history of democracy essay

John Dewey: Education for Democracy

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• First Online: 22 August 2024
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• Clifford P. Harbour 2  

John Dewey was an American educational thinker who lived during a time of great change. Dewey was trained as a philosopher and worked at major universities. But, he was active off campus and worked as a teacher, speaker, and leader for various community groups and political organizations. Dewey traveled widely and left an extensive body of philosophical writings. By the end of his life, Dewey was regarded not only as a great philosopher but as an important public intellectual. Dewey argued that education, both formal and informal, should be organized to promote individual growth and social growth. These ends were most likely to be achieved when learners worked together and focused on problems important and relevant to their lives. When educational activities and programs were organized accordingly, they had the greatest chance of supporting a progressive democracy where democratic processes and practices pervaded not just political institutions but the social and economic dimensions of life as well.

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Waks, L. J., & English, A. R. (Eds.). (2017). John Dewey’s Democracy and Education: A centennial handbook . Cambridge University Press.

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Further Reading

Fesmire, S. (Ed.). (2019). The Oxford handbook of Dewey . Oxford University Press.

Hickman, L. A., & Alexander, T. M. (Eds.). (1998). The essential Dewey, Volume 1: Pragmatism, education, democracy . Indiana University Press.

Hickman, L. A., & Alexander, T. M. (Eds.). (2009). The Essential Dewey: Volume 2: Ethics, logic, psychology . Indiana University Press.

Hook, S. (2008). John Dewey: An intellectual portrait . Cosimo Inc. (Original work published 1939).

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Harbour, C.P. (2024). John Dewey: Education for Democracy. In: Geier, B.A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Thinkers. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25134-4_85

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• Democracy and Justice, Past and Present

August 27, 2024 | Notre Dame Press | International Relations and Foreign Policy , Political Science and Theory

In order to fully understand the current political climate, it’s crucial to look at the history and influences that brought us here. Our political science and theory list is filled with books that do just that.  Whether it’s a title that looks at the past three decades of political history, or one that reaches back to three thousand years to Ancient Greece, these books carefully examine not just the current political landscape but how that landscape was shaped. While our frontlist titles continue to share the latest insights from political theorists, our backlist supports and develops the conversation around topics such as newly formed democracies, transitional justice, and international labor law. How did we get where we are today, and where will we be going in the future?  Take a look at our backlist titles below as they consider those questions and more.

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Democracy is a system of government in which laws, policies, leadership, and major undertakings of a state or other polity are directly or indirectly decided by the “people,” a group historically constituted by only a minority of the population (e.g., all free adult males in ancient Athens or all sufficiently propertied adult males in 19th-century Britain) but generally understood since the mid-20th century to include all (or nearly all) adult citizens.

Studies of contemporary nonliterate tribal societies and other evidence suggest that democracy, broadly speaking, was practiced within tribes of hunter-gatherers in prehistoric times. The transition to settled agricultural communities led to inequalities of wealth and power between and within communities and hierarchical nondemocratic forms of social organization. Thousands of years later, in the 6th century BCE, a relatively democratic form of government was introduced in the city-state of Athens by Cleisthenes .

States with democratic governments prevent rule by autocrats, guarantee fundamental individual rights, allow for a relatively high level of political equality, and rarely make war on each other. As compared with nondemocratic states, they also better foster human development as measured by indicators such as health and education , provide more prosperity for their citizens, and ensure a broader range of personal freedoms.

The hallmark of democracy is that it permits citizens to participate in making laws and public policies by regularly choosing their leaders and by voting in assemblies or referenda . If their participation is to be meaningful and effective—if the democracy is to be real and not a sham—citizens must understand their own interests, know the relevant facts, and have the ability to critically evaluate political arguments. Each of those things presupposes education .

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democracy , literally, rule by the people. The term is derived from the Greek dēmokratia , which was coined from dēmos (“people”) and kratos (“rule”) in the middle of the 5th century bce to denote the political systems then existing in some Greek city-states , notably Athens .

(Read Madeleine Albright’s Britannica essay on democracy.)

The etymological origins of the term democracy hint at a number of urgent problems that go far beyond semantic issues. If a government of or by the people—a “popular” government—is to be established, at least five fundamental questions must be confronted at the outset, and two more are almost certain to be posed if the democracy continues to exist for long.

(1) What is the appropriate unit or association within which a democratic government should be established? A town or city? A country? A business corporation ? A university? An international organization ? All of these?

(2) Given an appropriate association—a city, for example—who among its members should enjoy full citizenship? Which persons, in other words, should constitute the dēmos ? Is every member of the association entitled to participate in governing it? Assuming that children should not be allowed to participate (as most adults would agree), should the dēmos include all adults? If it includes only a subset of the adult population, how small can the subset be before the association ceases to be a democracy and becomes something else, such as an aristocracy (government by the best, aristos ) or an oligarchy (government by the few, oligos )?

(3) Assuming a proper association and a proper dēmos , how are citizens to govern? What political organizations or institutions will they need? Will these institutions differ between different kinds of associations—for example, a small town and a large country?

(4) When citizens are divided on an issue, as they often will be, whose views should prevail, and in what circumstances? Should a majority always prevail, or should minorities sometimes be empowered to block or overcome majority rule?

(5) If a majority is ordinarily to prevail, what is to constitute a proper majority? A majority of all citizens? A majority of voters? Should a proper majority comprise not individual citizens but certain groups or associations of citizens, such as hereditary groups or territorial associations?

(6) The preceding questions presuppose an adequate answer to a sixth and even more important question: Why should “the people” rule? Is democracy really better than aristocracy or monarchy ? Perhaps, as Plato argues in the Republic , the best government would be led by a minority of the most highly qualified persons—an aristocracy of “ philosopher-kings .” What reasons could be given to show that Plato’s view is wrong?

(7) No association could maintain a democratic government for very long if a majority of the dēmos —or a majority of the government—believed that some other form of government were better. Thus, a minimum condition for the continued existence of a democracy is that a substantial proportion of both the dēmos and the leadership believes that popular government is better than any feasible alternative . What conditions, in addition to this one, favour the continued existence of democracy? What conditions are harmful to it? Why have some democracies managed to endure, even through periods of severe crisis, while so many others have collapsed?

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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.

This entry focuses on issues in contemporary democratic theory. Although it mentions authors in the history of philosophy where relevant, it does not attempt to give a history of democratic theory. Readers interested in more in-depth discussions of historical figures important to the development of democratic theory are advised to look at the entries listed in the “Historical Figures” section towards the end of this entry.

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, 2.1.1.4 economic justifications of democracy, 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

4.2.6 sortition, 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, 8. historical figures, 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 Marsilius [DP]; 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.

There are a number of economic justifications of democratic institutions. They proceed from the idea that preferences are given and that institutions are justified in terms of how citizens, given their preferences, would rationally want their society to be organized. The two accounts we mention here are in a broadly contractarian tradition, which seeks to determine what persons would agree to as a framework for collective decision making. Probably the most famous of these efforts and the one that has led to the highly fruitful research program of public choice theory is that of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their classic work The Calculus of Consent (1963). They argue that something like constitutional democracy could arise from a state of nature in which persons, with their basic natural and property rights protected, would agree to a collective decision procedure. The basic preference structure is self-interest in which persons attempt to maximize the stream of benefits to themselves. Individuals desire a collective decision-making apparatus in order to take care of problems that arise in the state of nature from uncontrolled external costs and public bads, which are costs that arise for everyone because no individual has incentive to limit them. External costs are costs that persons impose others without their consent. Hence, the purpose of the collective decision making is to take care of problems that arise when markets are inefficient because of externalities and public bads. The design of the decision procedure is meant to minimize two kinds of costs: external costs and decision costs. Decision costs are costs that arise from the difficulty of making collective decisions. Such decision making takes time and resources. Here is the basic calculation each person considers when choosing a collective decision procedure. On the one hand, they consider the external costs imposed on them if the decision procedure is not a unanimity procedure. Each person reflects that as the decision procedure approximates unanimity the chance of external costs imposed on them goes to zero. Taking the external costs of the procedure alone into account each prefers unanimity. On the other hand, each person considers the decision costs of a collective procedure. Here, as the decision procedure approaches unanimity the decision costs grow extremely large because of all the haggling such a procedure would generate. The procedure each person would choose under the circumstances would attempt to minimize the combination of these two costs. It would be a procedure that is close to majority rule, though there is no reason to suppose that majority rule itself would be chosen.

One objection is that the assumptions behind the argument are too strong. Buchanan and Tullock argue that this process would lead to unanimous agreement on a collective decision procedure under certain assumptions such as individuals cannot be divided into groups with strongly opposed interests and when individuals are sufficiently uncertain of their fates in the long term that their interests become more or less the same. They are in effect behind a veil of ignorance with regard to the future. These assumptions have been contested as descriptions of any plausible circumstances in which societies find themselves.

Another broadly economic approach can be found in Douglas Rae (1969). Rae argues that individuals with preferences over social states would generally prefer majority rule over the long run because majority rule maximizes the chances of the satisfaction of their preferences. The Rae-Taylor theorem states that if each individual has an equal prior probability of preferring each of the two alternatives, majority rule maximizes each individual’s expected utility (see the Section 2.4 of the entry on social choice theory ). Again the background assumption is that people don’t know how often they fall in the majority or minority and don’t have any special preference for the status quo. Under these circumstances, one gets what one wants more often from a collective decision procedure when it is majoritarian (see also Coleman [1989]).

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; see also Marsilius [DP]). 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.

It has been argued that some of the core problems of electoral representative democracy can be solved by embracing the appointment of political officials by random selection, or sortition . Athenian democracy involved direct democracy for the making of laws and sortition for the choice of officials. Sortition is arguably consistent with the definition of democracy offered in section 1 because, in virtue of the fact that citizens have an equal chance of being selected, sortition is characterized by equality at a crucial stage of the decision-making process. Alex Guerrero (2014) argues that sortition can avoid the related problems of political ignorance, lack of representative accountability, and capture of the political process by elites. The problems are solved because the appointment of public officials does not depend on the input of ordinary citizens who are likely to be ignorant about political matters, nor does it leave space for the wealthy and powerful to influence official decision-making through funding electoral campaigns. One objection is that sortition ignores citizens’ interests in being part of the process of collective self-governance and rather than merely having an equal chance to be part of this process (Lafont 2019). Another objection is that the process of sortition does not allow for choosing representatives and political parties that have put together a conception of how all the interests in society are to fit together in a just and reasonable whole.

