satisfies a number of plausible constraints cannot be defined when there are three or more alternatives to be chosen by the group. He lays out a number of conditions to be imposed on a social choice function. Unlimited domain : The social choice function must be able to give us a social preference no matter what the preferences of the individuals over alternatives are. Non dictatorship : the social choice function must not select the preference of one particular member regardless of others’ preferences. Transitivity and completeness : The individual preferences orderings must be transitive and complete orderings and the social preference derived from them must be transitive and complete. Independence of irrelevant alternatives : the social preference between two alternatives must be the result only of the individual orderings between those two alternatives. Pareto condition : if all the members prefer an alternative x over y , then x must be ranked above y in the social preference. The theorem says that no social choice function over more than two alternatives can satisfy all of these conditions.

A useful illustration of this idea involves an extension of majority rule to cases of more than two alternatives. The Condorcet rule says that an alternative x wins when, for every other alternative, a majority prefers x over that alternative. For example, suppose we have three persons A , B and C and three alternatives x , y and z . A prefers x over y , y over z ; B prefers y over z and z over x ; C prefers x over z and z over y . In this case, x is the Condorcet winner since it beats y , and it beats z . The problem with this plausible sounding rule is the case of a majority cycle. Suppose you have three persons A , B and C , and three alternatives, x , y and z . In the case in which A prefers x over y and y over z , while B prefers y over z and z over x , and C prefers z over x and x over y , the Condorcet rule will yield a social preference of x over y , y over z and z over x . One can see here that the Condorcet rule satisfies all the conditions except transitivity of social preference. One way to avoid intransitivity is to restrict the domain of preferences from which the social preference arises. Another is to introduce cardinal information that compares the how much people prefer alternatives (violating independence). Another might be to make one person a dictator. So, this case nicely illustrates that one cannot satisfy all of the constraints simultaneously.

Riker argues that the theorem shows that the idea that the popular will can be the governing element in a society is false. If an existence condition for a popular will is a restricted set of preferences the question naturally arises as to whether such a condition is always or normally met in a moderately complex society. We might wonder whether a highly pluralistic society with a very complex division of labor is likely to satisfy the restricted preference set condition necessary to avoid cycles or other pathologies of social choice. Some have argued that we have empirical evidence to the effect that modern societies do normally satisfy such conditions (Mackie 2003). Others have argued that this seems unlikely (Riker 1982; Ingham 2019). This is not merely a defense of unlimited domain. It is a defense of the thesis that normally the collections of preferences in modern societies are not likely to have the properties that enable them to avoid cycles.

The fairness critique from social choice theory is based on the idea that when a voting process meets requirements of fairness, the fairness of the process and the preferences may not generate determinate outcomes. If cycles are pervasive, the outcomes of democratic processes may be determined by clever strategies and not by the fairness of the procedures (Riker 1982). Three remarks are in order here. First, it is compatible with the process being completely fair that the outcomes of the process are indeterminate. After all, coin flips are fair. Second, there is some question as to how prominent the cycles are. Third, one might think that if the conditions which enable opposing sides to strategize effectively are themselves roughly equal, then the concerns for fairness are fully met. If resources for persuasion and organization are distributed in an egalitarian way, perhaps the fairness account is vindicated after all. This point can be made more compelling when we consider Sean Ingham’s account of political equality. He includes intensity of preference in his account of fairness. This is a departure from the Arrowian approach, but it is in many ways a realistic one. The idea is that majorities have equal control over policy areas when they are able to get what they want with the same amount of intensity of preferences. And equality holds generally when all groups of the same size have the same control (Ingham 2019). There remains an extreme case in which all majorities have equal intensity of preference and are caught in a majority cycle. But the chances of this happening are very slim, even if the chances of majority cycles more generally are not as small. Even if there are a lot of majority cycles, if the issues are resolved in such a way that those majorities that have most at stake in the conflict are the ones that get their way, then we can have fairness in a quite robust sense even while having pervasive majority cycles.

If democratic societies allow members to participate as equals in collective decision making, a natural question arises: who has the right to participate in making collective decisions? We can ask this question within a particular jurisdiction (ought all adults have the right to participation? Ought children have the right to participation? Ought all residents have such rights?). But we can also ask what the extent of the jurisdiction ought to be. How many of the people in the world ought to be included in the collective decision-making? An easy, though slightly misleading, way of asking this question is, what ought the physical boundaries of a particular institution of collective decision-making be? We see partially democratic societies within the confines of the modern nation-state. But we might ask, why should we restrict the set of persons who participate in making decisions of the modern state just to those who happen to be the physical inhabitants of those states? Surely there are many other persons affected by decisions made by democratic states aside from those persons. For example, activities in one society A can pollute another society B . Why shouldn’t the members of B have a say in the decisions regarding the polluting activities in A ? And there can be many other effects that activities in A can have on B .

Some have suggested that the boundaries of a state ought to be determined through a principle of national self-determination. We identify a nation as an ongoing group of persons who share certain cultural, historical and political norms and who identify with each other and with a piece of land. Then we determine the boundaries of the territory by appeal to the size of the group of people and the land they cherish (Miller 1995; Song 2012). This is an appealing idea in many ways: shared nationality breeds a willingness to share the sacrifices that arise from collective decision making; it generates a sense of at-homeness for people. But it is hard to use as a general principle for dividing land among persons when one of the central facts for many societies is that a diversity of nations, ethnic groups and cultures co-mingle on the very same land.

Is there a democratic solution to the boundary problem? A number of ideas have been suggested. The first idea is that the people ought to decide what the boundaries are. But this suggestion, while it may be a pragmatic resolution to the problem, seems to beg the question about who the members are and who are not (Whelan 1983).

A second theoretical solution that has some democratic credentials is to invoke the principle that all who are subjected to decision making, in the sense of who are coerced or have duties imposed upon them, ought to have a say in the decision making (Abizadeh 2008). This principle is plausible enough, but it doesn’t get at enough cases. The pollution case above is not a case of subjection.

A third proposed theoretical solution is the all-affected principle. One formulation is “all affected persons ought to have a say in the decisions that affect them”. This does suggest that when the activities in one state affect those of another state, the people of the other state ought to have a say in those activities. Some have thought that this principle tends to lead to a kind of politically cosmopolitan principle in support of world government (Goodin 2007).

But the all-affected principle is conceptually quite uncertain and morally deeply problematic, and it provides very little, if anything, in the way of a solution to the boundary problem.

First, “having a say” is not clear. Does it require having a vote in collective decision-making? Or is it also satisfied by a person’s being able to modify another’s action by negotiating with them, as we see when there is bargaining over an externality? This latter version would undermine the idea that the all-affected principle has direct implications for the boundary problem. When the United States permits activities that produce acid rain in Canada, Canada can negotiate with the United States to lessen the production of acid rain and/or to compensate Canada for the harm. As long as there is a fair and effective system of negotiation, this would seem to satisfy the all-affected principle without giving Canadians a vote in American politics or Americans a vote in Canadian politics.

Second, it is not clear what “being affected” means. One, does a person being affected just mean that there is a change in the person’s situation or must the effect involve the setting back of one’s preferences, or interests, or legitimate interests, or exercise of one’s capacities or one’s good? Two, are one’s interests affected by a decision only when they are advanced or set back relative to some baseline (either the present state of affairs or some morally defined baseline like what you have promised me), or am I affected by decisions that could be to my advantage or disadvantage but end up making no difference? For example, if I am drowning in a pool and you are deciding whether to save me or go buy yourself a candy bar, am I affected by your buying the candy bar? If I am not affected when no change occurs, then who is affected by a decision often depends on who participates in the decision and we have no solution to the problem of inclusion. If I am affected, then the principle has some quite extraordinary implications. Now it turns out that impoverished persons in South Asia are affected by my buying a candy bar, since I could have sent the money to them (Goodin 2007).

The all-affected principle is a merely suggestive and rhetorically effective phrase. It is a conversation starter and a list of topics to be discussed, not a genuine principle. For example, if I must include everyone possibly affected by my decision for every decision I make, I will not be able to make many decisions and my decision making will no longer enable me to give a shape to my own life and my relations with others. My life becomes fragmented and lacks integrity (Williams 1973). An analog of this problem would arise for political societies, presumably. Each society would have to include a variety of different persons in each decision. It is hard to see how any society could take on any particular character if this is the case.

A more plausible principle that encompasses some of the suggestions of the all-affected principle is that a framework of institutions should be set up so that people have power to advance and protect their legitimate interests in life.

But if we understand the principle in this way, it is not clear that it helps us much with the boundary problem. First of all, there are different ways in which people can be said to possess power over their lives. One kind of power is the power to participate as an equal in a collective decision-making process. Another kind is to be able to advance one’s interests in a decentralized process like a market or a system of agreement making like international law. Recalling our pollution problem above, we could give the state of which they are members power to negotiate with the polluting state terms that are mutually agreeable. Only the power to participate as an equal in collective decision-making involves the boundaries of collective decision-making.

Another solution to the boundary problem is a conservative one. The basic idea is to keep the boundaries of states roughly as they are except if there is a pressing need to change them. Trying to alter the boundaries of political societies is a recipe for serious conflict because there is no institution that has the legitimacy or power actually to resolve problems at an international level and there is likely to be a lot of disagreement on how to do it. States as we know them, are by far the most powerful political entities in the international system. They have developed more effective practices of accountability of power than any other entity in the system. They have created unified societies with highly interdependent populations. Finally, states and the individuals in them can be made accountable to some degree to other individuals and states through the process of negotiation and international law making. The origin of these boundaries may be arbitrary, but it is not, for all that, irrelevant. To be sure, there are clear cases where borders can be changed. One source of pressing need is serious injustice within a country. Another might be the existence of permanent minorities that are sectionally defined. Here, we ask only how to revise boundaries and the basis of such revision is that it is a remedy for serious injustice (Buchanan 1991).

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423 Democracy Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best democracy topic ideas & essay examples, 🥇 most interesting democracy topics to write about, 👍 good essay topics on democracy, ✅ simple & easy democracy essay titles, 📌 democracy writing prompts, 🔍 good research topics about democracy, ❓ essay questions about democracy.

