# Democracy Government grounded in popular sovereignty — the demos (people) holds ultimate political authority, exercised either directly or through elected representatives, with institutions designed to make rulers accountable to ruled. ## Defining features The minimal modern definition (Dahl's "polyarchy" and successors) requires: 1. **Free, fair, recurring elections** for the most consequential political offices 2. **Universal (or near-universal) adult suffrage** 3. **Civil liberties** — speech, assembly, association, press 4. **Alternative information sources** — media not monopolized by the state or a single private actor 5. **Rule of law** — power exercised through legal procedure, not arbitrary command 6. **Peaceful alternation of power** — losing incumbents step down Different scholars expand this list (Diamond's "liberal democracy" adds judicial independence and minority rights; Lijphart distinguishes "majoritarian" vs "consensus" democratic models). ## Variants - **Direct democracy** — citizens vote on policy directly. Athens (5th century BCE) is the canonical case; modern referenda and Swiss cantons preserve elements. - **Representative democracy** — citizens elect representatives who decide. The dominant modern form. - **Liberal democracy** — representative democracy + entrenched individual rights, judicial review, and rule of law. - **Illiberal democracy** — formal elections but weak protection of rights/liberties (Zakaria 1997). Hungary under Orbán is the textbook contemporary case. - **Majoritarian vs consensus democracy** (Lijphart) — Westminster-style winner-take-all vs power-sharing/proportional models. ## Distinguishing from neighbors - vs. **[[Republic]]** — not the same axis. Republic = no monarch (head-of-state form). Democracy = popular sovereignty (legitimacy mechanism). The UK is a democratic monarchy; the US is a democratic republic. China is formally a republic but not democratic. - vs. **[[Authoritarianism (Government Type)]]** — democracies are constrained by institutional rules and civil liberties; authoritarian regimes concentrate power and restrict opposition. Many regimes sit on a spectrum (V-Dem treats this as continuous). - vs. **[[Oligarchy]]** — *formally* democratic systems can drift toward oligarchic substance when wealthy minorities exert disproportionate influence (Gilens & Page 2014 makes the empirical case for the US). ## Democratic backsliding Modern scholarship tracks how 21st-century democracies erode without classical coups — through legalistic salami-slicing, executive aggrandizement, judicial capture, electoral manipulation, and norm erosion. Key works: - Levitsky & Ziblatt, *[[How Democracies Die]]* (2018) - Bermeo, "On Democratic Backsliding" (2016, *Journal of Democracy*) - Lührmann & Lindberg, "A [[Third Wave]] of Autocratization" (2019) The V-Dem Institute (Gothenburg) maintains the most-cited empirical dataset; Freedom House and Polity also publish regular indices. ## Right-wing relevance The contemporary right's relationship to democracy is contested. [[Movement Conservatism]] in the US has increasingly embraced anti-democratic mechanisms (gerrymandering, voter suppression, electoral-college maximalism, refusal to accept lost elections — see [[Fake Electors Scheme]]). The intellectual right (Yarvin's "The Cathedral", neoreaction) explicitly argues against democracy; the populist right typically claims to *be* the true democracy against an "elite cabal" framing. Cross-references: [[The Cathedral]], [[Project 2025]], [[Eastman Memo]]. ## Ancient paradigm case The direct democracy of classical [[Athens]] (see [[Ancient Greece]]) is the paradigm case and original referent — a sovereign citizen assembly, selection of officials by lot, and mass juries, at its height in the era of the Greco-Persian Wars. Ancient and modern critics alike treat Athens as the test case for both the promise of popular sovereignty and its instability — the recurring conservative critique of democracy-as-mob runs straight back to it. ## See also - [[Authoritarianism]] (Subjects hub) — for the deeper psychological and sociological literature - [[Republic]], [[Parliamentary Republic]], [[Presidential Republic]] — for the head-of-state and executive-legislative axes ## See Also - [[Sortition]] — the selection method Athens considered democratic, and election oligarchic - [[Ostracism]] · [[Pericles]] · [[Peloponnesian War]] · [[Greek History Hub]]