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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Democracy Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on democracy.

Democracy is known as the finest form of government. Why so? Because in a democracy, the people of the country choose their government. They enjoy certain rights which are very essential for any human being to live freely and happily. There are various democratic countries in the world , but India is the largest one. Democracy has withstood the test of time, and while other forms have the government has failed, democracy stood strong. It has time and again proved its importance and impact.

Significance of a Democracy

Democracy is very important for human development . When people have free will to live freely, they will be happier. Moreover, we have seen how other forms of government have turned out to be. Citizens are not that happy and prosperous in a monarchy or anarchy.

Furthermore, democracy lets people have equal rights. This ensures that equality prevails all over the country. Subsequently, it also gives them duties. These duties make them better citizens and are also important for their overall development.

Most importantly, in a democracy, the people form the government. So, this selection of the government by the citizens gives everyone a chance to work for their country. It allows the law to prevail efficiently as the rules are made by people whom they have selected.

In addition, democracy allows people of various religions and cultures to exist peacefully. It makes them live in harmony with one another. People of democracy are more tolerant and accepting of each other’s differences. This is very important for any country to be happy and prosper.

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India: A Democratic Country

India is known to be the largest democracy all over the world. After the rule of the British ended in 1947 , India adopted democracy. In India, all the citizens who are above the age of 18 get the right to vote. It does not discriminate on the basis of caste, creed, gender, color, or more.

Although India is the largest democracy it still has a long way to go. The country faces a lot of problems which do not let it efficiently function as a democracy. The caste system is still prevalent which hampers with the socialist principle of democracy. Moreover, communalism is also on the rise. This interferes with the secular aspect of the country. All these differences need to be set aside to ensure the happiness and prosperity of the citizens.

In short, democracy in India is still better than that in most of the countries. Nonetheless, there is a lot of room for improvement which we must focus on. The government must implement stringent laws to ensure no discrimination takes place. In addition, awareness programs must be held to make citizens aware of their rights and duties.

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The History of Democracy

2013, Das Argument

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The aim of The Secret History of Democracy has been to open debate on a larger view of democratic practice than that encapsulated by its wellknown standard history. The book came about from a concern that, while democracy was experiencing an ascendancy that began in the aftermath of the Second World War and intensified with the end of the Cold War, the global uptake of this particular form of governance came at the very moment when its limitations were becoming clearer: in its European and American heartlands there was less interest in participating in democracy; Clinton began in hope but ended in scandal; 9/11 was a victory for intolerance precisely because Western democracy restricted its own freedoms; the Bush, Blair and Howard governments became less relevant to their constituents and waged unpopular wars; the global financial crisis revealed democracy’s dependence on a flawed economic model; and difficulties in dealing with the global impact of climate change showed the limitations of national democracies, hostage to sectional interests. The exemplars of democracy were not having an easy time.

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Democracy has never been more popular. It is successfully practiced today in a myriad of different ways by people across virtually every cultural, religious or socio-economic context. The forty-five essays collected in this companion suggest that the global popularity of democracy derives in part from its breadth and depth in the common history of human civilization. The chapters include exceptional accounts of democracy in ancient Greece and Rome, modern Europe and America, among peoples’ movements and national revolutions, and its triumph since the end of the Cold War. However, this book also includes alternative accounts of democracy’s history: its origins in prehistoric societies and early city-states, under-acknowledged contributions from China, Africa and the Islamic world, its familiarity to various Indigenous Australians and Native Americans, the various challenges it faces today in South America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the latest democratic developments in light of globalization and new technologies, and potential future pathways to a more democratic world. Understanding where democracy comes from, where its greatest successes and most dismal failures lie, is central to democracy’s project of inventing ways to address the need of people everywhere to live in peace, freedom and with a say in the decisions that affect their lives.

The notion that democracy could have a ‘secret’ history might at first seem strange to many readers. Indeed, the history of democracy has become so standardized, is so familiar and appears to be so complete that it is hard to believe that it could hold any secrets whatsoever. The ancient Greek practice of demokratia and the functions of the Roman Republic are foundational to Western understanding of politics; school textbooks introduce the Magna Carta and the rise of the English Parliament; Hollywood blockbusters recount the events surrounding the American Declaration of Independence; many best-selling novels have been written about the French Revolution; and the gradual global spread of the Western model of democracy has been a recurrent news story since the end of the Cold War. So pervasive is this traditional story of democracy that it has achieved the status of received wisdom: endlessly recycled without criticism by policy-makers, academics, in the popular media and in classrooms across the world. The central argument of this book is that there is much more to the history of democracy than this foreshortened genealogy admits. There is a whole ‘secret’ history, too big, too complex and insufficiently Western in character to be included in the standard narrative.

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This was offered as a discussion text for the Internationalist Perspectives Group. A Marxist critique of the form of democracy rather than its content arguing that all democracy is the fetish of an alienated consciousness. From its Greek origins to modern imperialism democracy is the essential form that separates civil society from political, serving primarily to protect private property and to ensure free labor. Utilizing the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and E. Pasukanis, this paper argues that liberation will not take the democratic form but seek to develop social arrangements in which social praxis is derived from both theoria and poiesis in a way that valorizes sensual forms of knowledge, knowledge that is specifically excluded by the democratic form.

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ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Democracy (ancient greece).

Democracy in ancient Greece served as one of the first forms of self-rule government in the ancient world. The system and ideas employed by the ancient Greeks had profound influences on how democracy developed, and its impact on the formation of the U.S. government.

Social Studies, Ancient Civilizations

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The ancient Greeks were the first to create a democracy . The word “ democracy ” comes from two Greek words that mean people ( demos ) and rule ( kratos ). Democracy is the idea that the citizens of a country should take an active role in the government of their country and manage it directly or through elected representatives . In addition, it supports the idea that the people can replace their government through peaceful transfers of power rather than violent uprising or revolution . Thus, a key part of democracy is that the people have a voice.

The first known democracy in the world was in Athens. Athenian democracy developed around the fifth century B.C.E. The Greek idea of democracy was different from present-day democracy because, in Athens, all adult citizens were required to take an active part in the government. If they did not fulfill their duty they would be fined and sometimes marked with red paint. The Athenian definition of “citizens” was also different from modern-day citizens: only free men were considered citizens in Athens. Women, children, and slaves were not considered citizens and therefore could not vote.

Each year 500 names were chosen from all the citizens of ancient Athens. Those 500 citizens had to actively serve in the government for one year. During that year, they were responsible for making new laws and controlled all parts of the political process. When a new law was proposed, all the citizens of Athens had the opportunity to vote on it. To vote, citizens had to attend the assembly on the day the vote took place. This form of government is called direct democracy.

The United States has a representative democracy. Representative democracy is a government in which citizens vote for representatives who create and change laws that govern the people rather than getting to vote directly on the laws themselves.

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DPI-703: Democracy: The Long View and the Bumpy History

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This course will explore key episodes, turning points, and themes in the history of democracy from ancient Athens to the present. It is shaped by two overarching and compelling questions: What circumstances, conditions, and forces are conducive to the development, deepening, and preservation of democratic ideas, values, and institutions? And conversely, what are the conditions or forces that tend to inhibit or threaten the emergence, strengthening, or  survival of democracy? Among the historical episodes to be examined are: ancient Greece and the Near East; the American Revolution; Europe during industrialization; Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries; India and Pakistan; the “third wave” of democratization; and the challenges facing democracies in the last thirty years. Inescapably (and by design) we will also be discussing the relevance of this history to current and recent developments.

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The Last Time Democracy Almost Died

The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. “The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America,” a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937. “In the Legislatures, over the radio, at the luncheon table, in the drawing rooms, at meetings of forums and in all kinds of groups of citizens everywhere, people are talking about the democratic way of life.” People bickered and people hollered, and they also made rules. “You are a liar!” one guy shouted from the audience during a political debate heard on the radio by ten million Americans, from Missoula to Tallahassee. “Now, now, we don’t allow that,” the moderator said, calmly, and asked him to leave.

In the nineteen-thirties, you could count on the Yankees winning the World Series, dust storms plaguing the prairies, evangelicals preaching on the radio, Franklin Delano Roosevelt residing in the White House, people lining up for blocks to get scraps of food, and democracies dying, from the Andes to the Urals and the Alps.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson’s Administration had promised that winning the Great War would “make the world safe for democracy.” The peace carved nearly a dozen new states out of the former Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian empires. The number of democracies in the world rose; the spread of liberal-democratic governance began to appear inevitable. But this was no more than a reverie. Infant democracies grew, toddled, wobbled, and fell: Hungary, Albania, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia. In older states, too, the desperate masses turned to authoritarianism. Benito Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922. It had taken a century and a half for European monarchs who ruled by divine right and brute force to be replaced by constitutional democracies and the rule of law. Now Fascism and Communism toppled these governments in a matter of months, even before the stock-market crash of 1929 and the misery that ensued.

Receive alerts about new stories in our exploration of democracy in America.

“Epitaphs for democracy are the fashion of the day,” the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, dismally, in 1930. The annus horribilis that followed differed from every other year in the history of the world, according to the British historian Arnold Toynbee: “In 1931, men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of Society might break down and cease to work.” When Japan invaded Manchuria, the League of Nations condemned the annexation, to no avail. “The liberal state is destined to perish,” Mussolini predicted in 1932. “All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.” By 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann was telling an audience of students at Berkeley that “the old relationships among the great masses of the people of the earth have disappeared.” What next? More epitaphs: Greece, Romania, Estonia, and Latvia. Authoritarians multiplied in Portugal, Uruguay, Spain. Japan invaded Shanghai. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. “The present century is the century of authority,” he declared, “a century of the Right, a Fascist century.”

American democracy, too, staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” F.D.R. said in his first Inaugural Address, telling Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. But there was more to be afraid of, including Americans’ own declining faith in self-government. “What Does Democracy Mean?” NBC radio asked listeners. “Do we Negroes believe in democracy?” W. E. B. Du Bois asked the readers of his newspaper column. Could it happen here? Sinclair Lewis asked in 1935. Americans suffered, and hungered, and wondered. The historian Charles Beard, in the inevitable essay on “The Future of Democracy in the United States,” predicted that American democracy would endure, if only because “there is in America, no Rome, no Berlin to march on.” Some Americans turned to Communism . Some turned to Fascism. And a lot of people, worried about whether American democracy could survive past the end of the decade, strove to save it.