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• Similarities and Differences Between Communism and Democratic Socialism This is because, according to the proponents of both ideologies, in Capitalist countries, the majority of ordinary citizens are denied the right to have a fair share in the national wealth.
• Social Media and Democracy For example, in 2009, during the Iran elections, citizens were able to comment on Facebooks and Youtube, and the whole world was able to follow the election proceedings.
• Leadership Styles: Democratic, Autocratic and Laissez-Faire According to McNichol and Hamer, the participative approach, compared to the other styles, enhances the productivity of employees for a prolonged period of time as it encourages cooperation and increases staff morale. As a democratic […]
• Does Democracy Require Equality of Income or Wealth? While wealth equality as the presence of equivalent opportunities to exert political power appears to be the essential factor in establishing democracy, income equality as the opportunity to build wealth is also a factor.
• Concept of Democratic Education Theory The learners have greater voice on what to learn and are involved in discussing the content and the structure of their curriculum.
• What Is the Relationship Between Capitalism and Democracy? The importance of the roles played by the stock market in the capitalistic economy is related considerably to the aspects of democracy and free market.
• Encouraging Voter Participation in Democratic Election Process The voting process should be concerned with high voter turnout rather than trust since losing legislatures is responsible for the lack of trust among voters in the entire process.
• Democratic Governance Concept The United States proves to be a main player in the promotion of democratic governance in countries where conflict dictatorship and war is involved.
• Democratic Leadership Styles and Patient Outcomes Democratic leadership positively impacts patient outcomes as it influences nurses to participate in all processes of the organization and contribute to its development.
• Democracy in Modern World All these events in the world history strengthened the thought that democracy is the only right and progressive form of authority in a state that will finally bring the overall population of the state to […]
• Democracy and Custom in Samoa From the perspective of modern democracy, the author concludes that customs and traditions that are in the constitution of Samoa are not essential because they hinder the development of democracy in the country.
• Success or Failure of Democracy In terms of equality in democracy, Tocpeuville observes that this becomes the form of government in a democracy since no one becomes right than the other.
• Democracy and Dictatorship As a matter of fact, the paths above show some means that connect political and economic composition of a community to a political institution. The panorama of the existing democracy in this path is weak […]
• Importance of News in Democracy The journalists are always on the lookout for areas of socio political and economic importance with the aim of reporting to the people in order to attract the required responses which may alter the sociopolitical […]
• Democratic and Undemocratic Elements of the Constitution The judicial arm, also known as the Supreme Court, functioned to establish the jurisdiction of particular cases under the US judicial system; the disposition of convicted prisoners; and the production of evidence and testimonies as […]
• Democratic vs. Autocratic Leadership Styles Thus, one of the main advantages of the democratic model is that all individuals who are affected by a certain situation have an opportunity to outline their views and participate in decision-making.
• The Complex Term of Democracy The second face of democracy is that of rights and liberties consisting of given basic rights and freedoms that the law to citizenry must guarantee.
• History of Athenian Democracy There were three main bodies that governed the affairs of Athens and they were the assembly, the council and the courts all which were run by representatives of the people.
• Public Speaking in a Democracy Public speaking actually matters for a democracy, because it is a good and sometimes the only chance to save democracy that is eroding now, to improve communicative skills, and to underline the problems that prevent […]
• The Democratic Peace Theory: Merits and Demerits Chioza et al.say that among the reasons that makes it possible to intertwine the democratic peace theory with the liberal theory is that many countries are in dire need of peace. There is a good […]
• Founding Fathers as Democratic Reformers In fact, he describes them as ‘superb democratic politicians.’ The author affirms that the founding fathers dedicated their efforts to serving the Americans within an autonomous framework that welcomed the decisions of the public.’James Madison […]
• Study of Liberal Democracy In the true sense of liberal democracy, the government is chosen by the voters, and in this sense, the government should answer to the people.
• The Democrats and the Whigs of 1830-1840 The Jacksonian Democrats and the Wigs were interested in American society’s modernization and economic development. However, the parties had different views on achieving economic efficiency and prosperity and the role of government in the economy.
• “Democracy for the Few” by Michael Parenti In order to consolidate their control over the information that is provided to the representatives of the general public, corporations also started to influence the context of the advertisements.
• What Is More Valuable in a Liberal Democracy: Positive or Negative Liberty? In the understanding of the concept of liberty, it is equally important to underscore the fact that it promotes freedom within a society.
• How Social Media Could Threaten Democracy The next paragraph of this law will state that an organization must prove that it is based in the country to run a politically related ad on social media.
• In a Democratic Britain, the Monarchy Is an Anachronism The presence of the queen as the head of state instils a sense of responsibility and ethics among the political leaders.
• Propaganda in the Democratic Society The article focuses on the effects of propaganda on the democracy. In the article, he focuses on his experiences in the media industry with respect to the past and the present news.
• Democratic Principle: The Constitution of the US The two major democratic principles are closely interrelated and the parties involved into them can actually change places from time to time: the minority has the right to become the majority, thus the latter becomes […]
• Canada as a Liberal Capitalist Democracy It includes also the re-organization of the enterprises in order to make a profit, for instance, changing management of the enterprise or adding new departments in the organization.
• The Democratic Process in Canada: The Role Played by Political Parties More specifically, the paper analyzes the political parties within the context of the Canadian form of democracy. The author is of the belief that political parties facilitate the democratic process in the country.
• American Political Culture History They made several paintings on nature and depicted the beauty of the natural features that were in the United States. The political representatives in various positions are expected to make laws and also safeguard the […]
• Socialism & Democracy: Fundamental Believes and Concepts The most distinct difference between the socialism and democracy is that in socialism we are mostly focusing our energies on the governance of the economic activities and the economic systems of a given country while […]
• Women’s Rights and the Advancement of Democracy The degree of citizen involvement in the political process, including the participation of various social groups in political parties and decision-making bodies, determines the quality of democracy in addition to the structure of current political […]
• The Internet is a Democratic Technology As opposed to what in the media channels of communication where the information let out to the public is filtered and influenced by what the government want the people to know, the Internet is free […]
• Democracy in Canada Though Canada is among the countries which are highly ranked in the realms of democracy around the world, it has a number of limitations and in-adequacies within its political system.
• Leadership Styles: Democratic and Collective The difference between Democratic and Collective Participative styles, however, lies in the role of the leader in decision-making.
• Robespierre From Democracy to Totalitarianism Consequently, as a result of the failure of the constitutional monarch and the foreign wars that threatened the French Jacobins, the Committee of Public Safety was constituted in part of the new Republic, on April […]
• Plato and Aristotle: Criticisms of Democracy To speak of it in our present time, there are only a few people who are given the power of ‘sound judgement about what is right and what is wrong’ and should have the power […]
• History of the Role of Democracy in the World One common characteristic that I have observed in the development of democracy is a trend whereby democracy first took root in the empowered ruling class, before spreading to other segments of the society.
• Democratic Deficit in the European Union In theory, the foundation of democracy is to be composed of the political equality of citizens and the control of the population in the process of making decisions.
• Organizational Theory: Democratic Leadership Taylorism is based on the theory of scientific management and the idea that output is linked to payment. Moreover, the framework implies the presence of a string hierarchy, which can be damaging to the morale […]
• Types of Democracy Known to Modern Society In conclusion, some of the types of democracy are representative, participatory, and deliberative. Deliberative is a rather intriguing form of democracy, where people are randomly chosen to express views.
• Stock Market Performance During Republican and Democratic Presidencies To compare the stock market performance during Republican and Democratic presidencies, the stock market data for the S&P 500 index over the past few decades were computed.
• Democratic Development in Colombia vs. Peru After a downturn in 2015 and a boom in 2009 due to the global financial crisis of 2008, the country’s economy is back on track as of 2016 and is riding the rising tide that […]
• Structures of Direct Democracy in California Others may argue that the proposition is a strength of direct democracy because it allows for the people’s will to be directly expressed and implemented.
• Emerging Democracy and Education in South Africa In the process of education reformation, the example of South Africa can be used to demonstrate the ability to shape the democratic mindset of the population by increasing the focus on critical thinking and civic […]
• American Democracy: Role of Anger The fact that the incident on January 6 was followed by a number of occasions where agents were seen engaged in sensitive operations makes it feasible to comprehend the explanation behind the public’s mistrust of […]
• Populism and Its Influence on Democracy Essentially, it explores the connections shared between Populism and authoritarianism and the potential democratic setbacks that might arise from the rise of authoritarian Populism.
• Women’s Rights: Democratic Perceptions Therefore, it is proper to claim that women would not be able to exercise their rights and freedoms as frequently without the efforts of Democrats.
• The Work “Republic” by Plato: Arguments for Democracy The primary argument that democracy is worse than timarchy and oligarchy derives directly from the text of Republic, where Socrates agrees that only tyranny is worse than democracy.
• Democracy: The Influence of Freedom Democracy is the basis of the political systems of the modern civilized world. Accordingly, the democracy of Athens was direct that is, without the choice of representatives, in contrast to how it is generated nowadays.
• The Article “Plato on Democracy and Expertise” by R. W. Sharples The central message permeating the writing is that the rigidity of truth on which the conceptual model of democracy is built is a problem since any system needs to acknowledge the malleability of the underlying […]
• Is a Secret Ballot a Basic Tenet of Democracy? The Supremacy Clause establishes that federal laws, constitutions, and regulations take precedence over state laws.”This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States…under the Authority of the United States, will be the supreme Law of […]
• Processes of Democratization in Spain, Portugal, and Greece Kornetis and Cavallaro claim that the processes of democratization resulted in the collapse of “the Francoist regime, the Salazar-Caetano regime of Estado Novo, and the Colonels’ military dictatorship in Greece “.
• Democracy and Its Crucial Features The equality of income and wealth remain the central issue of democracy, since, though democratic societies strive to egalitarianism, they fall short of ensuring equal income and wealth to everyone.
• Can the Democrats Win Back Rural Voters? The article used the Movement Lab approach to be able to win back the rural voters. The article relates to voting and election topic because it deals with voter turnout and strategies to be used […]
• Threat of Cyber Operations to Democracy and National Security Among its most important characteristics include the recognition of individual’s dignity, respect for equality, faith in the rule of the majority, and respect for the rights of the minority.
• Aspects of Democratic Regimes In the textbook, Dickovick and Eastwood, democratic regimes are described as ones where people individually and groups have the ability to voice and contest their ideas, as well as the opportunity to shape political life […]
• Characteristics of American Democracy Conversely, American democracy allows everyone and anybody to have the same opportunities regardless of the situation it is about, based on equal rights in the United States.
• Democrats Caught in Election-Year Gambit With Bloated Gas Prices These Midterms would be one of the most consequential in history as they will likely decide the political gridlock and demonstrate the voter confidence in the party that wins the majority.
• Abstracts for “Democracy: What’s It Good For?” and “The New Concert of Powers” The subject of the essay Democracy: What’s It Good For? is related to the issues of democracy in terms of its efficiency regarding the misinformation and irrationality of people’s choices.
• Corruption in Infrastructure of the Democratic Republic of Congo The mining companies are negatively affected by rampant corruption and a culture of everyday transactions, which has resulted in the misappropriation of public funds.
• Are Propositions, Recalls, and Referendums Democratic? According to this kind of leadership, a government is a social body retrieving its authority from the population and should always promote the will of the masses, especially the majority.
• Corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo This is a comprehensive report published by the IMF that examines in tremendous detail the corruption, policy, and frameworks of governance and corruption in the DRC.
• Struggles of Democracy: Social Insurance Programs There are always segments of people in the society who struggle more than the general population, and by taking measures, the government increases the economic growth and general well-being.
• The UK Parliament and Democratic Legislature The critical point about the UK Parliament is the importance of tradition in its structure and functioning, affecting the selection process, the arrangement of power, and the communication between the members of the Parliament.
• Jackson Democracy: Transformation of American Conservatism Andrew Jackson was the 7th president of the United States of America, his term of office lasted from 1829 to 1837.
• The Meaning of Liberal Democracy in the US The establishment of diplomatic relations with the USSR during Roosevelt’s presidency was an important event in the history of the two states and the entire history of the world.
• Democracy in Ancient Greece and Today From the lecture, I discovered that the word democracy partly originates from the word demes which means the small division of the bigger sections that Athens was divided into during the ancient time.
• The Diplock Courts and the Democratic Society The legal definition of the term is still ambiguous, but the best definition is considered to be the achievement of ideological, political, economic, or religious goals by violent means.
