Democracy is a government type in which the people of a given place have a say in their own governance. This can come in multiple forms, of course, and one must be careful not to ascribe too many values to democracy. Namely, people want to believe that democracy is a system where there are always fair elections and the ability for people to make their own way. This is not always true. In some democracies, as in the United States, there are multiple barriers that keep elections from being entirely fair. Everything from the Electoral College, which provides for the person with the least amount of votes to sometimes win, to gerrymandered districts, which can make elections meaningless and inevitable, restrict the free access to voting. Aside from that, restrictive voter ID laws and felony disenfranchisement are used as tools to suppress minority voting rights, ensuring that elections are not, in fact, fully fair on their face.
Some democracies in the past have been direct, with people getting to decide on everything that impacts them (Roskin, 2016). Some have been more like Republics, with people electing a select few representatives to serve as their proxies. Some have been governed by Islamic religious dictates, while others have been constrained by a Constitution. In all of these, the defining factor that brings them together is citizen involvement (Sartori, 2016). Elections are a part of the equation, even if these look different in different nations and have some restrictions on them. That people are able to influence their own form of government in order to get some of the things they want and need is a defining characteristic of democracy that can unite them all together, even when there are central differences between and among different nations that serve to make them much different on the whole.
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"Democracies Compared".
- Roskin, M. G. (2015). Political Science: an Introduction with MyPolsciLab. Pearson Education Limited.
- Sartori, G. (2016). THE THEORY OF DENTOCRACY REVISITED. Democracy: A Reader, 192.