“It’s not too late,” Jimmy Stewart pleaded with Congress, rasping, exhausted, in “ Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ,” in 1939. “Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light.” It wasn’t too late. It’s still not too late.

There’s a kind of likeness you see in family photographs, generation after generation. The same ears, the same funny nose. Sometimes now looks a lot like then. Still, it can be hard to tell whether the likeness is more than skin deep.

In the nineteen-nineties, with the end of the Cold War, democracies grew more plentiful, much as they had after the end of the First World War. As ever, the infant-mortality rate for democracies was high: baby democracies tend to die in their cradles. Starting in about 2005, the number of democracies around the world began to fall, as it had in the nineteen-thirties. Authoritarians rose to power: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Donald J. Trump in the United States.

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“American democracy,” as a matter of history, is democracy with an asterisk, the symbol A-Rod’s name would need if he were ever inducted into the Hall of Fame. Not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act can the United States be said to have met the basic conditions for political equality requisite in a democracy. All the same, measured not against its past but against its contemporaries, American democracy in the twenty-first century is withering. The Democracy Index rates a hundred and sixty-seven countries, every year, on a scale that ranges from “full democracy” to “authoritarian regime.” In 2006, the U.S. was a “full democracy,” the seventeenth most democratic nation in the world. In 2016, the index for the first time rated the United States a “flawed democracy,” and since then American democracy has gotten only more flawed. True, the United States still doesn’t have a Rome or a Berlin to march on. That hasn’t saved the nation from misinformation, tribalization, domestic terrorism, human-rights abuses, political intolerance, social-media mob rule, white nationalism, a criminal President, the nobbling of Congress, a corrupt Presidential Administration, assaults on the press, crippling polarization, the undermining of elections, and an epistemological chaos that is the only air that totalitarianism can breathe.

Nothing so sharpens one’s appreciation for democracy as bearing witness to its demolition. Mussolini called Italy and Germany “the greatest and soundest democracies which exist in the world today,” and Hitler liked to say that, with Nazi Germany, he had achieved a “beautiful democracy,” prompting the American political columnist Dorothy Thompson to remark of the Fascist state, “If it is going to call itself democratic we had better find another word for what we have and what we want.” In the nineteen-thirties, Americans didn’t find another word. But they did work to decide what they wanted, and to imagine and to build it. Thompson, who had been a foreign correspondent in Germany and Austria and had interviewed the Führer, said, in a column that reached eight million readers, “Be sure you know what you prepare to defend.”

It’s a paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to attack it, to ask more of it, by way of criticism, protest, and dissent. American democracy in the nineteen-thirties had plenty of critics, left and right, from Mexican-Americans who objected to a brutal regime of forced deportations to businessmen who believed the New Deal to be unconstitutional. W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that, unless the United States met its obligations to the dignity and equality of all its citizens and ended its enthrallment to corporations, American democracy would fail: “If it is going to use this power to force the world into color prejudice and race antagonism; if it is going to use it to manufacture millionaires, increase the rule of wealth, and break down democratic government everywhere; if it is going increasingly to stand for reaction, fascism, white supremacy and imperialism; if it is going to promote war and not peace; then America will go the way of the Roman Empire.”

The historian Mary Ritter Beard warned that American democracy would make no headway against its “ruthless enemies—war, fascism, ignorance, poverty, scarcity, unemployment, sadistic criminality, racial persecution, man’s lust for power and woman’s miserable trailing in the shadow of his frightful ways”—unless Americans could imagine a future democracy in which women would no longer be barred from positions of leadership: “If we will not so envisage our future, no Bill of Rights, man’s or woman’s, is worth the paper on which it is printed.”

If the United States hasn’t gone the way of the Roman Empire and the Bill of Rights is still worth more than the paper on which it’s printed, that’s because so many people have been, ever since, fighting the fights Du Bois and Ritter Beard fought. There have been wins and losses. The fight goes on.

Could no system of rule but extremism hold back the chaos of economic decline? In the nineteen-thirties, people all over the world, liberals, hoped that the United States would be able to find a middle road, somewhere between the malignity of a state-run economy and the mercilessness of laissez-faire capitalism. Roosevelt campaigned in 1932 on the promise to rescue American democracy by way of a “new deal for the American people,” his version of that third way: relief, recovery, and reform. He won forty-two of forty-eight states, and trounced the incumbent, Herbert Hoover, in the Electoral College 472 to 59. Given the national emergency in which Roosevelt took office, Congress granted him an almost entirely free hand, even as critics raised concerns that the powers he assumed were barely short of dictatorial.

New Dealers were trying to save the economy; they ended up saving democracy. They built a new America; they told a new American story. On New Deal projects, people from different parts of the country labored side by side, constructing roads and bridges and dams, everything from the Lincoln Tunnel to the Hoover Dam, joining together in a common endeavor, shoulder to the wheel, hand to the forge. Many of those public-works projects, like better transportation and better electrification, also brought far-flung communities, down to the littlest town or the remotest farm, into a national culture, one enriched with new funds for the arts, theatre, music, and storytelling. With radio, more than with any other technology of communication, before or since, Americans gained a sense of their shared suffering, and shared ideals: they listened to one another’s voices.

This didn’t happen by accident. Writers and actors and directors and broadcasters made it happen. They dedicated themselves to using the medium to bring people together. Beginning in 1938, for instance, F.D.R.’s Works Progress Administration produced a twenty-six-week radio-drama series for CBS called “Americans All, Immigrants All,” written by Gilbert Seldes, the former editor of The Dial. “What brought people to this country from the four corners of the earth?” a pamphlet distributed to schoolteachers explaining the series asked. “What gifts did they bear? What were their problems? What problems remain unsolved?” The finale celebrated the American experiment: “The story of magnificent adventure! The record of an unparalleled event in the history of mankind!”

There is no twenty-first-century equivalent of Seldes’s “Americans All, Immigrants All,” because it is no longer acceptable for a serious artist to write in this vein, and for this audience, and for this purpose. (In some quarters, it was barely acceptable even then.) Love of the ordinary, affection for the common people, concern for the commonweal: these were features of the best writing and art of the nineteen-thirties. They are not so often features lately.

Americans reëlected F.D.R. in 1936 by one of the widest margins in the country’s history. American magazines continued the trend from the twenties, in which hardly a month went by without their taking stock: “Is Democracy Doomed?” “Can Democracy Survive?” (Those were the past century’s versions of more recent titles, such as “ How Democracy Ends ,” “ Why Liberalism Failed ,” “ How the Right Lost Its Mind ,” and “ How Democracies Die .” The same ears, that same funny nose.) In 1934, the Christian Science Monitor published a debate called “Whither Democracy?,” addressed “to everyone who has been thinking about the future of democracy—and who hasn’t.” It staked, as adversaries, two British scholars: Alfred Zimmern, a historian from Oxford, on the right, and Harold Laski, a political theorist from the London School of Economics, on the left. “Dr. Zimmern says in effect that where democracy has failed it has not been really tried,” the editors explained. “Professor Laski sees an irrepressible conflict between the idea of political equality in democracy and the fact of economic inequality in capitalism, and expects at least a temporary resort to Fascism or a capitalistic dictatorship.” On the one hand, American democracy is safe; on the other hand, American democracy is not safe.

Zimmern and Laski went on speaking tours of the United States, part of a long parade of visiting professors brought here to prognosticate on the future of democracy. Laski spoke to a crowd three thousand strong, in Washington’s Constitution Hall. “ Laski Tells How to Save Democracy ,” the Washington Post reported. Zimmern delivered a series of lectures titled “The Future of Democracy,” at the University of Buffalo, in which he warned that democracy had been undermined by a new aristocracy of self-professed experts. “I am no more ready to be governed by experts than I am to be governed by the ex-Kaiser,” he professed, expertly.

The year 1935 happened to mark the centennial of the publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s “ Democracy in America ,” an occasion that elicited still more lectures from European intellectuals coming to the United States to remark on its system of government and the character of its people, close on Tocqueville’s heels. Heinrich Brüning, a scholar and a former Chancellor of Germany, lectured at Princeton on “The Crisis of Democracy”; the Swiss political theorist William Rappard gave the same title to a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Chicago. In “The Prospects for Democracy,” the Scottish historian and later BBC radio quiz-show panelist Denis W. Brogan offered little but gloom: “The defenders of democracy, the thinkers and writers who still believe in its merits, are in danger of suffering the fate of Aristotle, who kept his eyes fixedly on the city-state at a time when that form of government was being reduced to a shadow by the rise of Alexander’s world empire.” Brogan hedged his bets by predicting the worst. It’s an old trick.

The endless train of academics were also called upon to contribute to the nation’s growing number of periodicals. In 1937, The New Republic , arguing that “at no time since the rise of political democracy have its tenets been so seriously challenged as they are today,” ran a series on “The Future of Democracy,” featuring pieces by the likes of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. “Do you think that political democracy is now on the wane?” the editors asked each writer. The series’ lead contributor, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, took issue with the question, as philosophers, thankfully, do. “I call this kind of question ‘meteorological,’ ” he grumbled. “It is like asking, ‘Do you think that it is going to rain today? Had I better take my umbrella?’ ” The trouble, Croce explained, is that political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. “We need solely to make up our own minds and to act.”

Don’t ask whether you need an umbrella. Go outside and stop the rain.

Here are some of the sorts of people who went out and stopped the rain in the nineteen-thirties: schoolteachers, city councillors, librarians, poets, union organizers, artists, precinct workers, soldiers, civil-rights activists, and investigative reporters. They knew what they were prepared to defend and they defended it, even though they also knew that they risked attack from both the left and the right. Charles Beard (Mary Ritter’s husband) spoke out against the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, when he smeared scholars and teachers as Communists. “The people who are doing the most damage to American democracy are men like Charles A. Beard,” said a historian at Trinity College in Hartford, speaking at a high school on the subject of “Democracy and the Future,” and warning against reading Beard’s books—at a time when Nazis in Germany and Austria were burning “un-German” books in public squares. That did not exactly happen here, but in the nineteen-thirties four of five American superintendents of schools recommended assigning only those U.S. history textbooks which “omit any facts likely to arouse in the minds of the students question or doubt concerning the justice of our social order and government.” Beard’s books, God bless them, raised doubts.