• “Korean Film: History, Resistance, and Democratic Imagination” by Min et al. The key message of the article in question is that Korean film culture is complex and heterogeneous, but it has yet to receive at the time of writing the attention it deserves from the progressive […]
• Jury Service as an Essential Part of the Democracy A Jury Service is an integral part of the U.S.judicial branch, due to which people can make responsible decisions and understand that their opinion is essential to the state.
• Democracy, Republicanism, and Liberalism in 19th Century Mexico and Colombia They emphasized the role of Mexico and its republican, democratic, and liberal principles in those changes. They started to imitate the political principles in Europe and the U.
• The Democratic Radicals and Conservatives Struggle of American Government The roots of the American government can be traced back to the aftermath of the American civil war and the results of the American War of Independence.
• Zinn’s and Schweikart’s Beliefs on American Democracy Namely, Zinn’s personal assumptions concerning the problem of racism and colonialism as the cornerstone of inequality in the U.S.are represented clearly in the book.
• Trust and Democracy Overview It will create a status quo where the American model of democracy that has been recognized and revered in the world is no longer a democracy but merely an illusion of one.
• Racial Democracy in Brazil Racial democracy in Brazil is a phenomenon connected to the idea that racial differences encourage individuals to look for a broad identity that would include every population presented in the country.
• Democratic Republic of Congo’s Refugee Crisis The refugee crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo is one example of how refugees suffer because of poor healthcare access and the inability to provide for themselves.
• Plato’s Views on Democracy Plato’s point of view appeared to me as a more appealing out of the two presented opinions on the best course for a political regime within a country.
• How to Make People Who Support Democrats Believe in Aliens The ones who are convinced in their existence the way they trust the course of actions proposed by Democrats help overcome the threat for the stability of the government.
• “After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy” by Coyne The reason for this is that the United States has used the excuse of protecting democracy when interfering in the internal affairs of different states.
• “Engendering Democracy in Brazil” by Sonia Alvarez In addition, the review integrates information acquired from essays by Barbara Nelson and Saint-Germain regarding gender equality and the electoral participation of women in democratic processes.
• The Democratic Political Strategy in Florida Establishing a connection to the Florida audiences can be especially advantageous for the democratic party, as it can let them know of all the recent changes and developments.
• Deliberative Democracy as an Improvement of Democratic Participation More specifically, the schools of a democratic system of most significant interest are deliberative democracy and democratic participation. At the same time, deliberative democracy realizes the political interest of every citizen in a thorough discussion.
• Democratic Politics and Australian Attitudes According to Stoker et al, the younger generations are usually blamed for the emergence of the aforementioned tendency. Overall, the primary idea behind the study consisted of disproving the presupposition, according to which young people […]
• America’s Voting Democracy: Failing After All Even though the United States did not start as a democracy and it took hundreds of years to ensure voting rights for the general populations in its entirety, these are still not the grounds to […]
• Theories of Global Politics. Democracy Effectiveness In the classical theme of ancient Athenian society, it is the representation of the ‘will of the people’ and had to include the views of all citizens in the decision making matters.
• Democratic Rule and Educated Citizenry They may think it is simply a matter of taxing big business in order to get something for the whole town, when, in reality, the higher tax will result in lower needed investment in the […]
• Russia’s Contemporary Political Regime not Democratic Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin was elected the first president of the Russian Federation on the 12th in June 1991. Some argue that the idea of politics as a mean for […]
• International Political Economy, Democratization, and Terrorism IPE describes the global power dynamics that control international trade and finance, fuel globalization, and wealth distribution across the globe. Sachs argues that globalization and the emergence of political economics have led to the increased […]
• Democracy and Black Lives Matter It then continued as a series of protests against racial prejudice and police brutality ones that the police attempted to subdue with force.
• The New State of Israel: A Block to the Development of Democracy Since the infamous Palestine conflict is rooted deeply in political, cultural, social, and religious misconceptions between the Jewish and the Muslim residents of the area, the advocacy of the current Israeli strategy concerning the emphasis […]
• Internet Function and Potential in a Democratic Society This situation is comparable to the Medieval Age before the introduction of printing in the 1440s. The church and the courts monopolized books, and the population had no chance to learn an alternative opinion on […]
• Democracy, Political Power, and Public Policy Issues 1 Now, the question of balance between democracy and political power is as relevant as it was decades ago, being the center of the debate in the United States and the rest of the world.
• Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City’ by Robert Dahl A political stratum is defined as a group of individuals who take an active position in the political life of the country.
• Democratic Presidential Nominees for 2020 American society is a complex concept with many determinants, and the election of the President in the country is one of the most significant events because it shows the achieved progress and preferred values.
• Truthful Information for Building a Democracy Democracy is defined as the rule of the people, by the people for the people. Greenberg and page argue that for a democratic government to be established, information is of the essence.
• Francis Fukuyama: Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class? Then, the author shifts to explaining the importance of the existence of a strong and abundantly represented in the society middle class layer as it is a foundation for all the democratic values in the […]
• Democracy in Asia India and the Price of Peaceful Change In his last kick, Gandhi decided to encourage the Indians to make their own salt, which was the most taxed by the British government.
• Israel as the Jewish and Democratic State: Can It Be Possible? However, the historical evaluation of the situation in Israel and the development of the Israel-Palestinian conflict that led to the Israel war of independence in 1948 and continues today shows that it is not an […]
• Ancient Democracy: Review All of the Athenians were involved in the process of selecting the candidates for the positions of the Archons the advisors to the ruler of the city.
• The Democratic Presidential Debate The part of the debate concerning the immigration policies and the candidate’s views of them is highly representative of the overall rhetorical strategies in use.
• “Inequality, Democracy, and the Environment” by Downey Liam Downey examines in his work Inequality, democracy, and the environment, the nature of these problems and tries to explain the causes of their occurrence.
• Organizational Culture: Democratic Leadership Democratic leadership would be an effective approach to leading others in the workplace because members of a group are allowed to offer their ideas that are applied to solve problems.
• Differences Between the Democrats and Republicans The activin expression in a marrow stromal cells is however regulated by the incubation with the necrosis factor of the tumor and the interleukin 1 alpha.
• Democracy Emergence in Ancient Greece and Why Plato Was Opposed to It The result of this war was the defeat of Athens by Sparta at the end of the fifth century which led to the overthrow of many democratic regimes.
• Democracy: Forms, Requirements and Homosexuality Democracy exists in two major forms there is the liberal democracy which is a very capitalistic economic approach in nature while the other form is a socialist democracy that embraces economic aspects like subsidies and […]
• Democratic Governance and Policy Networks The contribution of each of these actors was valuable for improving the quality of legislation which became the result of the collaborative work of the interested parties.
• Rape as a Weapon of War: Democratic Republic of Congo While some researchers argue that the occurrence of wartime rape, with its frequency, savagery and systematic organization during these times, is inherently entwined with the nature of the conflicts, most of them emphasize that the […]
• A Government and Basic Democratic Requirements to It In pluralism, the people who make policies are the top government officials and they do not involve the public. The relevance of involvement in the implementation of government policies is not clear to the citizens.
• “Jihad Versus Mcworld” by Benjamen Barber: Tribalism and Globalism Threat to Democracy The forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld are fighting for sovereignty and neither supports democracy. It is the decentralization of confederations that may save democracy, according to Barber.
• Parliamentary Democracy: Will of the People Representation The party with the majority votes is sought to be representing the will of the people. In The will of the people: Notes towards a dialectical voluntarism, Peter Hallward states that the will of the […]
• Terrorism and Liberal Democracy: What We Should Know When confronted with external coercion like global terrorism, democracies react like a pendulum by first of all providing security and then vacillating back in the direction of moderation, the quest of lenience, and the encouragement […]
• Greek and Hellenistic World and Democracy In addition to the above, the model of democracy in Greece was composed of the Assembly, the Council and the courts that were collectively referred to as the governing bodies.
• Is the Constitution Supportive of Today’s Democracy? Additionally, one of the dominant elements in most constitutions is the principle of democracy which refers to the government by the people for the people themselves.
• Jihad vs. Mcworld Article: How Globalization Hinders Democracy In the recent past, most economies in the world have been adopting strategies aimed at increasing democracy in all areas of the economy i.e.political, economic, social, etc.globalization is one of the factors that influence the […]
• Supreme Court’s Interpretation of Democracy This was seen in the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment in a case involving Sherbert and Verner. The court mentioned the importance of a compelling interest from the state in regard to employment […]
• Benjamin’s Concept of Democracy Against Bennett’s Propositions on News and Democracy However, what seems good to many seems to work better and much more acceptable, from this point of view it is fair to reiterate Churchill’s pronouncement that, the present democracy is the best of all […]
• Origin and History of the Democratic Party and the Federal Constitution The acknowledgement of the USA independence by the Great Britain and the ratification of the treaty of peace of the 1783 at once led to the formation of schemes and the organization of factions, having […]
• Asian Experience in Democratization As long as the authorities in some of the Asian countries are elected, democracies in these countries still lack the characteristics which can be associated with democracy in other parts of the world.”In other words, […]
• Democratic Transition in Asian Communities As long as the authorities in some Asian countries are elected, democracies in these countries still lack the characteristics which can be associated with democracy in other parts of the world.”In other words, if a […]
• The Latin American Democracy: The Creation of Policy Policy, it is no surprise, is created in Latin American countries in manners that directly correlate with each system’s structure of accountability for their representatives, as is the case in every democracy.
• The Crises of Democracy, Society, and Environment The severity of the situation arises due to the homogeneity of American intelligentsia on the idea of democracy and the reported submissiveness towards all actions taken by the Government and capitalists to be right.
• A Dream Deferred and Democracy by Langston Hughes But if they over dry, they will become hard to chew and lose all the nutrition, This warns us of the consequences that may befall us if we sit there and wait for conditions to […]
• The Sources of Leadership and Democracy in Britain Also, the powers of the British Government are derived from the appeal or iron authority of the British rulers to the party blocs rather than from the power of the influence of the leaders to […]
• Democratization Theories at the Present Political Map The world history witnessed a great number of changes in the political state of countries, in the form of ruling and the change as well as the form of power in every state existing nowadays.
• Human Rights and Global Democracy by Michael Goodhart Considering that the current human rights bodies focus mostly on rights of individuals, there is needs for translating the rights in a global context.
• Democracy Is the Best Form of Government for All the World’s Inhabitants The challenge to the leaders, therefore, is to provide good leadership and governance to reciprocate the good work of the voters.
• Democratic Empowerment via Village Elections During Imperial China The villager assembly oversees the progress of the VCs and ensures that the decisions they make are for the common good of the rest of the villagers.
• Anti-Democratic Movement and Path of Democratization According to Lijphart, the Westminster model of democracy provides a throughout insight into the essence of democracy not only in the United Kingdom but in the rest of the world as well.
• Deliberative Democracy Case Studies When the government fails to give the reasons for engaging in war, citizens have the right to question justification of the government for the war and the respect it gives the citizens.
• Democrats vs. Republicans: Who Is Superior? The differences between the democratic regimes and the republicans have been described using all sorts of criteria. Under democrats, the lower 20% of the population tends to match the income growth of the top 5%.
• Torture and Democratic Society 1948, United Nations General Assembly, after the second world war adopted the Universal declaration on human rights, which prohibits the use of torture or any other form of inhuman or demeaning treatment or punishment In […]
• The State, Democracy and Globalization In order for people to understand the government there should be a system of communicating the state policies to the local individuals.
• Ideology of Race and the New Democratic Nation His main argument in this matter is that whilst racism did not at first lead the colonists in enslaving the blacks, the concept of the native hereditary inferiority on the component of Africans and African […]
• Roadblocks to Democracy in Iraq A huge part of Iraq has remained isolated from government control for the larger part of their history as a result of the harsh terrain and topography alongside lack of building material to construct roads.
• Revolutionary Vision: Popular Democracy or Elite Plutocracy? For instance, there are not many people who know how exactly the Constitution of the USA was created and adopted: “When the Constitution was completed, “the majority of the people were completely against it”.
• Ideology of the Democratic Party The Democratic Party of USA is the oldest political party in the world. Dilemma and destiny: the Democratic Party in America.
• Slavery and Democracy in 19th Century America In the 19th century when white folks are busy building a nation and taking part in the more significant aspects of creating a new future for their children, Negro slaves were still doing a backbreaking […]
