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GEARANTOCRACYGovernment by the people, exercised either directly or through electedrepresentatives.1. A political or social unit that has such a government.2. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.3. Majority rule.4. The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within acommunity.[French dmocratie, from Late Latin d?mocratia, from Greek d?mokrati? : d?mos,

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Political Dictionary: democracy TopHome > Library > History, Politics & Society > Political DictionaryGreek, rule by the people. Since the people are rarely unanimous, democracy as a

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descriptive term is synonymous with majority rule. In ancient Greece, and when theword was revived in the eighteenth century, most writers were opposed to what theycalled democracy. In modern times, the connotations of the word are sooverwhelmingly favourable that regimes with no claim to it at all appropriated it(the German Democratic Republic, Democratic Kampuchea). Even when not used emptilyas propaganda, democracy and democratic are frequently applied in ways which

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have no direct connection with majority rule: for instance, The DemocraticIntellect (G. E. Davie) is a well-known discussion of the (supposed)

egalitarianism of the Scottish educational system in the nineteenth century. Suchuses of democracy to mean what I approve of? are not considered further here.

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Issues relating to majority rule include:(1) Who are to count as the people and what is a majority of them? Ancient

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Athens called itself a democracy (from c.500 BC to c.330 BC) because all citizenscould take part in political decisions. But women, slaves, and resident aliens(including people from other Greek cities) had no rights to participate. Citizenswere thus less than a quarter of the adult population. Modern writers havenevertheless accepted the self-description of classical Athens as democratic

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(see also Athenian democracy). Likewise, well under half the adult population ofthe United Kingdom had the vote before the first women were enfranchised in 1918;but 1918 is not usually given as the year in which Britain became a democracy.What minimum proportion of adults must be enfranchised before a regime may becalled democratic? This simple question seems to lack simple answers.Majority

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appears to be more clear-cut than people; it means more than half?. In votes

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between two options or candidates this poses no difficulty; in votes among threeor more it does. The difficulty was studied by various isolated people (Pliny theYounger, c. AD 105; Ramon Lull in the thirteenth century; Nicolas Cusanus in thefifteenth) but first systematically tackled by Borda and Condorcet in the lateeighteenth century. The plurality rule (Select the candidate with the largest

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single number of votes, even if that number is less than half of the votes cast)

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may select somebody whom the majority regard as the worst candidate. Nevertheless,countries using this rule for national elections (including Britain, the UnitedStates, and India) are normally described as democratic. Borda proposed to

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select the candidate with the highest average ranking; Condorcet proposed toselect the candidate who wins in pairwise comparisons with each of the others.Although these are the two best interpretations of majority rule when there are

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more than two candidates, they do not always select the same candidate; and theCondorcet winnerthat is, the candidate who wins every pairwise

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comparisonsometimes does not exist. In this case, whichever candidate is chosen,

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there is always a majority who prefer some other, and the meaning of majority

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rule is unclear.Voting in legislatures is usually by the binary resolution-and-

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amendment procedure, which always ensures that the winning option has beaten itslast rival by a majority (but does not solve the problems mentioned in theprevious paragraph).(2) Why (if at all) should majorities rule minorities? The first argument fordemocracy in ancient Greece is that attributed by Thucydides to Pericles, one ofthe democratic leaders of Athens, in 430 BC. Pericles argued that democracy islinked with toleration, but made no special claims for majority rule. Plato andAristotle both deplored democracy, Plato on the grounds that it handed control ofthe government from experts in governing to populist demagogues and Aristotle onthe grounds that government by the people was in practice government by the poor,who could be expected to expropriate the rich. However, Aristotle did firstmention as a justification of majority rule that the majority ought to be

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sovereign, rather than the best, where the best are few. [A] feast to which all

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contribute is better than one given at one man's expense. In medieval elections,

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the usual phrase was that the larger and (or or) wiser part ought to prevail.