Beard didn’t back down. Nor did W.P.A. muralists and artists, who were subject to the same attack. Instead, Beard took pains to point out that Americans liked to think of themselves as good talkers and good arguers, people with a particular kind of smarts. Not necessarily book learning, but street smarts—reasonableness, open-mindedness, level-headedness. “The kind of universal intellectual prostration required by Bolshevism and Fascism is decidedly foreign to American ‘intelligence,’ ” Beard wrote. Possibly, he allowed, you could call this a stubborn independence of mind, or even mulishness. “Whatever the interpretation, our wisdom or ignorance stands in the way of our accepting the totalitarian assumption of Omniscience,” he insisted. “And to this extent it contributes to the continuance of the arguing, debating, never-settling-anything-finally methods of political democracy.” Maybe that was whistling in the dark, but sometimes a whistle is all you’ve got.

The more argument the better is what the North Carolina-born George V. Denny, Jr., was banking on, anyway, after a neighbor of his, in Scarsdale, declared that he so strongly disagreed with F.D.R. that he never listened to him. Denny, who helped run something called the League for Political Education, thought that was nuts. In 1935, he launched “America’s Town Meeting of the Air,” an hour-long debate program, broadcast nationally on NBC’s Blue Network. Each episode opened with a town crier ringing a bell and hollering, “Town meeting tonight! Town meeting tonight!” Then Denny moderated a debate, usually among three or four panelists, on a controversial subject (Does the U.S. have a truly free press? Should schools teach politics?), before opening the discussion up to questions from an audience of more than a thousand people. The debates were conducted at a lecture hall, usually in New York, and broadcast to listeners gathered in public libraries all over the country, so that they could hold their own debates once the show ended. “We are living today on the thin edge of history,” Max Lerner, the editor of The Nation , said in 1938, during a “Town Meeting of the Air” debate on the meaning of democracy. His panel included a Communist, an exile from the Spanish Civil War, a conservative American political economist, and a Russian columnist. “We didn’t expect to settle anything, and therefore we succeeded,” the Spanish exile said at the end of the hour, offering this definition: “A democracy is a place where a ‘Town Meeting of the Air’ can take place.”

No one expected anyone to come up with an undisputable definition of democracy, since the point was disputation. Asking people about the meaning and the future of democracy and listening to them argue it out was really only a way to get people to stretch their civic muscles. “Democracy can only be saved by democratic men and women,” Dorothy Thompson once said. “The war against democracy begins by the destruction of the democratic temper, the democratic method and the democratic heart. If the democratic temper be exacerbated into wanton unreasonableness, which is the essence of the evil, then a victory has been won for the evil we despise and prepare to defend ourselves against, even though it’s 3,000 miles away and has never moved.”

The most ambitious plan to get Americans to show up in the same room and argue with one another in the nineteen-thirties came out of Des Moines, Iowa, from a one-eyed former bricklayer named John W. Studebaker, who had become the superintendent of the city’s schools. Studebaker, who after the Second World War helped create the G.I. Bill, had the idea of opening those schools up at night, so that citizens could hold debates. In 1933, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and support from the American Association for Adult Education, he started a five-year experiment in civic education.

The meetings began at a quarter to eight, with a fifteen-minute news update, followed by a forty-five-minute lecture, and thirty minutes of debate. The idea was that “the people of the community of every political affiliation, creed, and economic view have an opportunity to participate freely.” When Senator Guy Gillette, a Democrat from Iowa, talked about “Why I Support the New Deal,” Senator Lester Dickinson, a Republican from Iowa, talked about “Why I Oppose the New Deal.” Speakers defended Fascism. They attacked capitalism. They attacked Fascism. They defended capitalism. Within the first nine months of the program, thirteen thousand of Des Moines’s seventy-six thousand adults had attended a forum. The program got so popular that in 1934 F.D.R. appointed Studebaker the U.S. Commissioner of Education and, with the eventual help of Eleanor Roosevelt, the program became a part of the New Deal, and received federal funding. The federal forum program started out in ten test sites—from Orange County, California, to Sedgwick County, Kansas, and Pulaski County, Arkansas. It came to include almost five hundred forums in forty-three states and involved two and a half million Americans. Even people who had steadfastly predicted the demise of democracy participated. “It seems to me the only method by which we are going to achieve democracy in the United States,” Du Bois wrote, in 1937.

The federal government paid for it, but everything else fell under local control, and ordinary people made it work, by showing up and participating. Usually, school districts found the speakers and decided on the topics after collecting ballots from the community. In some parts of the country, even in rural areas, meetings were held four and five times a week. They started in schools and spread to Y.M.C.A.s and Y.W.C.A.s, labor halls, libraries, settlement houses, and businesses, during lunch hours. Many of the meetings were broadcast by radio. People who went to those meetings debated all sorts of things:

Should the Power of the Supreme Court Be Altered? Do Company Unions Help Labor? Do Machines Oust Men? Must the West Get Out of the East? Can We Conquer Poverty? Should Capital Punishment Be Abolished? Is Propaganda a Menace? Do We Need a New Constitution? Should Women Work? Is America a Good Neighbor? Can It Happen Here?

These efforts don’t always work. Still, trying them is better than talking about the weather, and waiting for someone to hand you an umbrella.

When a terrible hurricane hit New England in 1938, Dr. Lorine Pruette, a Tennessee-born psychologist who had written an essay called “Why Women Fail,” and who had urged F.D.R. to name only women to his Cabinet, found herself marooned at a farm in New Hampshire with a young neighbor, sixteen-year-old Alice Hooper, a high-school sophomore. Waiting out the storm, they had nothing to do except listen to the news, which, needless to say, concerned the future of democracy. Alice asked Pruette a question: “What is it everyone on the radio is talking about—what is this democracy—what does it mean?” Somehow, in the end, NBC arranged a coast-to-coast broadcast, in which eight prominent thinkers—two ministers, three professors, a former ambassador, a poet, and a journalist—tried to explain to Alice the meaning of democracy. American democracy had found its “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” moment, except that it was messier, and more interesting, because those eight people didn’t agree on the answer. Democracy, Alice, is the darnedest thing.

That broadcast was made possible by the workers who brought electricity to rural New Hampshire; the legislators who signed the 1934 federal Communications Act, mandating public-interest broadcasting; the executives at NBC who decided that it was important to run this program; the two ministers, the three professors, the former ambassador, the poet, and the journalist who gave their time, for free, to a public forum, and agreed to disagree without acting like asses; and a whole lot of Americans who took the time to listen, carefully, even though they had plenty of other things to do. Getting out of our current jam will likely require something different, but not entirely different. And it will be worth doing.

A decade-long debate about the future of democracy came to a close at the end of the nineteen-thirties—but not because it had been settled. In 1939, the World’s Fair opened in Queens, with a main exhibit featuring the saga of democracy and a chipper motto: “The World of Tomorrow.” The fairgrounds included a Court of Peace, with pavilions for every nation. By the time the fair opened, Czechoslovakia had fallen to Germany, though, and its pavilion couldn’t open. Shortly afterward, Edvard Beneš, the exiled President of Czechoslovakia, delivered a series of lectures at the University of Chicago on, yes, the future of democracy, though he spoke less about the future than about the past, and especially about the terrible present, a time of violently unmoored traditions and laws and agreements, a time “of moral and intellectual crisis and chaos.” Soon, more funereal bunting was brought to the World’s Fair, to cover Poland, Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. By the time the World of Tomorrow closed, in 1940, half the European hall lay under a shroud of black.

The federal government stopped funding the forum program in 1941. Americans would take up their debate about the future of democracy, in a different form, only after the defeat of the Axis. For now, there was a war to fight. And there were still essays to publish, if not about the future, then about the present. In 1943, E. B. White got a letter in the mail, from the Writers’ War Board, asking him to write a statement about “ The Meaning of Democracy .” He was a little weary of these pieces, but he knew how much they mattered. He wrote back, “Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.” It meant something once. And, the thing is, it still does. ♦

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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AT THE SMITHSONIAN

The real birth of american democracy.

This week, 215 years ago, the lofty ideals of the Constitution passed their first test

Joseph Stromberg

The dawn of American democracy didn’t come in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. It didn’t come in 1788, when the Constitution was ratified by the states, or in 1789, when George Washington took office. According to Harry Rubenstein , chair and curator of the Division of Political History at the American History Museum , the symbolic birth of our system of government didn’t come until its noble ideals were actually put to the test. On September 19, 215 years ago, Washington published his farewell address , marking one the first peaceful transfers of power in American history and cementing the country’s status as a stable, democratic state.

This moment, Rubenstein says, “is crucial for creating the in-and-out system of government that we have. And this is unique. In that time and era, politicians would gain power, or kings would stay in office until they die.” At that nascent stage in American history, before precedents such as the two-term limit were even set, many were uncertain about what would happen after a galvanizing figure like Washington resigned office. But at this critical juncture, the leadership of Washington and others proved more than adequate to preserve the democracy. “Stepping down is unique,” says Rubenstein. “It’s a powerful statement about Washington and American democracy.”

In addition to the symbolic importance of voluntarily leaving office, the content of Washington’s farewell address—which was published in newspapers across the country and as a pamphlet—was important in establishing the values of the quickly maturing American democracy. The 51-paragraph document covered Washington’s decision to retire, the importance of a unified national government, the folly of getting involved in foreign affairs and other issues. “What the farewell address aims to do is call for national unity: an end to the squabbling between the parties, between Federalists and Republicans, and an end to the sectionalism of West, North and South,” Rubenstein says. “It’s a call for trying to form something larger than local interests.” For an infant nation that had resembled more of a loose association of independent states under the Articles of Confederation just years earlier, this message of unity was significant.

The candle holder Washington used in writing the address. Photo courtesy American History Museum

Of course, Washington’s lofty written standards weren’t always achieved in real life. “I think his desire for national unity, while hard for people to act on, was something that most aspired to,” says Rubenstein. “It’s just that everyone wanted everyone else to agree with their position.” Even during Washington’s presidency, the buildup of partisan politics that would characterize our government was beginning. “You start to have the birth of the parties, especially during his second administration: the squabbling between the two parties, between Hamilton and Jefferson,” Rubenstein says.