• Comparing Democracy Effort Between Mali and the USA Abraham Lincoln defined it as a government of the people, for the people and by the people. The main function of the judiciary in Mali is the protection and guard of human rights and freedoms.
• Venezuela: A Democracy Under Siege This essay will critically evaluate Venezuela in different aspects in the following order : democratic principles and the constitution, political systems, economic policies and institutions, the media, and civil societies to show how Chavez is […]
• A Critique on Deliberative Democracy The belief that the United States of America is a democratic country automatically create the assumption that it is a government by the people, for the people, and of the people as laid down by […]
• Will China Become Democratic in Near Future? China, being one of the countries yet truly to begin the process of democratization, stands on a point that future progress will be important not only for the people in China but also for the […]
• Relationship Between Democracy and Violence in Colombia The escalating violence in the 1980s has in fact, watered-down Colombia’s democratic governance mainly because of the country’s incapacity to tame the violence.
• The Role of Media in the Democratization of Lebanon Even today, the country is considered to be one of the banking hubs of the Western Asia region and this can be evidenced by the fact that during the periods before the civil war in […]
• Relationship Between Democracy and the State If leaders are not visionary and their ideas are not cohesive, the situation leads to the formation of splinter groups within the state, a condition that is unbefitting for the health of a democracy.
• Kwangju Democratization Movement The Chun Doo-Hwan government was not justified in the use of force during the Kwangju democratization movements and failed in the restoration of democracy in the country.
• Democracy in the Educational Process He gives us the understanding of the changing attitude to the democracy in the society. The public education was organized by the idea of “democratic community and equality”.
• American Culture of Liberty and Democracy Undoubtedly democracy is the government of the people, for the people, by the people.’ But it is also true that it is only a part of the people of which the government is, has raised, […]
• The Role of Education in Democracy Propaganda is in itself an aspect of education where the Public Information Committee provided some knowledge on the certain issues surrounding the war in order to win public support.
• Descriptive Meaning of Democracy This term is however modified in meaning nowadays and it can be used in various applications; that is, it is used in a variety of ways depending on the time of use, the place where […]
• Democracy Threats in Australia Governance as the rule of the people by the people has been more subjected to the teachings of democracy that have been adopted as a form of governance.
• Modern China – Is True Democracy Still a Dream? There is a dormant-volcano kind of “sub-terranean tensions” that seem to herald the beginning of the end for communism in China.
• The Battle Over Democracy Within Burma However, the military government in Burma remained controlling the political affairs and economy of the country which made the condition of the people to get worse.
• Utopian Society: National Socialism and Libertarian Democracy
• The Synergy Between Capitalism and Democracy
• The Nature of Democracy in the Period 1871-1914
• Elitism and Democracy Relations
• Democratization of China: History
• American Imperialism and Democracy
• Democrats and Rebuplicans Political Campaigns
• Democracy: The Greatest Gift Enlighten-Ica Can Give
• Weimar Democracy History Analysis: Why the Organization Failed
• Classical Political Thought. Democracy in Plato’s Republic
• Elements of Democracy and Constitutionalism
• Democracy: Under the Influence
• Aspect of Democracy in Seattle
• Democracy and Dictatorship in Ancient Greece and Today
• Haiti and Cape Verde Democracy: History and Philosophy
• Habermas’s Theory of Democracy
• Relevance of Building Democratic Institutions in Russia
• Germany and Poland Passages to Democracy Comparison
• Southeast Asian Changing Experience of Democracy
• The Level of Democracy in Singapore and Thailand
• Democratic Breakdown in Latin America
• Democracy Within the Realm of a Republic
• Urban Democracy and Capitalism
• Democratic Party in the US: History and Analysis
• Democratic Consolidation in Africa
• Public Opinion: The Image of Democracy by Lippmann
• Democracy and Freedom in Pakistan
• Public Opinion and Democracy: Under the Influence?
• Direct Democracy in Switzerland and Slovak Republic
• Citizenship Education and Democracy
• Failed Democracy in Pakistan and Nigeria
• Success of Democracy in US: Comparative Approach for Explaining
• Donald Trump and American Democracy
• Enemies of American Democracy
• Underdevelopment, Economic Inequality and Democratization
• Democracy Development in the World up to 1500 CE
• Greek Legacy in a Contemporary Democratic State
• Republican Versus Democrat Political Beliefs
• Strangers in the US Democracy
• Is Democratization Leading to a More Secure World?
• American Democratic Political Model as an Innovation
• Federalists and Democrats in the 19th Century
• Athenian Democracy: Pay for Public Service
• “Terror and Democracy at the Age of Stalin” by Goldman
• Globalization and Democratization Effects on Libya
• Western Liberal and Democratic Values
• UNDP and USAID: Source Evaluation
• “Democracy and International Relations in Asia” by Acharya
• Democratic Society: Basic Values and Priorities
• Democratic Globalization and Its Benefits
• ‘Democrats, Republicans Agree on a Budget Deal’ by Silverleib and Cohen
• Comparative Democratization and Dictatorships
• American Democratic and Republican Parties
• Democracy in the Arab World
• Technology and Democratic Education
• Democracy Promotion and Humanitarian Intervention
• Media and Democracy: Free Press and Fake News
• Empire and Democracy Conflict by Thucydides
• Democracy: Perception and Application
• Democracy and Oligarchy: the Meaning of Equality
• Democracy in Sudan: Key Factors
• Earth Democracy: Beyond Dead Democracy and Killing Economies
• Democracy in Egypt: Key Factors
• Politics of the Democratic Republic of Congo
• Globalization Impact on Africa’s Democratization Process
• Community Engagement in Democracy Building
• Democracy Concerns and Exaggerated Challenges
• Kenya in Pre- and Post-Democracy Periods
• Constitutional Amendments to Expand Democracy
• 2012 Presidential Elections: Republicans vs. Democrats
• The Democratization of Japan
• Struggle for Democracy: President Interview
• The United States of America and Its Democracy
• Special Interest Groups Enhancing Democracy
• Okuma Shigenobu and Modern Democracy in Japan
• Federalists vs. Democratic-Republicans in the US
• Ruling America: Wealth and Power in a Democracy
• The Taisho Democracy Period in Japanese History
• The United States Promoting Democracy in Africa
• Libya: Challenges of Transitioning to Democracy
• Democratic Leadership, Value System, Followership
• “American Democracy is Doomed” by Matthew Yglesias
• Tunisian Transition to Democracy and Its Specificities
• Kuwait’s Democratization and Its Challenges
• Democratic Consolidation in Asia
• Leader Selection in Liberal Democratic Minimalism
• To What Extent Is Burma Democracy?
• American Democracy’ History: Turner’s Thesis
• Teaching Standards, Democracy and World Learning
• Religious Fundamentalism’ and Democracy’ Comparison
• American Democracy and Equality Criticism
• Democracy in Chile: Evidence and Effects
• Egyptian Democracy and Citizens’ Readiness for It
• Why Japan Was Able to Build a Successful Democracy?
• Democracy and Religion: Modern Theories
• Democratic Transitions: Weaknesses and Challenges
• Liberal Democracy: Marxist and Conservatism’ Approaches
• The Rise of American Democracy: Influences of the Constitution
• Democracy and Peaceful International Relations
• Democracy: Features and Impact on Peace
• American Democracy: Federal Government vs. States’ Rights
• The Taliban Insurgency: Democracy in Dangerous Places
• Human Development: Democratization and Economy’ Relations
• Democracy Promotion: Unilateralism vs. Multilateralism
• US Promotion of Democracy: Tools and Approaches
• Political Corruption as a Trigger of Democracy
• Democracy in the United States System
• Political Culture: Democracy and Civil Societies
• Democracy in Cambodia: Strategy and Recommendations
• Can Democracy Be Successfully Exported by Force?
• Youth Participation in Democracy: China
• Chinese Democratic Dictatorship Essence
• Sustainable Democracy in Developing Countries
• Democracy Versus Other Forms of Government
• The US’s Democracy Features
• Egypt Democratization Process
• Chinese Democracy in the Documentary “Please Vote for Mes”
• Democracy and Wealthy Americans Policy
• The History of Democracy in Libya
• The Development of America’s Democracy
• American Democracy and Society
• Democrats and Republicans Comparative Analysis
• Democracy and Religion in Turkey Government
• The Centripetal Theory of Democratic Governance
• Can Judicial Review Be Reconciled With Democracy?
• Canadian Social Democracy Historical Evolution
• America’s Democracy History: Constitutional Perspectives
• China’s Democracy Movement
• Machiavelli’s Views on Democratization and Their Relation to Modern Politics
• Peace and Democracy: US Impact in the Middle East
• Outbreak Democratic Institutions
• Major Shifts in the Politics of Republican and Democratic Parties
• The National Curriculum for England and Wales From an Ideal Democratic Learning Society Perspective
• The Foundation of Democracy: Waiting for the King to Come
• Economic and Political Liberalism and Democracy
• Possibility of Attaining a Democracy in the Middle East
• Conflicts in Syria Present No Opportunity for Future Democratization
• Democracy and Global Peace
• Principles of Democratic Structuring
• Form of Political Ideology: Social Democracy
• Is Sectarianism an Obstacle to the Democratization of Iraq?
• Islam and Democracy in Egypt
• Copyright and Democratic Governance
• How Chinese Cultural Revolution Influenced Modern Democracy in China
• Should Democracy Be Adopted by All Nations?
• “The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy” by Rodrik, D
• Liberal Democracy, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust
• Partial Democracy and Governance Assessment in Egypt
• Rohr and Rosenbloom on Democracy
• How Does Turkey’s Greater Democratization Influence the Handling of the Cyprus Dispute?
• Is Majority Rule Democratic?
• Danish Aid to Africa: Implication for Civil Society & Democracy
• What Is Democratic Consolidation?
• Democracy and Economic Growth: Asia-Pacific Region Experiences
• FDR’s New Deal: Democratic Platform
• Capitalism, Democracy and the Treaty of Waitangi are Three Ways Through Which We in Aotearoa ‘Organise’ Ourselves
• Democratic Space Is Relevant in Early Childhood Education
• Taxes, Capitalism, and Democracy: Karl Marx vs. Plato
• Amu Chua: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
• Democracy Measures in United Kingdom, France, Japan and China
• Democracy and Power in Online World
• Brazil: Embracing Structural Changes to Consolidate Democracy
• Democracy Strategy for the Middle East Countries
• Three Important Features of our Democracy
• Democratic Racism in Canada
• The Liberal Position of Democrats and Republicans
• Social Construction of “Race” and “Racism” and Its Relationship to Democratic Racism in Canada
• Views of American Muslims on Democracy
• The Probability for Libya to Become a Democracy
• Ancient Greek Democracy That Still Makes People Strive for Perfection
• The Concept of Democracy by Force
• Democracy and Reform’s Trilemma
• Unitary Versus Adversary Democracy
• Rapid Growth as a Destabilizing Force to Effective Democracy
• Can Democracy Be Spread by Force?
• Democratization Process in Argentina
• Democratic Governments Role in the Global Economy
• The Main Impacts of the Civil War in the Democratic Republic of Congo
• What Is ‘Liberal Representative Democracy’ and Does the Model Provide an Appropriate Combination of Freedom and Equality?
• Policy Mechanisms for Trade Reform in a Democracy
• Transition to Democracy in Latin America
• Understanding Greek Culture’s Influence on Democratic Ideas
• How Development Leads to Democracy
• The Relationship Between Democracy and Islam in Indonesia
• Democracy System of Government
• Democratic Influence on Public Policies
• Democratization and the Indigenous Languages of Mexico and Venezuela
• The Required Freedom and Democracy in Afghanistan
• The Need for Ethical Leadership and Governance in Democracy
• China’s Democracy Perspective and Practice
• Democracy in the Policy of United States of America
• Democracy’s Problems and Principles
• How Does Revolutionary Communism Compare With Democratic Socialism?
• Was Kant Wrong to Argue that Democracy Brings Peace Between States?
• In What Ways Did American Culture Become More Democratic in the Early 19th Century
• Is America a True Democracy?
• Islam, Democracy and the West Summary
• Inequality and American Democracy
• Democracy in America: Critical Summary
• Government and Democracy
• What Makes Democracy Succeed or Fail?
• Democracy Movement in the Middle East
• Euro Zone Crisis: Does It Contribute to Democratic Deficit?
• Influence of the American Media in Promotion of Democratic Values in the United States of America
• Was Saddam Hussein’s Execution an Essential Point in Establishing Democracy in Iraq?
• The Democracy Promotion in the Middle East by US
• Democracy in the Aristophane’s Work “The Acharnians”
• Social Capital Contribution to Democratic Renewal
• Becoming a Citizen in a Democratic Society
• The Main Threat to the Modern Democracy
• New “Act on Democracy and Human Rights in Belarus” Passed by the US Congress
• Africa Regional Conference: Should Democracy Be Promoted in Africa?
• Fake Democracy and Patriotism: “Give Me Liberty” by Naomi Wolf
• The Spread of Democracy
• Democracy Concepts and Principles
• Does Political Participation Challenge Democracy or Enhance It?
• Modern American History: In Pursuit of Democracy
• Democracy in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam
• Internet and Democracy in US
• The Rise of Democracy
• Democracy in the Middle East
• The Democratic Party vs. the Republican Party as Organizing Political Structures
• Modernization and Democracy
• Modernization and Its Correlation With Democracy
• America and Democracy, at Home and Abroad, During and Just After the First World War
• An Analysis of Kirkpatrick Jennet’s Uncivil Disobedience: Studies in Violence and Democratic Politics
• The Possibility of Democracy and Development Within the African State
• Democrat or Republican: Political Party Preferences
• Democracy: Definition, Types, Systems and Benefits
• Democracy and Its Types
• What True Majority Democracy Is About?
• American Government, Balancing Democracy and Rights
• Modernization and Democratization
• What Are the Differences Between Democracy and Dictatorship?
• Why Is the Oldest Democracy in Asia Doomed to Failure?
• What Can Valid Criticisms Be Made of Liberal Democracy?
• Why Isn’t Democracy Slowing Down the Rise in Inequality?
• What Effect Does Facebook Have on Democracy?
• Why Does Unregulated Capitalism Undermine the Legitimacy of Liberal Democracy?
• Why Does the Kuwaiti Parliament Misunderstanding the Idea of Democracy for Women?
• What Is the Relationship Between Political Democracy and Economic Growth?
• What Factors Affect the Survival of a Liberal Democracy?
• Why Can Burma not Have a Democracy?
• What Is the Connection Between Economic Inequality and Democracy?
• What Is True Majority Democracy Is About?
• How Has the Magna Carta Affected American Democracy?
• What Are the Pros and Cons of Pressure Groups on Democracy in the United Kingdom?
• How Does the Population of the United States Fight for Democracy?
• What Challenges Are Posed by International Terrorism to Democracy?
• What Hope Can Democracy Bring to S&T Policy Making in Latin America?
• What Is the Relationship Between Democracy and Religion?
• Why Japan Was Able To Build a Successful Democracy?
• What Is the Role of Political Parties in Democracy?
• Why Does Democracy Facilitate Development?
• What Are the Defining Elements of Democracy Politics?
• Why Does the American Democracy Not Work?
• Why Did Democracy Develop in Britain After 1850?
• What Characteristics Are Vital for a Democracy To Succeed?
• What Are the Unique Traits of Athenian Democracy?
• Where Is Indian Democracy Heading Today?
• What Is the Role of Cultural Factors in Moving a Country Towards Liberal Democracy?
• What Was Wrong With the Ancient Athenian Democracy?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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ROAD TO DEMOCRACY ESSAY GRADE 12