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But every losing minority could claim that it was the wiser part. Only in theseventeenth century did a defence of democracy based on an assumption of equalrights for all citizens begin to re-emerge, perhaps as a by-product of theProtestant Reformation. Hobbes and Locke both assume the political equality ofcitizens, but neither draws explicitly democratic conclusions. A stronger claim ofequality was asserted by Colonel Rainborough of Cromwell's army in 1647, with hisclaim that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the

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greatest hee.Significant widening of the franchise in Western regimes began in

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the late eighteenth century. In the French Revolution, the franchise was at firstrestricted to fairly substantial property-holders, but it was widened to something

approaching manhood franchise in the constitution of 1791 and the proposedconstitution of 1793. Many of the American colonies had broad suffrage before1776, and the Constitution of 1787 lays the groundwork for democracy in federalelections by giving each state representation in the House and in presidentialelections in proportion to its population (except for Indians and slaves). Exceptbetween 1865 and the 1890s, however, Southern blacks remained disenfranchiseduntil 1965. The first British act to widen the franchise was in 1832; universalsuffrage was achieved in 1928. The leading commentators of the period from 1780 to1920 all accepted the basic premiss that the poorest hee (and for Condorcet and

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J. S. Mill the poorest she) had as good a right to a vote as the richest, althoughmany of them were concerned about the tyranny of the majority (see 4 below) and

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Mill proposed weighting votes in favour of the richer and the better-educated.(See also Madison; Tocqueville.)Another strand of democratic thought argues fromequal competence rather than equal rights. This revives Aristotle's feast.Democrats who see politics as a matter of judgement rather than opinion (includingRousseau and Condorcet) argue that, other things being equal, the more people whoare involved in arriving at a decision the more likely the decision is to becorrect. Condorcet formalized this in his jury theorem, which states that,providing a large enough majority is required, a large number of only moderatelycompetent people can be relied on to take the right decision.(3) Direct v. representative democracy. Athenian democracy was direct. Allcitizens were expected to participate, and the attendance at the sovereignAssembly may have been as high as 6,000. When decision-taking bodies had to besmaller, their members were selected by lot rather than by election. Every citizenof Athens had a reasonably high probability of being chief executive for aday.When democracy was reinvented in the eighteenth century, every system wasindirect: voters elected representatives who took decisions for which they wereanswerable only at the next election. Rousseau argued that this was no democracy(The people of England think they are free. They are gravely mistaken. They are

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free only during the election of Members of Parliament), but was a lone voice.

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Interest in direct democracy revived in the 1890s when the referendum became morepopular, and to a greater extent in the 1960s, when many people especially on thenew left revived Rousseau's criticism of representation. Modern communications andcomputers have removed many of the technical obstacles to direct democracy, but itis not popular either among politicians (whose jobs it imperils) or amongpolitical philosophers (the majority of whom accept Schumpeter's argument thatdirect democracy is incompatible with responsible government).(4) Is democracy merely majority rule or are other features necessarily part ofthe definition? Most of the classical theorists of democracy were liberals; andthey all saw a tension between democracy and liberty. If the majority voted toinvade the minority's rights, this could be tyrannical. Therefore Madison proposedthe divisions of powers, both among branches of government and between levels ofgovernment, that are a feature of the US Constitution; and Mill proposed to weightthe votes of the more educated. Although Madison's scheme protects only somegroups from majority tyranny (until 1954 it did nothing for black people inSouthern states), the Madisonian principle has been accepted by Schumpeter andmany other modern theorists of democracy. Schumpeter's opponents argue that heposed a false dilemma because the persecution of minorities cannot be squared

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with democratic procedure. This suggestion leaves undetermined the many cases in

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the world where majorities vote to persecute minorities: not only are places likeNorthern Ireland, Cyprus, and the West Bank not democracies, but they would not bedemocracies whichever faction controlled them. It is probably better to restrictdemocracy narrowly to majority rule, and treat toleration, entrenchment of

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rights, and so on as preconditions for democracy but not as constitutive ofdemocracy itself.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: democracy TopHome > Library > Miscellaneous > Britannica Concise Encyclopedia