But Washington’s core message would remain at the heart of the public conception of the country as a unified nation. “His intention is to urge people to put aside their differences, and not get caught up in the squabbles of the international community,” says Rubenstein. “As an administrator, he was witnessing all these tugs and pulls, and so this is his last major statement. These are the beliefs that he’s hoping people will follow.” The importance of checks and balances, the danger of foreign alliances, the authority of the Constitution, and the need for national unity were adopted with conviction in the years to follow by legislators across the political spectrum.

The American History Museum is home to a critical relic of the farewell address. “According to family tradition,” Rubenstein says, “Washington worked on his farewell address by the light of this candle stand .” During the pre-electric era, candle stands with reflectors were often used to increase the light output of a candle at night, and were used on desks in a manner similar to a reading lamp. This brass stand was passed down among Washington’s descendants before being sold to the government in 1878.

In reflecting upon the farewell address, it hardly escapes notice that the very issues Washington focused on—political rivalry, entanglement in foreign affairs—are still in play. “These debates are still relevant today,” Rubenstein says.

But even from the nation’s infancy, it pays to remember, the high-minded standards of the Constitution haven’t always been universally achieved. Our democracy has always been a messy experiment. Nevertheless, the ideas in Washington’s farewell still help to guide lawmakers and ordinary citizens alike.  “At its core, I think that we still desire many of the aspirations that Washington professed in this document,” says Rubenstain. “Ultimately, we want people to think of the good of the nation.”

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Joseph Stromberg | | READ MORE

Joseph Stromberg was previously a digital reporter for Smithsonian .

10.2 The Rise of American Democracy

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe the key points of the election of 1828
• Explain the scandals of Andrew Jackson’s first term in office

A turning point in American political history occurred in 1828, which witnessed the election of Andrew Jackson over the incumbent John Quincy Adams. While democratic practices had been in ascendance since 1800, the year also saw the further unfolding of a democratic spirit in the United States. Supporters of Jackson called themselves Democrats or the Democracy, giving birth to the Democratic Party. Political authority appeared to rest with the majority as never before.

THE CAMPAIGN AND ELECTION OF 1828

During the 1800s, democratic reforms made steady progress with the abolition of property qualifications for voting and the birth of new forms of political party organization. The 1828 campaign pushed new democratic practices even further and highlighted the difference between the Jacksonian expanded electorate and the older, exclusive Adams style. A slogan of the day, “Adams who can write/Jackson who can fight,” captured the contrast between Adams the aristocrat and Jackson the frontiersman.

The 1828 campaign differed significantly from earlier presidential contests because of the party organization that promoted Andrew Jackson. Jackson and his supporters reminded voters of the “corrupt bargain” of 1824. They framed it as the work of a small group of political elites deciding who would lead the nation, acting in a self-serving manner and ignoring the will of the majority ( Figure 10.7 ). From Nashville, Tennessee, the Jackson campaign organized supporters around the nation through editorials in partisan newspapers and other publications. Pro-Jackson newspapers heralded the “hero of New Orleans” while denouncing Adams. Though he did not wage an election campaign filled with public appearances, Jackson did give one major campaign speech in New Orleans on January 8, the anniversary of the defeat of the British in 1815. He also engaged in rounds of discussion with politicians who came to his home, the Hermitage, in Nashville.

At the local level, Jackson’s supporters worked to bring in as many new voters as possible. Rallies, parades, and other rituals further broadcast the message that Jackson stood for the common man against the corrupt elite backing Adams and Clay. Democratic organizations called Hickory Clubs, a tribute to Jackson’s nickname, Old Hickory, also worked tirelessly to ensure his election.

In November 1828, Jackson won an overwhelming victory over Adams, capturing 56 percent of the popular vote and 68 percent of the electoral vote. As in 1800, when Jefferson had won over the Federalist incumbent John Adams, the presidency passed to a new political party, the Democrats. The election was the climax of several decades of expanding democracy in the United States and the end of the older politics of deference.

Click and Explore

Visit The Hermitage to explore a timeline of Andrew Jackson’s life and career. How do you think the events of his younger life affected the trajectory of his political career?

SCANDAL IN THE PRESIDENCY

Amid revelations of widespread fraud, including the disclosure that some $300,000 was missing from the Treasury Department, Jackson removed almost 50 percent of appointed civil officers, which allowed him to handpick their replacements. This replacement of appointed federal officials is called rotation in office . Lucrative posts, such as postmaster and deputy postmaster, went to party loyalists, especially in places where Jackson’s support had been weakest, such as New England. Some Democratic newspaper editors who had supported Jackson during the campaign also gained public jobs.

Jackson’s opponents were angered and took to calling the practice the spoils system, after the policies of Van Buren’s Bucktail Republican Party. The rewarding of party loyalists with government jobs resulted in spectacular instances of corruption. Perhaps the most notorious occurred in New York City, where a Jackson appointee made off with over $1 million. Such examples seemed proof positive that the Democrats were disregarding merit, education, and respectability in decisions about the governing of the nation.

In addition to dealing with rancor over rotation in office, the Jackson administration became embroiled in a personal scandal known as the Petticoat affair . This incident exacerbated the division between the president’s team and the insider class in the nation’s capital, who found the new arrivals from Tennessee lacking in decorum and propriety. At the center of the storm was Margaret (“Peggy”) O’Neal, a well-known socialite in Washington, DC ( Figure 10.8 ). O’Neal had connections to the republic’s most powerful men. She married John Timberlake, a naval officer, and they had three children. Rumors abounded, however, about her involvement with John Eaton, a U.S. senator from Tennessee who had come to Washington in 1818.

Timberlake committed suicide in 1828, setting off a flurry of rumors that he had been distraught over his wife’s reputed infidelities. Eaton and Mrs. Timberlake married soon after, with the full approval of President Jackson. The so-called Petticoat affair divided Washington society. Many Washington socialites snubbed the new Mrs. Eaton as a woman of low moral character. Among those who would have nothing to do with her was Vice President John C. Calhoun’s wife, Floride. Calhoun fell out of favor with President Jackson, who defended Peggy Eaton and derided those who would not socialize with her, declaring she was “as chaste as a virgin.” (Jackson had personal reasons for defending Eaton: he drew a parallel between Eaton’s treatment and that of his late wife, Rachel, who had been subjected to attacks on her reputation related to her first marriage, which had ended in divorce.) Martin Van Buren, who defended the Eatons and organized social gatherings with them, became close to Jackson, who came to rely on a group of informal advisers that included Van Buren and was dubbed the Kitchen Cabinet . This select group of presidential supporters highlights the importance of party loyalty to Jackson and the Democratic Party.

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Ancient Democracy: What is Democracy and Where Did it Start?

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Ancient democracy was invented at the beginning of the 5th century BCE at almost the same time in both Athens and Rome . The word democracy comes from the Greek word demokratia with demos meaning the people and kratos meaning power or rule. So put that together and you essentially get the rule of the people. Today’s idea of democracy is a representative democracy, which means the people have the power to choose their representative, whereas the democracy of Athens was a direct democracy Athenian democracy began with Cleisthenes reforming the earlier laws by the statesman Solon . His governmental and law reforms saw the beginning of democracy in Athens, and gave Cleisthenes the title of the Father of Athenian Democracy. After the Persian Wars , the general Pericles initiated the Delian League and was the man who advocated for what is known as radical democracy,. Pericles developed Athenian democracy until his death from the plague in 429 BCE. Roman democracy arose independently at pretty much the same time as in Greece ! Rome was ruled by a monarchy between 753-509 BCE when it abandoned that model and instituted the democracy of the Roman Republic . Instead of a king and his counsellors, Rome had a representative government of three branches: the Senate, the Consuls and the Judges. The Roman Republic, although it can’t be considered a true democracy, did give its citizens a voice in the way their city was governed. This same basic form would continue during the Roman Empire with the emperor taking the place of the Consuls. — ATTRIBUTIONS — You can find all attribution and credits for images, animations, graphics and music here - https://worldhistory.typehut.com/ancient-democracy-what-is-democracy-and-where-did-it-start-images-and-attributions-6199 The music used in this recording is the intellectual copyright of Michael Levy, a prolific composer for the recreated lyres of antiquity, and used with the creator's permission. Michael Levy's music is available to stream at all the major digital music platforms. Find out more on: https://www.ancientlyre.com https://open.spotify.com/artist/7Dx2vFEg8DmOJ5YCRm4A5v?si=emacIH9CRieFNGXRUyJ9 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ1X6F7lGMEadnNETSzTv8A — THUMBNAIL IMAGE — https://www.worldhistory.org/image/12863/acropolis-in-athens-artists-impression/ Mowhawk Games - https://mohawkgames.com/oldworld/ Copyright / republished with permission

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Introduction: Transition to Democracy

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A New Start for South Africa  |  A New Constitution  |  Seeking Truth and Justice  |  Symbolism, Sports, and Unity  |  The Persistence of Economic Inequality  |  Education  |  Challenging the “Rainbow Nation”: Xenophobia Against Migrants  |  The Shadow of Apartheid: Economics and Health  |  The Marikana Miners' Strike and Massacre  |  Looking Forward 

As negotiations between the National Party and the ANC became public in the early 1990s, South Africans began to imagine a democratic future. Leaders of the anti-apartheid struggle sought to create a government that reflected the country’s diversity, transforming a state long committed to white supremacy into what many began to describe as a “rainbow nation.” Yet the long history of racism and violence that reached a pinnacle during the 40 years of apartheid left many deep legacies and problems. The population remained physically segregated along racial lines, economic inequality was among the worst in the world, and violence had become endemic. Under apartheid, the majority of the South African population viewed the government as a source of disorder, restriction, and violence. Even the election of Nelson Mandela, a widely respected and trusted leader, did not transform people’s attitudes overnight.

As the people of South Africa pushed to rebuild their country, they faced the daunting challenge of addressing the legacies left by apartheid: How could a divided people achieve unity? How could the country’s groups retain their identities while finding new ways to live together and mix peacefully? What would the role of the minority white community be in the new South Africa? How could a population of black South Africans who had suffered for so long finally begin to heal? What should be done about the crimes that had occurred under apartheid? Who should be held accountable? Should the offenders be punished? How could opportunities be created for the millions of people who had been held down by an oppressive state for so long?