ROAD TO DEMOCRACY ESSAY SAMPLE (TALKS/NEGOTIATIONS) NOTE:your introduction and conclusionis highlighted with green colour.Your lines of arguments are highlighted withred colour.

One would totally agree with the statement that it was leadership,negotiations and compromises among various leaders that ensured that South Africa become a democratic state.For example,Nelson Mandela and De Klerk worked together including ot her organisations to bring democratic South Africa on 1994. (Make sure your introduction is not longer than 5 pages) In1981,FW De Klerk replaced PW Botha as a state president of South Africa and immediately made drastic changes by unbanning political parties and release political prisoners.De Klerk made an announcement for the release of Nelson Mandela on 11 February 1990.This was a huge step taken by De Klerk and it gave people hope that the apartheid was coming to a nend. (Make sure your back ground is not more than 5 lines).

The National Party(NP) and African National Congress(ANC) delegation met at two locations to discuss the way on how they will work together towards the democratic South Africa.The first meeting was held in 2 May1990 at the official resident house of Groote Schuur and it was called the Groot Schuur Meeting.In this meeting both ANC and NP agreed on ending violence which were occurring in the country and to work together towards the process of negotiations or talks to bring a democratic South Africa.The second meeting were held at Pretoria on 6 August 1990 which led to an agreement called the Pretoria Minutes.Here the ANC government agreed that they will suspend the armed struggle and the NP government agreed to end the state of emergency.Other major law were removed.The Group Areas Act and Registration Population were also removed.This convinced countries that imposed sanctions to S.A and boycotts to stop them.Thus,the leadership and negotiations and compromises among various leaders ensured that South Africa become a democratic country in1994.

Although,the violence did not stop in the country between Inkandla Freedom Party(IFP)and ANC.The IFP supporters attacked ANC on commuter trains and led into almost 573 deaths. It was emerged that the NP government handed weapon to IFP supporters to eliminate ANC supporters.This created a huge distrust between ANC and IFP including NP.Another violence occurred in Sebokeng in hostels when the IFP attacked ANC strong hold and almost 30 people died.Moreover,another violence occurred in ZonkizizweTownship in Germistonin Gauteng between supporters of the IFP and the ANC.The ongoing violence between the ANC and IFP members led into a Seven Day Warat Pietermarisburg (PMB).Therefore,the violence and uncertainly that confronted South Africa in the early1980s almost delayed the process of negotiations.

Moreover,the formal negotiations occurred on 20December 1990 at Convention for Democratic South Africa(CODESA1)at Trade Work Centreat Kempton Park.Nineteen political organisations including UNO and common wealth.Even though talks sometimes broke down but the Declaration of Intent was signed.It was agreed that South Africa should be an undivided country.Free from apartheid, discrimination and all other forms of prejudices.This also led into accountability of a meeting by four groups that were preparing for the future meeting which was CODESA2 which were to be held in May2.The PAC and PC boycotted against the CODESA.The IFP and the Independent Bophuthatshwana did not sign it because the irrequest for an extra delegation for the Zulu King was refused.Therefore, compromises among various leaders ensured that South Africa become a democratic state in1994.

Furthermore,DeKlerk called for a white only referendum on1991. Here DeKlerk wanted to see if the white people were still with him from the negotiations he had started making from 1990 to change South Africa.The majority voted positive and it was clear that he should continue.This gave people hope that apartheid was coming to an end.Thus,the compromises also ensured that South Africa become a democratic country in1994.

CODESA2 occurred on May1991.It was agreed that the SABC should presents the neutral view of the negotiations on televisions.The NP and ANC did not agreed on major power sharing like power sharing,majority rule and regional powers.The NP still wanted a major place from the government and the ANC did not admit on that.The ANC and NP did not come into consensus solution on how they will end the violence in South Africa. As a results,ANC and COSATU walked out of the negotiations and called for a mass rally to force government to compromise.Therefore,it was leadership,negotiations and compromises among various leaders that ensured that South Africa become a democratic state.

Even though the official negotiations had ended but the unofficial negotiations continue between Cyril Ramaphosa and Roef Meyer. The Record of Understanding was signed between Cyril Ramaphosa of ANC and Roef Meyer of the NP.This committed and encouraged South Africa to work together again towards the negotiations.Moreover,Joe Slovo came up with Sunset Clause on April 1993.The Sunset Clause allowed the National Party government until 2000.It also protected the security jobs for whites people for more than 10years.Therefore, the commitment and compromises among various leaders ensured that South Africa become a democratic country in 1994.

Moreover, the violence did not end between IFP and ANC.The ANC attacked the squatter camps of the ANC near the township of Boipatong in the Gauteng and almost 49people died.It was said that a white man was the one who handed over the Force Defence Agency to cause violence and chaos.The ANC called for a march to the Cickel to protests against homeland leaders.Here almost 79 people died and 200 people got injured when they were trying to break through the police barriers.The assassination of Chris Hani almost stopped the negotiations process of the elections.Chris Hani was a General Secretary of the Communist Party(CP) and he was assassinated on1993 by members of the Military Wink.There was a violence and chaos in a country after his assassination. DeKlerk realised he could not deal with this anymore and called for Nelson Mandela to address the issue. Mandela addressed that on national television that there must calm down and stop fighting each other.Thus,thev iolence and uncertainty that confronted South Africa in the early 1980s almost delayed the process of negotiations.

Moreover, the Multi talks began on 1993April1. It was said that the date of the election was going to be 27thApril1994 on this meeting which was held at World Trade Centre. Furthermore, the AWB and Volk front stormed the World Trade Centre attempt to disturb the negotiations.They vandalised the entrance and threatened delegation.The AWB was killed by the South African Defence Force.The APPLA opened on fire on St James Church and killed 11 people.The IFP marched to Shell House and was killed by ANC security.This led to a Shell House Massacre.Then DeKlerk, Mandela and Buthelezihada meeting led to IFP joining the negotiations.Then finally the election held free and fairly. ANC won the elections and Nelson Mandela became the first president of South African Democratic Country.The election were held on 27 April 1994. DeKlerk and Thabo Mbheki became deputy president. Therefore, the compromises, negotiations and leadership ensured that South Africa become a democratic country in 1994.

To conclude, it was leadership,negotiations and compromises among various leaders that ensured that South Africa become a democratic state in 1994. For example Nelson Mandela and De Klerk compromised so much working with other organisations to bring democracy in South Africa. (Your conclusion must be less than5lines).

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Essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy

Students are often asked to write an essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy

The essence of democracy.

Voting is the cornerstone of a democracy. It’s the tool that allows citizens to choose their leaders and voice their opinions on important issues.

Why Voting Matters

By voting, you get to influence the society you live in. It’s a way to ensure that your interests are represented in government.

The Power of Each Vote

Every vote counts. In many cases, elections have been decided by just a few votes. Therefore, your vote can make a real difference.

In summary, voting is a crucial component of democracy. So, always exercise your right to vote!

250 Words Essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy

Democracy is often defined as ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people.’ It is a system that bestows power in the hands of the citizens to choose their representatives. The cornerstone of this power lies in the act of voting.

The Role of Voting

Voting is not just a right, but a duty and a moral responsibility. It is the most direct and effective way of participating in the democratic process. The vote of every citizen contributes to the formation of a government and the trajectory of the nation.

Empowering the Masses

Voting gives citizens the power to express their opinion and choose leaders who align with their views. It is a tool to effect change and ensure the government reflects the will of the people. Voting also empowers marginalized groups, providing an equal platform for their voices to be heard.

Accountability and Transparency

Voting ensures accountability and transparency in the democratic system. It acts as a check on the government, reminding them of their responsibility towards the electorate. If the government fails to deliver, voters have the power to change the administration in the next election.

The importance of voting in democracy cannot be overstated. It is the fundamental right and duty of every citizen to participate in this process. It is through voting that we shape our society, influence policies, and ensure the government serves the common good. By voting, we uphold the democratic values of freedom, equality, and justice.

500 Words Essay on Importance of Voting in Democracy

Introduction.

Democracy is a system of governance where citizens participate directly or indirectly in the decision-making process. At the heart of this system lies the act of voting, an essential tool through which citizens express their will, choose their leaders, and influence public policy. The importance of voting in a democratic society cannot be overstated as it forms the basis for the exercise of political and civil rights.

