Typically, when the term democracy is used, it is intended
to mean representative democracy which can be defined as a system in which
the people rule through the election--in free, frequent, and competitive
elections--of officeholders who make binding decisions for members of the
community. Representative democracy is also known as indirect
democracy or a republican form of government. As such, it differs from
direct democracy, aka Athenian democracy, in which citizens vote directly on
the rules (contemporary examples of direct democracy would include the New
England town meeting and the use of referendums/initiatives).
While free, frequent, and competitive elections are
necessary for any system claiming to be a representative democracy,
elections alone are not sufficient (a point nicely made by
Michael Slackman in a piece
in the International Herald Tribune). Following, in
part, Robert Dahl, one can identify four institutional requirements that
must be well satisfied for a political system to merit the honor of being
recognized as a representative democracy. To wit:
- political equality, defined as one person, one
equally weighted vote
- a free flow of information
- citizen participation, which is itself
composed of seven institutional subrequirements
- three of these center on participation
- there should be high rates of participation
- there should be no unreasonable legal
barriers to participation
- there should be no systematic biases in
participation where some sectors of the citizenry are more
likely or less likely to participate than others
- four of them center on expectations of citizens,
who should be
- interested in politics
- well-informed about political matters
- capable of good judgment about political
matters
- committed to the principles of democracy and
their full implementation
- collective agreement on the
decision rules to be applied in
making decisions
To complicate matters further, representative democracies
can be organized in different ways, or, in other words, can have different
constitutional arrangements.
As Lijphart shows, there is a
majoritarian model of representative democracy and then there is a whole
range of other arrangements that are not majoritarian.