South Africans entered the post-apartheid era with newfound empowerment, a visionary leader, and the goodwill of millions of people from around the world. As discussed in this chapter, a democratic and multiracial South Africa has confronted many of the legacies of apartheid and undergone some very important positive transformations—but the country continues to face serious challenges.

A New Start for South Africa

On April 27, 1994, millions of South Africans voted in the country’s first fully democratic elections. As discussed in Chapter 3, the black community was still reeling from government-sponsored violence during the period of transition, but in spite of this, the elections were largely peaceful. For the majority of the population, this was their first opportunity to vote. In the reading  South Africa’s First Nonracial Democratic Election , one such voter reflects on the way he processed this change and what the act of voting came to mean. More than 85% of those eligible participated, many standing in line for hours for the chance to choose their own government; the first free and fair elections in South Africa felt like a celebration and a great event for the citizens of the country.

1994 Elections

Long lines edge the William Nicol Highway, as people wait to vote during the general elections on April 27, 1994 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In the end, the ANC won 62.7% of the vote, winning 252 seats in the 400-person National Assembly. The National Party won 20.4% of the vote with 82 seats, and the Inkatha Freedom Party won 10.5% of the vote with 43 seats. People did not vote directly for president because South Africa follows a parliamentary system. Instead, people chose a political party that was awarded seats in the National Assembly on a proportional basis. As the majority party in the National Assembly, the ANC chose Nelson Mandela as president.

On May 10, 1994, in a ceremony that filled people across South Africa and around the world with hope, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president. He was not only South Africa’s first black president but also the first president chosen in competitive, free, and fair elections. In his inaugural address, Mandela declared:

We have triumphed in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of the millions of our people. We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity—a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world. . . . The time for the healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us. . . . 1

A New Constitution

Work on a permanent constitution began on May 9, 1994, almost immediately after the transition to democratic rule. The interim document required that the Constitutional Assembly, made up of the 400 members of the National Assembly and 90 members of the National Council of Provinces, approve a constitution by a two-thirds majority. With this structure, the National Party could not veto changes, as it accounted for just over 20% of the legislature. Additionally, the ANC could not make changes on its own; it would need to work with other parties. Most of the drafting of the constitution was done by a constitutional committee made up of 44 members of parliament drawn proportionally from the seven largest political parties. A Constitutional Court oversaw the drafting of the document, ensuring that it complied with the 34 principles that could not be eliminated from the interim constitution, due to terms negotiated during the transition.

During this process, politicians debated the relationship between provincial and central governments, the guarantee of representation for minority parties, land reform, the death penalty, and limits on speech. 2  Cyril Ramaphosa, a veteran of the ANC who would later become president of South Africa, presided as chair of the Constitutional Assembly. Roelf Meyer, a member of parliament since 1979, was lead negotiator for the National Party. Meyer hoped to create a permanent power-sharing arrangement to guarantee National Party control over legislation, thus allowing the white population continuing disproportionate political influence. Meyer was unsuccessful in this goal; the day after parliament approved the new constitution, Meyer’s party withdrew from the Government for National Unity, where they had held several ministerial posts and de Klerk had served as deputy president. 3

During the drafting process, the government began a massive outreach program modeled on the Freedom Charter process to gain insight from the public on what they wanted included in the constitution. The program involved over 400 community workshops and garnered two million letters and petitions from the public. “It was the first time in our history that politicians have gone to the people without playing politics or asking for votes,” observed Hassen Ebrahim, chief executive of the Constitutional Assembly. “I hope it's a lesson that will be pursued in our politics.” When a series of nine big public meetings were held early in 1995, one petitioner advocated for a constitutional right to more libraries, and a memorandum appended to the final constitution described it as “the collective wisdom of the South African people.” 4

The final constitution was approved by the Constitutional Assembly on May 8, 1996. After a period of revision, it was certified by the Constitutional Court on December 4, 1996, and approved by President Mandela on December 10. 5  The Assembly chose this date because it had been recognized in 1950 by the United Nations as Human Rights Day. The presidential signing ceremony took place in Sharpeville, recalling one of the seminal events in the struggle against apartheid. At the ceremony, Mandela declared, “Out of the many Sharpevilles which haunt our history was born the unshakeable determination that respect for human life, liberty and well-being must be enshrined as rights beyond the power of any force to diminish. These principles were proclaimed wherever people resisted dispossession, defied unjust laws, or protested against inequality. They were shared by all who hated oppression, from whomsoever it came and to whomsoever it was meted.” 6

The preamble of the constitution acknowledges the suffering and injustice of the past while conveying a hope for a just, democratic, and united future. To emphasize this commitment, the word  democratic  appears three times within the preamble itself. The constitution continues in 14 thematic chapters, written in accessible prose and translated into the 11 official South African languages. These chapters focus on such topics as basic rights, elections, the composition of legislative bodies, the organization and function of courts of law, national finance, and national security. The constitution also upholds the rights of distinctive ethnic communities (those sharing “a common cultural and language heritage”) to self-determination (article 235), the recognition of traditional leaders (articles 211 and 212), and the obligations of different organs of state to “preserve the peace” and “co-operate with one another” (article 41). The first chapter of the constitution states:

The Republic of South Africa is one, sovereign, democratic state founded on the following values: a. Human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms. b. Non-racialism and non-sexism. c. Supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law. d. Universal adult suffrage, a national common voters roll, regular elections and a multi-party system of democratic government, to ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness. 7

The South African constitution is widely recognized as including the most extensive human rights guarantees of any constitution in the world, as it places its list of 32 rights before any mention of the structure of government. 8  This section is a careful monument to the achievement of those who campaigned for equality. Included among the rights guaranteed by South Africa’s constitution are equality, freedom from discrimination (including bigotry based on sexual orientation or age), a right to human dignity, freedom of religion and expression, and the right to form and join trade unions. Chapter 9 of the constitution, which defines equality before the law, specifies a long list of protected categories: “The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.” 9  This provision made South Africa the first constitution in the world to guarantee gay and lesbian rights, which offered new freedoms and led to other important legal gains, as described in the reading  The Equality Clause: Gay Rights and the Constitution .

Many of the provisions in the constitution’s bill of rights are direct responses to practices of the apartheid state. For example, the apartheid state commonly detained individuals it suspected of opposing apartheid without charging them, and many of these individuals were tortured. In response, Article 12 of the constitution guarantees “freedom and security of the person.” It states that people cannot be arbitrarily detained and that they have a right “to be free from all forms of violence from either public or private sources” and a right “not to be tortured in any way.” 10  Article 35 outlines in great detail the rights of those arrested, accused, or detained. No law can protect people from harm, but here is a body of laws whose enforcement will ensure that the horrors of the past are not repeated. The reading  The South African Constitution  offers a closer look at the constitution’s preamble, which frames these ideas, and the bill of rights—perhaps the most comprehensive in the world.

Seeking Truth and Justice

In the negotiations for transition, one major debate centered around accountability for the violence used to enforce apartheid. The ANC leadership wanted to publicize the facts of apartheid violence and bring perpetrators to justice, but de Klerk had promised amnesty to the security forces. A compromise was conceived by Dullah Omar, a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, who became the minister of justice following the 1994 elections. Omar proposed public hearings that would allow open discussion of the violence surrounding apartheid. These hearings would include the possibility of amnesty for those who fully disclosed their crimes and could prove that they had a political motive.

• 1 Nelson Mandela, “ Nelson Mandela’s 1994 Inauguration Speech ” (transcript), Pretoria, South Africa, May 10, 1994), BET website.
• 2 “Making the Constitution: South Africa,” The Economist, January 13, 1996, 42.
• 3 Padraig O’Malley, “ Full House ,” O’Malley: The Heart of Hope website, “Post Transition (1994–1999): Constitution Making” section, Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, accessed July 21, 2015.
• 4 Padraig O’Malley, “ A Very Distant Deadline ,” O’Malley: The Heart of Hope website, “Post Transition (1994–1999): Constitution Making” section, Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, accessed July 21, 2015; “ Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996—Explanatory Memorandum ,” South African Government website, accessed July 22, 2015.
• 5 Recent Developments, “Making the Final Constitution in South Africa,” Journal of African Law 41, no. 2 (1997): 246–47; “ The Certification Process ,” Constitutional Court of South Africa website, accessed July 21, 2015.
• 6 “ Speech by President Nelson Mandela at the Signing of the Constitution ,” Polity.org, accessed July 21, 2015.
• 7 Government of South Africa, “ Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 ,” South African Government website.
• 8 Ian Millhiser, “ What Americans Can Learn from the Constitution Nelson Mandela Signed ,” December 6, 2013, ThinkProgress website, accessed July 21, 2015.
• 9 Millhiser, “ What Americans Can Learn from the Constitution Nelson Mandela Signed .”
• 10 Constitution of South Africa, Chapter 2: Bill of Rights , Department of Justice and Constitutional Development of South Africa website, accessed May 23, 2018.

Ntsiki Biko Consoles her Mother-in-Law Alice Biko

Nontsikelelo 'Ntsikie' Biko (L), widow of South African civil rights activist Steve Biko, consoles his mother Alice (R) during the investigation into his death from beatings administered by the South African Security Police.

In 1995, the new parliament established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC investigated and recorded gross violations of human rights committed in South Africa and beyond its borders between 1960 and 1994. The TRC focused on both supporters and opponents of apartheid, allowing the process to appear balanced and fair. Perpetrators of human rights violations could provide testimony and apply to the Amnesty Committee, one of three TRC committees. Victims were also encouraged to submit testimonies to the Human Rights Violations Committee. Once such testimony had been corroborated, some victims were eligible for reparations, or financial payments from the government, which were administered by the Reparations Committee. The organizers explained, “These measures cannot bring back the dead, or adequately compensate for pain and suffering, but they can improve the quality of life for victims of gross human rights violations and/or their dependents.” 1

Omar emphasized that in his view, the aim of the TRC was not forgiveness: “Forgiveness is a personal matter. However, bitterness can only exacerbate tensions in society. By providing victims a platform to tell their stories and know the destiny of their loved ones, one can help to achieve a nation reconciled with its past and at peace with itself.” 2  The TRC mandate said that “to achieve unity and morally acceptable reconciliation, it is necessary that the truth about gross violations of human rights must be: established by an official investigation unit using fair procedures; fully and unreservedly acknowledged by the perpetrators; made known to the public, together with the identity of the planners, perpetrators, and victims.” 3  Amnesty would be granted only to those who applied for it and fully disclosed their misdeeds. The crimes were then judged in proportion to their political aims. Rulings on amnesty were made by the commission.