The Pillar of Democratic Governance

Voting is a fundamental pillar of democratic governance. It is the mechanism through which citizens exercise their sovereignty and control over the government. By voting, citizens choose their representatives who will make laws, shape public policy, and steer the direction of the nation. This process ensures that the government is accountable to the people, and not the other way round. The act of voting is, therefore, a powerful expression of political freedom and self-determination.

Instrument for Social Change

Voting is not only a political act but also a tool for social change. It gives citizens the power to influence public policy and the direction of societal evolution. Through the ballot box, citizens can express their views on critical issues such as education, health, economy, and social justice. Voting, therefore, serves as a peaceful means of effecting change and shaping the society we want to live in.

Equality and Inclusivity

In a democracy, voting underscores the principle of equality. Regardless of social, economic, or cultural backgrounds, every citizen has an equal vote. This inclusivity strengthens social cohesion and fosters a sense of belonging among citizens. Moreover, it ensures that marginalized and underrepresented groups have a voice in the political process, thereby promoting social equity.

Responsibility of Citizenship

Voting is not just a right; it is a responsibility. By participating in elections, citizens contribute to the democratic process and the overall health of the political system. Abstaining from voting leads to a skewed representation, which may not reflect the true will of the people. Therefore, every vote counts, and each citizen ought to take this responsibility seriously.

In conclusion, the act of voting is a cornerstone of democracy, serving as a tool for change, a symbol of equality, and a responsibility of citizenship. It gives power to the people, ensuring that the government remains accountable and responsive to their needs. Hence, for a democracy to be truly representative and effective, it is essential that citizens understand the importance of voting and actively participate in the electoral process. The future of our democratic society depends on the collective action of informed and engaged citizens.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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• Essay on Electoral Literacy for Stronger Democracy
• Essay on Democracy in Sri Lanka
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Democracy Essay

Democracy is derived from the Greek word demos or people. It is defined as a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people. Democracy is exercised directly by the people; in large societies, it is by the people through their elected agents. In the phrase of President Abraham Lincoln, democracy is the “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” There are various democratic countries, but India has the largest democracy in the world. This Democracy Essay will help you know all about India’s democracy. Students can also get a list of CBSE Essays on different topics to boost their essay-writing skills.

500+ Words Democracy Essay

India is a very large country full of diversities – linguistically, culturally and religiously. At the time of independence, it was economically underdeveloped. There were enormous regional disparities, widespread poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and a shortage of almost all public welfare means. Since independence, India has been functioning as a responsible democracy. The same has been appreciated by the international community. It has successfully adapted to challenging situations. There have been free and fair periodic elections for all political offices, from the panchayats to the President. There has been a smooth transfer of political power from one political party or set of political parties to others, both at national and state levels, on many occasions.

India: A Democratic Country

Democracy is of two, i.e. direct and representative. In a direct democracy, all citizens, without the intermediary of elected or appointed officials, can participate in making public decisions. Such a system is only practical with relatively small numbers of people in a community organisation or tribal council. Whereas in representative democracy, every citizen has the right to vote for their representative. People elect their representatives to all levels, from Panchayats, Municipal Boards, State Assemblies and Parliament. In India, we have a representative democracy.

Democracy is a form of government in which rulers elected by the people take all the major decisions. Elections offer a choice and fair opportunity to the people to change the current rulers. This choice and opportunity are available to all people on an equal basis. The exercise of this choice leads to a government limited by basic rules of the constitution and citizens’ rights.

Democracy is the Best Form of Government

A democratic government is a better government because it is a more accountable form of government. Democracy provides a method to deal with differences and conflicts. Thus, democracy improves the quality of decision-making. The advantage of a democracy is that mistakes cannot be hidden for long. There is a space for public discussion, and there is room for correction. Either the rulers have to change their decisions, or the rulers can be changed. Democracy offers better chances of a good decision. It respects people’s own wishes and allows different kinds of people to live together. Even when it fails to do some of these things, it allows a way of correcting its mistakes and offers more dignity to all citizens. That is why democracy is considered the best form of government.

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Essay on Democracy in India for Students and Children

500+ words essay on democracy in india.

Essay on Democracy in India – First of all, democracy refers to a system of government where the citizens exercise power by voting. Democracy holds a special place in India. Furthermore, India without a doubt is the biggest democracy in the world. Also, the democracy of India is derived from the constitution of India. After suffering at the hands of British colonial rule, India finally became a democratic nation in 1947 . Most noteworthy, Indian democracy since independence is infused with the spirit of justice, liberty, and equality.

Features of Indian Democracy

Sovereignty is a vital feature of Indian democracy. Sovereignty refers to the full power of a governing body over itself without outside interference. Moreover, people can exercise power in Indian democracy . Most noteworthy, people of India elect their representatives. Moreover, these representatives remain responsible for common people.

The democracy in India works on the principle of political equality. Furthermore, it essentially means all citizens are equal before the law. Most noteworthy, there is no discrimination on the basis of religion , caste, creed, race, sect, etc. Hence, every Indian citizen enjoys equal political rights.

Rule of the majority is an essential feature of Indian democracy. Moreover, the party which wins the most seats forms and runs the government. Most noteworthy, no-one can object to support of the majority.

Another feature of Indian democracy is federal. Most noteworthy, India is a union of states. Furthermore, the states are somewhat autonomous. Moreover, the states enjoy freedom in certain matters.

Collective responsibility is a notable feature of Indian democracy. The council of Ministers in India is collectively responsible to their respective legislatures. Therefore, no minister alone is responsible for any act of their government.

Indian democracy works on the principle of formation of opinion. Furthermore, the government and its institutions must work on the basis of public opinion. Most noteworthy, public opinion must be formed on various matters in India. Moreover, the Legislature of India provides an appropriate platform to express public opinion.

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Ways to Strengthen Democracy in India

First of all, people must stop having a blind belief in the media. Many times the news reported by media is out of context and exaggerated. Most noteworthy, some media outlets may propagate the propaganda of a particular political party. Therefore, people must be careful and cautious when accepting media news.

Another important way to strengthen the Indian democracy is to reject the consumer mentality in elections. Several Indians view national elections like consumers buying a product. Most noteworthy, elections should make Indians feel like participants rather than separatists.

People in India should make their voices heard. Furthermore, people must try to communicate with their elected official all year-round instead of just during elections. Therefore, citizens must write, call, email, or attend community forums to communicate with their elected official. This would surely strengthen Indian democracy.

Huge voter turnouts is really an efficient way to strengthen democracy in India. People must avoid hesitation and come out to vote. Most noteworthy, large voter turnout would signify a substantial involvement of the common people in Indian politics.

In conclusion, the democracy in India is something very precious. Furthermore, it is a gift of the patriotic national leaders to the citizens of India. Most noteworthy, the citizens of this country must realize and appreciate the great value of democracy. The democracy in India is certainly unique in the world.

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Sample Essay On Democracy, with Outline

Published by gudwriter on June 9, 2018 June 9, 2018

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Democracy Essay Sample Outline

Introduction.

Thesis: Democracy is a system of government where the will of the people is the ultimate power. Though it has a decisive influence in most countries where it is practiced, several drawbacks amount from the practice.

Paragraph 1:

Democracy is, ‘the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’

• Free and fair elections characterize it.
• A country that thrives in a democracy should prioritize the protection of human freedoms and rights.

Paragraph 2:

Democracy discards privileges of a class or group of men.

• Ordinary people have the right to choose their leaders.
• All voters are eligible for leadership positions.

Paragraph 3:

Democracy ensures that all people are treated as equals before the law.

• Citizens make laws in a democratic country through their representatives.
• All people regardless of their influence in the society are treated equally under the law.

Paragraph 4:

Democracy instills a sense of responsibility in all citizens within a country.

• People take part in governing their country.
• People rise against oppression and air their views on governance.

Paragraph 5: 

Democracy greatly reduces the likelihood of political dissent.

• A democratically elected government receives its mandate from a majority of the citizenry.
• A majority should be content with it.

Paragraph 6:

Democracy operates by an exceptional majority.

• Illiterate persons and the ignorant, who make up the majority are given the power to choose leaders instead of the elites.
• Leadership positions are given to irresponsible people.

Paragraph 7:

Democracy proliferates inefficiency in governance.

• Most leaders in democratic countries focus more on creating political alliances rather than on development and administration. Administration in many democratic countries is run by bureaucrats, who have no obligation to the people.
• Elected leaders do not foster development in their countries.

Paragraph 8:

Democracy encourages corruption.

• Most leaders use their political influence to benefit those close to them.
• Only supporters of a political regime benefit from an elected government.

Democracy gives people the power to govern themselves. It allows them to make laws, which promote equality and fair treatment for all. However, it also encourages corruption and promotes inefficiency in governance. Appropriate use of democracy benefits both a country and its people.

Make use of the best writing tools that will come in handy when writing your essays or handling your assignments.

Free Essay On Democracy for Students

Democracy is a system of government where the will of the people is the ultimate power. It was introduced to give ordinary people the ability to take part in determining who governs them. Over the years more and more countries have followed the democratization path in an effort to improve their links with other democratic countries. It is a practice that is highly recommended by most international organizations. Even though this form of governance has real influence in most countries where it is practiced, it also has its downside. Below is a discussion regarding what democracy entails, and its positive and negative impacts in countries where it is practiced.

Many sources define democracy as, ‘the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ Freedom in a country is realized through the use of an open mechanism of selecting leaders. In this light, a democratic nation should be characterized by free and fair elections. Ordinary people hold the ultimate power in a democratic country, and therefore should be allowed to actively participate in civic life and politics. A state that thrives on democracy should prioritize the protection of human freedoms and rights. The rule of law is one of the crucial components of justice. In a democratic country, all individuals are treated equally under the law.

Merits of Democracy

Democracy discards privileges of a class or group of people. In a democratic environment, only people with the right to vote are given the responsibility of leadership. Every voter in a country has the potential to lead others. In a democratic state, the administration is not limited to few groups or individuals. It gives ordinary people the freedom to choose their leaders and to serve as leaders. Democracy ensures that no individual is above others as is often evident in other forms of government such as monarchies and anarchies. It upholds the values of equality and liberty in a country.

Democracy also ensures that all people are treated equally before the law. In a democratic country, rules are made by ordinary people through their representatives in the legislature. Laws made take into consideration the welfare of all people and not for those who belong to a particular class. The freedoms, interests, and rights of every citizen are highly and equally safeguarded. Resources in such a nation are similarly distributed because democracy stresses on equality of all persons. People in the three social classes are governed by the same set of rules and regulations. The law applies to all individuals irrespective of their influence in society. Perhaps you maybe interested in what it means to be American sample esays .

This method of governance further instills a sense of responsibility in all citizens within a country. It gives the common man the right of belonging to a particular nation. It also gives them a chance to participate in the nation’s governance. The people are therefore compelled to take matters of governance upon themselves so that if anything goes wrong, they will stand and question those they put in positions of leadership. They feel entitled to oppose any form of oppression that may arise in their country. They are given the right to speak up their minds and express their views about the governance or leadership without fear of being victimized.

Further, democracy has a significant strength in its ability to greatly reduce the likelihood of political dissent. Collier (2012) explains that since a democratically elected government receives its mandate from a majority of the citizenry, it implies that a majority should be content with it. This is not possible in other forms of government. It is only by constituting and running a government as informed by the needs of those who elect it that a system of governance can be said to be based on approval by the majority. Not even when a dictatorship works in the interest of all citizens can it be considered to enjoy majority approval. This is because the only sure way of determining what the public needs and/or wants is through elections. On the other hand however, the minority needs may not be fully met by a democratic government. Those who voted against such a government would feel left out and would thus develop a feeling of dissatisfaction (Collier, 2012). This notwithstanding, no system of politics or governance can see everybody get satisfied and it is only through democracy that a majority can be satisfied.

Demerits of Democracy

Democracy operates on majority rule. As earlier mentioned, democracy gives ordinary people the power to choose their leaders. Those who are preferred by the majority are regarded to be the elected leaders. However, in most countries, a high proportion of the population consists of illiterate or ignorant individuals who do not care about how the government is run. These people vote blindly and end up giving leadership positions to unqualified and undeserving persons. The elite makes up the minority in many countries, and their few numbers restrict them from determining those that assume positions of power.

Democracy also proliferates inefficiency in governance. Most leaders in democratic countries focus more on creating political alliances rather than on development and administration. Administration in many democratic countries is run by bureaucrats, who have no obligation to the people. Since most of those that elect such leaders are ignorant individuals, they are sucked into the debates of political alliances thus paying less attention to the delivery of services by such leaders. It therefore becomes difficult to foster infrastructural, social, and economic development in many democratic countries. People neglect their responsibilities of keeping the government in check, making it hard for leaders to make any meaningful developments. Democracy therefore negatively influences the ability of a country to experience significant economic growth.

Further, democracy encourages corruption. After elected leaders assume office, they embark on activities of forming new political parties and alliances. Leadership values and promises made to the people are forgotten. Developments are only initiated in regions that support ruling regimes, while other regions are neglected. The value of equality, which democracy purports to uphold, is often overlooked. Most state jobs are given based on favoritism. People in leadership positions use their influence to benefit those close to them and those who belong to their communities or support their political movements.

Democracy gives people the power to govern themselves. Through it, equality is upheld, and the rule of law takes its course. However, it also gives illiterate and ignorant individuals the power to lead others, and this contributes to inefficiency in governance and promotes corruption. Thus, democracy may only be of benefit to a country if used appropriately and in line with the true meaning of the word. Scheme through some quality criminal justice research paper topics you can choose for your assignment.

Ankita, T. (2016). “13 valid demerits of democracy form of government”. Preserve Articles . Retrieved June 19, 2020 from http://www.preservearticles.com/201106248563/13-valid-demerits-of-democracy-form-of-government.html

Ankita, T. (2017). “13 most essential merits of democracy form of government”. Preserve Articles . Retrieved June 19, 2020 from http://www.preservearticles.com/201106248562/13-most-essential-merits-of-democracy-form-of-government.html

Campbell, D. F. (2008). The basic concept for the democracy ranking of the quality of democracy .

Collier, R. (2012). Fundamental principles of democracy . Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Ghiorgis, A. (2012). “Principles of democracy”. Asmarino . Retrieved June 19, 2020 from http://asmarino.com/articles/1442-principles-of-democracy

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HSNS 54.1: A Special Issue of Essays: Pedagogy in the History of Science and Medicine

April 22nd, 2024  |  Published in Latest news

The HSNS February 2024 Issue marks the first for a new “Essays and Reviews” editorial team: Melinda Baldwin and Brigid Vance.

From the Editorial Team:

Henry Cowles and Chitra Ramalingam have left us big shoes to fill, and we want to express our appreciation for everything they have done for both  HSNS  and us during this editorial transition.

The February 2024 special section focuses on the theme of “Pedagogy in the History of Science.” Like most of our colleagues, the two of us found ourselves navigating a new teaching environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our classes moved online; many students fell ill and needed extra support; faculty and students alike had to find ways to cope with and work through the anxiety, stress, and loneliness of social distancing. In this new environment, we reconsidered learning goals for our students, revised policies on absences and late work, and examined how our field could speak to this moment in history.

That experience led us to solicit essays on pedagogy in the history of science and medicine. Classes at most universities have now resumed in person, but we have heard from many colleagues whose pandemic experiences shifted what and how they teach. The essays in this special section reflect caring, innovative, and rigorous pedagogical approaches that teach not just historical content, but analytical thinking, key academic skills, and new approaches to collaborative and individual work.

The authors of our essays work in a variety of educational contexts, not all of which are university settings. Matthew Shindell and Samantha Thompson of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum share reflections on pedagogy in a museum environment, and Shireen Hamza’s essay recounts her experience teaching at Statesville Prison in Crest Hill, Illinois. Nor are all of the essays about teaching in North America. John DiMoia writes about his experience building a history of computing syllabus for a large course at Seoul National University, and Jongsik Yi shares her work building an innovative syllabus on the history of science in Korea. Many of the essays address efforts to decolonize the way we teach our field, or ways to put the history of science into conversation with other fields. Honghong Tinn’s course on “Ethics and Science and Technology” pushes students to consider case studies of indigenous technology, invisible labor, and exploitation in the East Asian context, and David Dunning and Judith Kaplan share their experience contributing to an interdisciplinary team-taught freshman program.

For the complete text, please read “Introduction: Pedagogy in the History of Science and Medicine” by Melinda Baldwin and Brigid Vance.

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Active learning through video essays: challenges, opportunities and ways forward.

25 April 2024, 5.00 PM

Dr. Estrella Sendra (KCL)

Richmond Building, 5.65 Lecture Room (5th Floor, Students' Union, Queens Road)

Bruce Drysdale 5th-grade student advances to national finals in DAR's essay contest

Bruce Drysdale fifth grader Lia Martinonis has advanced to the national finals in the Daughters of the American Revolution 2024 Essay Contest, and each time her essay has advanced, her family has celebrated with a cake.

She is anxiously hoping for more cake. Martinonis is one of eight fifth-grade finalists in the nation, and so far, she's won three awards for her essay — one at the local level, one at the state level and the latest for the Southeastern Division.

"I am unbelievably proud. I have felt both shocked and pleased each time I learned that I had won," she said.

And there's prize money involved: $1,000 for first place, $500 for second place and $250 for third place. The winners will be recognized at the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution Continental Congress, which is being held June 26-30 in Washington, D.C.

The topic for the contest was “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Essay writers were asked to imagine they were a newspaper reporter for The Philadelphia Times on May 14, 1897, and the newspaper's editor asked them to attend and report on the first public performance of John Philip Sousa’s new march, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The students were to tell about Sousa’s life and the story behind the song.

Lia was with her family on April 20 in Durham to receive the state award, her mother, Andrea, said.

"This essay contest has been an incredible experience for Lia. My daughter aspires to be a writer when she grows up," Andrea Martinonis said. "This opportunity has given her the confidence to pursue that dream. Lia researched the essay subject, learned about American history, honed her writing skills, and read her speech to a large audience at the initial award ceremony. 

"As an educator, I couldn't be more pleased that DAR sponsors this contest, encouraging students to write essays and learn about our nation's past. As a parent, I am thrilled that my daughter chooses to spend her free time reading and writing and that her interests and skills are being recognized."

More: North Henderson student one of four grand prize winners in national essay contest

Lia said her teacher, April Summey, assigned the essay contest to her class.

"I remember being frustrated when drafting my essay, but now I am so glad my hard work paid off. I still cannot believe this is all happening," Lia Martinonis said.  

This part of her essay describes Sousa talking about composing his new march:

"...Sousa said that he composed the song in his head on his return to America as he grieved the death of his beloved band manager, David Blakely. Sousa said, “In a kind of dreamy way, I used to think over old days at Washington when I was leader of the Marine Band…when we played at all public functions, and I could see the Stars and Stripes flying from the flagstaff.” He also stated, “And that flag of ours became glorified… And to my imagination it seemed to be the biggest, grandest flag in the world, and I could not get back under it quick enough.”

More: Apple Valley Middle student one of four grand prize winners in national contest

Summey called Lia a phenomenal, gifted student who "always goes above and beyond."

"She thrives on a challenge and is an avid learner. Her contagious curiosity shines brightly as she lights up upon acquiring new knowledge," Summey said. "Every year, my fifth grade students work on the DAR essay. They are given a prompt and required to read multiple primary and secondary sources about the topic in order to prepare. I am very passionate about the contest, because it helps students learn history and get excited about it." 

Dean Hensley is the news editor for the Hendersonville Times-News. Email him with tips, questions and comments at [email protected]. Please help support this kind of local journalism with a subscription to the Hendersonville Times-News.

Panama Papers trial's public portion comes to an unexpectedly speedy end

PANAMA CITY — The public portion of a trial of more than two-dozen associates accused of helping some of the world’s richest people hide their wealth came to an unexpectedly speedy conclusion Friday when a Panamanian judge said she would take the two weeks of trial arguments and testimony under advisement.

The trial came eight years after 11 million leaked secret financial documents that became known as the “Panama Papers” prompted the resignation of the prime minister of Iceland and brought scrutiny to the then-leaders of Argentina and Ukraine, Chinese politicians, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, among others.

Judge Baloisa Marquínez noted Friday that the case included more than 530 volumes of information. The public trial had been expected to run to the end of the month. The judge has 30 working days to issue a verdict.

Those on trial include the owners of the Mossack Fonseca law firm that was at the heart of the 2016 massive document leak. Jürgen Mossack attended the trial, while his partner Ramón Fonseca did not for health reasons, according to his counsel.

Panamanian prosecutors allege that Mossack, Fonseca and their associates created a web of shell companies that used complex transactions to hide money linked to illicit activities in the “car wash” corruption scandal of Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht .

“This whole process from eight years ago until now … has had a lot of consequences for my family, on my personal situation and truly has been a great injustice not just for me but for all of the people who have worked with me,” Mossack testified Friday. “I trust your honor will know how to evaluate all that has been said here.”

Mossack had said at the start of the trial, as he has for years, that he was not guilty of the money laundering charges.

According to Panamanian prosecutors, the Mossack Fonseca firm created 44 shell companies, 31 of which opened accounts in Panama to hide money linked to the Brazilian scandal.

Fonseca has said the firm, which closed in 2018, had no control over how its clients might use offshore vehicles created for them.

Mossack Fonseca helped create and sell around 240,000 shell companies across four decades in business. It announced its closure in March 2018, two years after the scandal erupted.

The firm’s documents were first leaked to the German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung, and were shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which began publishing collaborative reports with news organizations in 2016.

“The reputational deterioration, the media campaign, the financial siege and the irregular actions of some Panamanian authorities have caused irreparable damage, whose consequence is the complete cease of operations to the public,” the firm said in a statement at the time.

The Mossack and Fonseca were acquitted on other charges in 2022.

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Panama Papers trial’s public portion comes to an unexpectedly speedy end

The Supreme Court stands in Panama City, Monday, April 8, 2024 as the trial starts for those charged in connection with the worldwide “Panama Papers” money laundering case. (AP Photo/Agustin Herrera)

Juergen Mossack, partner of the law firm Mossack-Fonseca, leaves the Supreme Court during the trial of the “Panama Papers” money laundering case in Panama City, Monday, April 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Agustin Herrera)

Lawyers and court workers leave the Supreme Court during a recess for the trial of the “Panama Papers” money laundering case in Panama City, Monday, April 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Agustin Herrera)

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PANAMA CITY (AP) — The public portion of a trial of more than two-dozen associates accused of helping some of the world’s richest people hide their wealth came to an unexpectedly speedy conclusion Friday when a Panamanian judge said she would take the two weeks of trial arguments and testimony under advisement.

The trial came eight years after 11 million leaked secret financial documents that became known as the “Panama Papers” prompted the resignation of the prime minister of Iceland and brought scrutiny to the then-leaders of Argentina and Ukraine, Chinese politicians, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, among others.

Judge Baloisa Marquínez noted Friday that the case included more than 530 volumes of information. The public trial had been expected to run to the end of the month. The judge has 30 working days to issue a verdict.

Those on trial include the owners of the Mossack Fonseca law firm that was at the heart of the 2016 massive document leak. Jürgen Mossack attended the trial, while his partner Ramón Fonseca did not for health reasons, according to his counsel.