In typical prosecutions, the focus is usually on perpetrators. At the TRC hearings, the co-chairs, archbishop Desmond Tutu and Alex Boraine, focused on the victims, their families, their suffering, and the crimes committed against them as human beings. As Boraine, who served as vice president of the commission, said at an international conference, “To ignore what happened to thousands of people who were victims of abuse under apartheid is to deny them their basic dignity. It is to condemn them to live as nameless victims with little or no chance to begin their lives over again.”

The ANC and most black South Africans wanted to bring perpetrators to justice, but because de Klerk, who in the early 1990s was still president, had promised his security forces amnesty, a compromise was reached. Perpetrators would be granted amnesty, as individuals, but only if they met two criteria: 1) they publicly told the full truth about what they had done, and 2) their deeds had been carried out for a political purpose. To encourage perpetrators to come forward, the state had the power to charge with crimes those who had not received amnesty.

In court-like proceedings, the TRC began taking evidence in 1996. For two years, the commission chair collected testimony from both victims and perpetrators and held hearings throughout the country, many focused on specific instances of violence. 4  Over 7,000 people applied for amnesty, and over 21,000 people submitted victim statements. Some 2,500 perpetrators of political crimes came before the commission, a small percentage relative to the number of people who committed crimes and the mass violence that occurred. Televised public hearings and radio coverage gave victims the opportunity to share their stories publicly. Some were able to confront the worst of apartheid’s agents. Thousands of victims and survivors were also allowed to air their grievances. 5

The entire South African community was able to follow the proceedings. A weekly television show summarized the testimony in the TRC hearings of the previous week, allowing a wide audience to learn about the various crimes that had occurred during the apartheid era. Importantly, radio, a medium used by the majority of South Africans, also carried the hearings, as did newspapers and other print media. In addition, there was a dedicated website that posted transcripts. These efforts were not just about sharing the TRC’s work; they were also explicitly aimed at creating transparency, a crucial element of democracy. For the first time, South Africans were allowed to see such processes at work. Unlike prior truth commissions in other countries, which often amounted to back-room amnesty deals, the South African TRC became both a process by which the young democracy could address the violent past and a medium for democratization.

• 1 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “ A Summary of Reparation and Rehabilitation Policy, Including Proposals to Be Considered by the President ,” Republic of South Africa, Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, accessed July 31, 2015.
• 2 Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New York: Times Books, 1999), 9.
• 3 “ Explanatory Memorandum to the Parliamentary Bill ,” South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, accessed June 26, 2016.
• 4 Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, “Truth and Justice: Unfinished Business in South Africa,” Traces of Truth website, accessed 4 June 4, 2015.
• 5 Therese Abrahamsen and Hugo van der Merwe, “ Reconciliation through Amnesty? Amnesty Applicants’ Views of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission ,” Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, accessed July 31, 2015.

Archbishop Tutu and the Chasm

Standing at the edge of a cliff labeled ‘Truth,’ Archbishop Desmond Tutu clutches a blank map. Behind him stand a perpetrator, a victim, and members of the media. A deep chasm separates them from the cliff labeled ‘Reconciliation.’

Giving a voice to victims was one of the most important aspects of the TRC. Across the country, victims came forward in town halls to speak of the atrocities they had personally faced or to speak for their loved ones who had been killed or who had disappeared. Many acknowledged the importance of finally having a space to discuss their personal histories. Mzukisi Mdidimba, who was beaten by police at the age of 15 while in solitary confinement, spoke of what it meant that his story had finally been told. He remarked, “When I have told stories of my life before, afterward I am crying, crying, crying . . . This time, . . . I know [that] what they have done to me will . . . be all over the country. I still have some sort of crying, but also joy inside.” 1  The reading The  Truth and Reconciliation Commission  includes an extended example of TRC victim testimony, from the wife of a political leader murdered by security police in 1985.

At the conclusion of the hearings, the TRC compiled a six-volume report of its findings and submitted it to President Mandela in October 1998. In total, there were 1,188 days of hearings; 7,112 people petitioned for amnesty, 5,392 were refused, and 849 were granted amnesty. Two more volumes were submitted later that assessed the work of the TRC. These later reports focused on the cases that the TRC had not been able to investigate sufficiently and provided recommendations for the future. 2  Critics of the TRC have claimed that the process did not succeed in bringing reconciliation to South Africa because the hearings focused too much on individual cases while failing to look at the broad system of inequality, because victims who participated in the process received too little emotional support, and because the reparations were very slow in coming and were ultimately far too small. The reading  Examining Weaknesses of the TRC  elaborates on some of these criticisms. In an analysis of the TRC, Graeme Simpson writes:

There is a grave risk that out of the testimonies and confessions of a few, a truth will be constructed that disguises the way in which black South Africans, who were systematically oppressed and exploited under apartheid, continue to be excluded and marginalised in the present. The sustained or growing levels of violent crime and antisocial violence, which appear to be new phenomena associated with the transition to democracy, are in fact rooted in the very same experiences of social marginalisation, political exclusion and economic exploitation that previously gave rise to the more ‘functional’ violence of resistance politics. 3

In their 2017 Reconciliation Barometer, the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation reported that “most South Africans feel that reconciliation is still needed, and that the TRC provided a good foundation for reconciliation in the country.” Reconciliation may take the form of an ongoing process rather than something fully achievable—one that must reach deep and wrestle with a public or national morality, according to the bishop in the reading  A Need for a Moral Bottom Line . The commissioners of the TRC often said that in order to build a more unified society, first truth is necessary, and only then can come reconciliation. This approach is known as restorative justice, as distinct from retributive justice. The latter is the more common approach for prosecutions and trials and was the model for the Nazi war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg.

The TRC is widely viewed as a success, although an imperfect one. Many countries have since used the TRC as a model for addressing their own painful recent pasts, including Peru, Sierra Leone, and Canada, which held a truth commission to deal with the legacy of abuses against First Peoples. In the US, the city of Greensboro, North Carolina, held a TRC in order to respond to the killing of five anti-Klan demonstrators in 1979. And in Maine, the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth & Reconciliation Commission held hearings to learn the truth about what happened to Wabanaki children and families involved with the state’s child welfare system.

What else did the TRC achieve? One notable accomplishment was a contribution to the prevention of deniability, something all countries must consider in the wake of mass violence. By building a historical record based on testimony and investigation of massive human rights violations committed during apartheid, the TRC placed apartheid at the center of South Africa’s history. South Africa further emphasized a focus on the past and historical memory through early post-apartheid efforts to create institutions like the District Six Museum, the Apartheid Museum, and the site of the Constitutional Court, which was once one of South Africa’s most notorious prisons.

Symbolism, Sports, and Unity

To make this new South Africa successful, President Mandela understood that he needed to bring people along on this journey into the unknown by appealing to what mattered to them. He needed to help all South Africans see him as  their  president and to feel as if they were part of the new South Africa. While in prison, Mandela had recognized the importance of bonding with Afrikaners through their culture. What could be better as a means of bonding than sports? The love that many Afrikaners had for rugby offered a perfect opening. In 1995, South Africa was scheduled to host the Rugby World Cup. Until that time, rugby in South Africa had been seen as a sport for white people. Many black South Africans viewed Afrikaner support for rugby as another lingering legacy of apartheid; some even rooted against the national team, partly because very few black players took the field for the Springboks, the South African national team.

• 1 Susie Linfield, “ Trading Truth for Justice? Reflections on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission ,” Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum , accessed May 23, 2018.
• 2 “ Amnesty Hearings and Decisions ,” Truth and Reconciliation Commission website.
• 3 Graeme Simpson, “ Repairing the Past: Confronting the Legacies of Slavery, Genocide, & Caste ,” Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale University, New Haven, CT, October 27–29, 2005.

All White Community in South Africa Holds Onto Its Past

A family dressed in traditional Afrikaner clothing pose during a holiday celebration commemorating ‘the Battle of Blood River,’ on December 16, 2003 in Orania, Northern Cape province, South Africa.

Prior to 1994, many anti-apartheid activists had supported a boycott on South African sports as a tool of the anti-apartheid movement, infuriating Afrikaners. When the Springboks toured New Zealand in 1981, for example, many New Zealanders protested. This inspired activists to pressure New Zealand to cancel plans to play in South Africa, a campaign that prevailed in 1985. An international boycott of South African rugby began shortly thereafter.

Mandela, who needed the support of Afrikaners as he prepared to negotiate with de Klerk, saw an opportunity. He decided that bringing an end to the Springboks rugby boycott would help with his larger project. The South African team once again faced New Zealand in August 1992. Although the stadium had prohibited apartheid symbols at the game, the national anthem, “Die Stem,” seen by many black South Africans as another symbol of apartheid, was boisterously sung and the old flags were waved. Mandela, however, did not give up hope that sports could be used to help bring South Africa’s people together. In June 1994, with the Rugby World Cup scheduled to begin the following May, Mandela met with Francois Pienaar, the Springboks’ captain, to convey his determination to do all he could to help bring the trophy home. After the meeting, Pienaar and his teammates were convinced that one thing they could do to help build bridges was to learn the new South African national anthem, “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.” Pienaar recalls, “As a matter of historical fact, the Springboks weren’t reluctantly forced to sing the new anthem,  Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika , with the Xhosa words . . . It was something we badly wanted to do ourselves and we organised our own singing lessons before the World Cup. I loved singing it—what an anthem—though I was so emotional in the final I just couldn’t get any words out and had to bite my lip hard to stop cracking up.” 1  Also symbolic of growing tolerance was the song “Shosholoza,” translated as “make way,” “move forward,” or “travel fast,” which was originally sung by the black migrant workers who worked in the gold mines around Johannesburg. It was the longtime anthem at soccer matches, where spectators were mostly black, but was adopted as the new Rugby World Cup song.

Before the first match of the 1995 Rugby World Cup in Cape Town, Mandela made a surprise visit to the startled Springboks team. He explained to them the great service they would be doing for their country by promoting unity. When he finished, the players offered Mandela a green Springboks cap, which he immediately put on. Pienaar later recalled how, at that moment, Mandela won the team’s hearts. In the match, the Springboks were unbeatable: first they overwhelmed the reigning champions, Australia, and then they beat Canada and then France in the semifinal. On the day of the final against New Zealand, Mandela telephoned Pienaar to wish the Springboks good luck. The green jersey and cap that Mandela decided to wear that day, for so long closely associated with apartheid, now symbolized a bond between white and black South Africans.