Panamanian prosecutors allege that Mossack, Fonseca and their associates created a web of shell companies that used complex transactions to hide money linked to illicit activities in the “car wash” corruption scandal of Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht .

“This whole process from eight years ago until now … has had a lot of consequences for my family, on my personal situation and truly has been a great injustice not just for me but for all of the people who have worked with me,” Mossack testified Friday. “I trust your honor will know how to evaluate all that has been said here.”

Mossack had said at the start of the trial, as he has for years, that he was not guilty of the money laundering charges.

According to Panamanian prosecutors, the Mossack Fonseca firm created 44 shell companies, 31 of which opened accounts in Panama to hide money linked to the Brazilian scandal.

Fonseca has said the firm, which closed in 2018, had no control over how its clients might use offshore vehicles created for them.

Mossack Fonseca helped create and sell around 240,000 shell companies across four decades in business. It announced its closure in March 2018, two years after the scandal erupted.

The firm’s documents were first leaked to the German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung, and were shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which began publishing collaborative reports with news organizations in 2016.

“The reputational deterioration, the media campaign, the financial siege and the irregular actions of some Panamanian authorities have caused irreparable damage, whose consequence is the complete cease of operations to the public,” the firm said in a statement at the time.

The Mossack and Fonseca were acquitted on other charges in 2022.

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A Culture Warrior Takes a Late Swing

The editor and essayist Joseph Epstein looks back on his life and career in two new books.

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By Dwight Garner

NEVER SAY YOU’VE HAD A LUCKY LIFE: Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life , by Joseph Epstein

FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTENT: New and Selected Essays , by Joseph Epstein

When Tammy Wynette was asked to write a memoir in her mid-30s, she initially declined, she said in an interview, because “I didn’t think my life was over yet.” The publisher responded: Has it occurred to you that in 15 years no one might care? She wrote the book. “Stand by Your Man: An Autobiography” (1979) was a hit.

The essayist and editor Joseph Epstein — whose memoir “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life,” is out now, alongside a greatest-hits collection titled “Familiarity Breeds Content” — has probably never heard Wynette sing except by accident. (In a 1993 essay, he wrote that he wished he didn’t know who Willie Nelson was, because it was a sign of a compromised intellect.) But his memoir illustrates another reason not to wait too long to commit your life to print.

There is no indication that Epstein, who is in his late 80s, has lost a step. His prose is as genial and bland, if comparison to his earlier work is any indication, as it ever was. But there’s a softness to his memories of people, perhaps because it was all so long ago. This is the sort of memoir that insists someone was funny, or erudite, or charismatic, while rarely providing the crucial details.

Epstein aw-shucks his way into “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life” — pretending to be self-effacing while not being so in the least is one of his salient qualities as a writer — by warning readers, “I may not have had a sufficiently interesting life to merit an autobiography.” This is because he “did little, saw nothing notably historic, and endured not much out of the ordinary of anguish or trouble or exaltation.” Quickly, however, he concludes that his life is indeed worth relating, in part because “over the years I have acquired the literary skill to recount that life well.”

Here he is wrong in both directions. His story is interesting enough to warrant this memoir. His personal life has taken complicated turns. And as the longtime editor of the quarterly magazine The American Scholar, and a notably literate conservative culture warrior, he’s been in the thick of things.

He does lack the skill to tell his own story, though, if by “skill” we mean not well-scrubbed Strunk and White sentences but close and penetrating observation. Epstein favors tasseled loafers and bow ties, and most of his sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie.

He grew up in Chicago, where his father manufactured costume jewelry. The young Epstein was popular and, in high school, lettered in tennis. His title refers to being lucky, and a big part of that luck, in his estimation, was to grow up back when kids could be kids, before “the therapeutic culture” took over.

This complaint sets the tone of the book. His own story is set next to a rolling series of cultural grievances. He’s against casual dress, the prohibition of the word “Negro,” grade inflation, the Beat Generation, most of what occurred during the 1960s, standards slipping everywhere, de-Westernizing college curriculums, D.E.I. programs, you name it. His politics aren’t the problem. We can argue about those. American culture needs more well-read conservatives. The problem is that in his search for teachable moments, his memoir acquires the cardboard tone of a middling opinion column.

His youth was not all tennis lessons and root beer floats. He and his friends regularly visited brothels because, he writes, sex was not as easy to come by in the 1950s. He was kicked out of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for his role in the selling of a stolen accounting exam to other students.

He was lucky to find a place at the University of Chicago, a place of high seriousness. The school changed him. He began to reassess his values. He began to read writers like Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz, and felt his politics pull to the right.

After college, he was drafted into the Army and ended up in Little Rock, Ark., where he met his first wife. At the time, she was a waitress at a bar and restaurant called the Gar Hole. Here Epstein’s memoir briefly threatens to acquire genuine weight.

She had lost custody of her two sons after a divorce. Together they got them back, and she and Epstein had two sons of their own. After their divorce, Epstein took all four of the boys. This is grist for an entire memoir, but Epstein passes over it quickly. One never gets much of a sense of what his boys were like, or what it was like to raise them. He later tells us that he has all but lost touch with his stepsons and has not seen them for decades.

He worked for the magazine The New Leader and the Encyclopaedia Britannica before becoming the editor of The American Scholar in 1975. It was a position he would hold for 22 years. He also taught at Northwestern University for nearly three decades.

At The American Scholar he began to write a long personal essay in each issue, under the pseudonym Aristides. He wrote 92 of these, on topics such as smoking and envy and reading and height. Most ran to 6,500 words, or about 4,000 words longer than they should have been.

Many magazine editors like to write every so often, to keep a hand in. But there is something unseemly about an editor chewing up acres of space in his own publication on a regular basis. Editorially, it’s a droit du seigneur imposition.

A selection of these essays, as well as some new ones, can now be found in “Familiarity Breeds Content.” In his introduction to this book, Christopher Buckley overpraises Epstein, leaving the reader no choice but to start mentally pushing back.

Buckley calls Epstein “the most entertaining living essayist in the English language.” (Not while Michael Kinsley, Lorrie Moore, Calvin Trillin, Sloane Crosley and Geoff Dyer, among many others, walk the earth.) He repurposes Martin Amis’s comment about Saul Bellow: “One doesn’t read Saul Bellow. One can only reread him.” To this he adds, “Ditto Epstein.” (Epstein is no Saul Bellow.) Buckley says, “Joe Epstein is incapable of writing a boring sentence.”

Well. How about this one, from an essay about cats?

A cat, I realize, cannot be everyone’s cup of fur.

Or this one, from an essay about sports and other obsessions:

I have been told there are people who wig out on pasta.

Or this one, about … guess:

When I was a boy, it occurs to me now, I always had one or another kind of hat.

Juggling today appears to be undergoing a small renaissance.

If one is looking to save on fuel bills, politics is likely to heat up a room quicker than just about anything else.

In tennis I was most notable for flipping and catching my racket in various snappy routines.

The essays are, by and large, as tweedy and self-satisfied as these lines make them sound. There are no wild hairs in them, no sudden deepenings of tone. Nothing is at stake. We are stranded with him on the putt-putt course.

Epstein fills his essays with quotation after quotation, as ballast. I am a fan of well-deployed, free-range quotations. So many of Epstein’s are musty and reek of Bartlett’s. They are from figures like Lord Chesterfield and Lady Mary Montagu and Sir Herbert Grierson and Tocqueville and Walpole and Carlyle. You can feel the moths escaping from the display case in real time.

To be fair, I circled a few sentences in “Familiarity Breeds Content” happily. I’m with him on his distrust of “fun couples.” He writes, “A cowboy without a hat is suitable only for bartending.” I liked his observation, which he borrowed from someone else, that a career has five stages:

(1) Who is Joseph Epstein? (2) Get me Joseph Epstein. (3) We need someone like Joseph Epstein. (4) What we need is a young Joseph Epstein. (5) Who is Joseph Epstein?

It’s no fun to trip up a writer on what might have been a late-career victory lap. Epstein doesn’t need me to like his work. He’s published more than 30 books, and you can’t do that unless you’ve made a lot of readers happy.

NEVER SAY YOU’VE HAD A LUCKY LIFE : Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life | By Joseph Epstein | Free Press | 287 pp. | $29.99

FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTENT : New and Selected Essays | By Joseph Epstein | Simon & Schuster | 441 pp. | Paperback, $20.99

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade. More about Dwight Garner

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About 1 in 5 U.S. teens who’ve heard of ChatGPT have used it for schoolwork

Roughly one-in-five teenagers who have heard of ChatGPT say they have used it to help them do their schoolwork, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17. With a majority of teens having heard of ChatGPT, that amounts to 13% of all U.S. teens who have used the generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot in their schoolwork.

Teens in higher grade levels are particularly likely to have used the chatbot to help them with schoolwork. About one-quarter of 11th and 12th graders who have heard of ChatGPT say they have done this. This share drops to 17% among 9th and 10th graders and 12% among 7th and 8th graders.

There is no significant difference between teen boys and girls who have used ChatGPT in this way.

The introduction of ChatGPT last year has led to much discussion about its role in schools , especially whether schools should integrate the new technology into the classroom or ban it .

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand American teens’ use and understanding of ChatGPT in the school setting.

The Center conducted an online survey of 1,453 U.S. teens from Sept. 26 to Oct. 23, 2023, via Ipsos. Ipsos recruited the teens via their parents, who were part of its KnowledgePanel . The KnowledgePanel is a probability-based web panel recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses. The survey was weighted to be representative of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 who live with their parents by age, gender, race and ethnicity, household income, and other categories.

This research was reviewed and approved by an external institutional review board (IRB), Advarra, an independent committee of experts specializing in helping to protect the rights of research participants.

Here are the  questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and its  methodology .

Teens’ awareness of ChatGPT

Overall, two-thirds of U.S. teens say they have heard of ChatGPT, including 23% who have heard a lot about it. But awareness varies by race and ethnicity, as well as by household income:

• 72% of White teens say they’ve heard at least a little about ChatGPT, compared with 63% of Hispanic teens and 56% of Black teens.
• 75% of teens living in households that make $75,000 or more annually have heard of ChatGPT. Much smaller shares in households with incomes between $30,000 and $74,999 (58%) and less than $30,000 (41%) say the same.

Teens who are more aware of ChatGPT are more likely to use it for schoolwork. Roughly a third of teens who have heard a lot about ChatGPT (36%) have used it for schoolwork, far higher than the 10% among those who have heard a little about it.

When do teens think it’s OK for students to use ChatGPT?

For teens, whether it is – or is not – acceptable for students to use ChatGPT depends on what it is being used for.

There is a fair amount of support for using the chatbot to explore a topic. Roughly seven-in-ten teens who have heard of ChatGPT say it’s acceptable to use when they are researching something new, while 13% say it is not acceptable.

However, there is much less support for using ChatGPT to do the work itself. Just one-in-five teens who have heard of ChatGPT say it’s acceptable to use it to write essays, while 57% say it is not acceptable. And 39% say it’s acceptable to use ChatGPT to solve math problems, while a similar share of teens (36%) say it’s not acceptable.

Some teens are uncertain about whether it’s acceptable to use ChatGPT for these tasks. Between 18% and 24% say they aren’t sure whether these are acceptable use cases for ChatGPT.

Those who have heard a lot about ChatGPT are more likely than those who have only heard a little about it to say it’s acceptable to use the chatbot to research topics, solve math problems and write essays. For instance, 54% of teens who have heard a lot about ChatGPT say it’s acceptable to use it to solve math problems, compared with 32% among those who have heard a little about it.

Note: Here are the  questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and its  methodology .

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Olivia Sidoti is a research assistant focusing on internet and technology research at Pew Research Center

Jeffrey Gottfried is an associate director focusing on internet and technology research at Pew Research Center

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