Only a year after assuming office, Mandela stepped onto the Ellis Park Stadium field before a hushed crowd. As the players prepared to run down the tunnel to the field, they could hear the largely Afrikaner crowd slowly begin to chant and eventually erupt into deafening cheers. The former captain of the Springboks described the scene that greeted him:

I walked out into this bright, harsh winter sunlight and at first I could not make out what was going on, what the people were chanting. Then I made out the words. This crowd of white people, of Afrikaners, as one man, as one nation, they were chanting, ‘Nel-son! Nel-son! Nel-son!’ Over and over . . . and, well, it was just . . . I don’t think I’ll ever experience a moment like that again. It was a moment of magic, a moment of wonder. It was the moment I realised that there really was a chance this country could work. 2

Kobie Coetsee, minister of justice and prisons, later said, “It was the moment when my people, his adversaries, embraced Mandela.” 3

Two hours later, with a word of gratitude, saying, “Thank you for what you have done for our country,” Mandela proudly shook Pienaar’s hand and handed him the trophy, sealing a bond between white and black South Africans. The Springboks captain is said to have replied, “No, Mr. President. Thank you for what you have done.” Coming at the start of an era in which the country would be seeking some shared sense of national identity—a unique and ongoing challenge, as discussed in the reading  Creating a Shared Identity for a Democratic South Africa —such a show of unity carried particular weight.

The Persistence of Economic Inequality

Apartheid left a particularly challenging legacy of vast economic gaps between the historically white rich and the mostly black poor. At the most fundamental level, apartheid was a system designed to protect the economic interests of whites and subsidize their lifestyle by limiting competition and suppressing the wages of black South Africans. Government services for whites were extensive, while those for blacks were quite limited. While whites received free education in excellent government schools and world-class healthcare in government hospitals, expenditures on education and health for black South Africans was minimal, resulting in poor schools and substandard healthcare.

As discussed in Chapter 3, South Africa’s political transition was negotiated on the central compromise that it include an agreement to allow whites to maintain their economic position. The National Party was willing to transfer political power to the majority only if whites were allowed to retain control of their land and industries. Some critics of this compromise have argued that the failure to confront the economic consequences of white domination has meant that the transition was only a political one and ultimately failed to end the apartheid economic system. Steven Friedman, a white South African journalist and scholar, later wrote, “While there is no doubting the profound changes which the end of apartheid has produced, it could well be argued that . . . the transition did not encompass the fundamental shift in social and economic power relations which the end of apartheid was meant to produce.” 4

The economic alternatives available to the ANC were limited not simply by the negotiated settlement but also by domestic and international economic constraints. Levying too steep of a tax on the rich population would predictably have driven them to move their wealth outside of South Africa, undermining the economy. The ANC was further constrained by the necessity of attracting critical foreign investment. South Africa shifted to majority rule at a time when the concept of “neoliberal” economics was at its height internationally. Neoliberalism holds that economies do best when the role of government in the economy is limited. Advocates of neoliberalism argue for eliminating restrictions on imports, opening the economy up to international investment, and cutting back on social services. The new ANC-led government thus faced considerable international pressure to limit government spending at the very time when the new leaders were hoping to vastly expand the provision of services to the country’s poor. 5

In 1994, the ANC proposed its first economic policy, called the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). This policy focused on trying to redistribute wealth to the country’s poor, particularly through building infrastructure—providing housing, water, electricity, schools, and hospitals. Yet the success of RDP was limited by budget constraints; the regime did not raise the money that it needed to follow through on its promises. In 1996, RDP was replaced by a new policy: Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR). Although the name included the word “redistribution,” GEAR was in fact a more neoliberal economic program focused primarily on attracting international investment and expanding the South African economy, in the belief that economic growth would ultimately benefit all South Africans. The government continued to invest in developing the infrastructure, but its main focus was on economic growth. 6

While the South African economy has experienced growth and policies have had some success in reducing poverty, the gap between the rich and poor has actually increased. The economic gap continues to fall largely along racial lines. Scholar Elke Zuern writes:

The World Bank reported . . . that the top 10 percent of the population receives 58 percent of the country’s income, while the bottom 50 percent receives less than 8 percent. . . . From 1995 to 2008, white mean per capita income grew over 80 percent, while African income grew by less than 40 percent. Poverty remains overwhelmingly black: In the poorest quintile of households, 95 percent are Africans. Members of this segment of the population struggle to feed their families, allocating more than half of their total expenditure just to food. At the other end of the scale, almost half of the wealthiest 20 percent of households are white, even though whites make up less than 10 percent of the total population. 7

Affirmative action policies have helped to open up employment opportunities for Africans, “coloureds,” and Indians, but these policies have above all benefited those with higher education, who have taken over many government jobs and have gained opportunities as doctors, lawyers, and teachers. The policy of Black Economic Empowerment, adopted by the government in 2007, encouraged businesses to open up opportunities for investment by members of formerly disadvantaged groups. Again, however, these policies primarily helped those who already had some means; the poorest black South Africans did not have the capital to invest in businesses. With legal segregation eliminated, many of the Africans, Indians, and coloureds who could afford to do so moved into formerly white neighborhoods. Today, white South Africans remain the wealthiest population and the poorest are overwhelmingly black South Africans. 8  As a result of the economic polarization there, writer and journalist Hein Marais portrays South Africa as a “two-nation society,” where a wealthy nation and a poor nation exist together side by side in the same territory. 9

Article 29 of the 1996 constitution of the Republic of South Africa declared that “everyone has the right to a basic education” and that schools could no longer discriminate on the grounds of race. The new democracy was determined to go far beyond the bare-bones, far-too-basic schooling that black South Africans had long received. Education had been one of the tools of apartheid, with unequal schools teaching a curriculum that supported the policies and historical narratives of white supremacy. While the central government had previously determined what type of curriculum and what language of instruction would prevail in all of the nation’s schools, under the new constitution, those questions would be determined by local considerations. 10  Still, a massive centralized apparatus—divided in 2009 into a Department of Basic Education and a Department of Higher Education and Training—came to sit atop nine provincial offices of education; education now receives a larger slice of the national budget than does any other sector. 11

While education has seen improvement in some areas, it remains one of the great challenges faced by the government. To undo the damage done by apartheid to the educational system, teachers would need more than money. They would need improved school buildings, new curricula, and better training, as great gaps exist between the facilities serving the rich and the poor. As a senior lecturer at the University of South Africa pointed out, “Almost 80% of schools in the black townships in rural and farm areas have neither basic infrastructure, such as decent classrooms and libraries, nor basic services including clean running water and electricity. They don’t have the required number of qualified teachers or functioning school governing bodies. They report pass rates of less than 30% on required school exit exams. Media reports have highlighted the plight of primary school children who were learning under trees in rural areas of Limpopo province.” 12  Students in primary school continue to perform poorly on tests of literacy and numeracy, and far too many students lack textbooks. Only 12% of black South Africans go to college.

Since apartheid was dismantled, South Africa has seen at least four waves of curriculum reform. First, in keeping with the National Education Policy Investigation, offensive language and content—particularly concepts that reflected and promoted the racist ideas behind apartheid—were purged. Some critics argue that despite good intentions, this was at best a halfhearted effort aimed at furthering reconciliation. Then, during the late 1990s, “values” became the key term, and reformers looked for ways to open the curriculum to include a reflection on ethics—ostensibly the basis of a true democracy. 13

In 1997, while the Truth and Reconciliation Commission continued its work, the Department of Education initiated a major curriculum reform called Curriculum 2005. While some lauded the efforts, critics now point to the short shrift given to history under this plan, and some decry the curriculum as “advocating collective amnesia” for the crimes of apartheid. 14

The appointment of Kader Asmal to the post of minister of education in 1999—a role he would hold until 2004—marked a break with precedent. Asmal had been involved in designing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and he had strong feelings about the need to come to grips with the past. Under Asmal, a working group from the Department of Education produced a report titled  Manifesto on Values, Education and Democracy  (2001). Among the principles underlined early in the report was “putting history back into the curriculum.” This was “essential in building the dignity of human values within an informed awareness of the past, preventing amnesia, checking triumphalism,” and more. 15  The education department set up a specific Race and Values Directorate whose task was to ensure that the curriculum and classrooms became spaces where values and democratic citizenship were addressed. The  Manifesto on Values, Education and Democracy  shaped the Revised National Curriculum Statement that began to be rolled out in schools across the country in 2003. Four years later, Johan Wassermann, the head of the Department of History and Social Studies Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, lauded the new content in history books for including “a range of different voices that were silenced in the past.” He believed that the new curriculum would provide students with the opportunity to “see the world through the eyes of someone else. What does it mean to have been a policeman and also a protester during the 1976 Soweto uprising? You are attempting to understand, as opposed to saying that this side is bad and that side is good.” 16  These lessons are part of the ongoing challenge for nations in facing the most difficult moments of their histories—lessons that are both more urgent and, in some ways, more difficult in countries where the wounds of the past are still fresh. For a sense of how South Africans discuss educational and other forms of inequality, see the Antjie Krog reading,  Overcoming the Past and Becoming a Single Nation .

Challenging the “Rainbow Nation”: Xenophobia Against Migrants

Since 1994, migration into South Africa has increasingly become an additional challenge facing the country. The exact number of migrants is unclear, as many arrive undocumented. It is estimated that between 1 and 3 million refugees have come to South Africa from other African countries seeking work and opportunity; many have fled violence and persecution in their country of origin. This influx of refugees and immigrants has led to an increase in xenophobia and, especially in townships, xenophobic violence. Townships are ripe grounds for the development of xenophobia, as these are areas where the majority of people live in difficult conditions and where poor newcomers will first try to find homes.

Xenophobia in South Africa has been attributed to many root causes, including fear, frustration with the pace of change, and a culture of violence that is a legacy not only of apartheid but of the transition itself. There is very little evidence to show that the influx of refugees has led directly to an increase in South African unemployment or decreased access to housing. In spite of a lack of evidence, however, many poor and unemployed South Africans believe that migrants will take or compete for jobs and resources.

The violence against migrants has been horrific. On May 18, 2008, in an East Rand township called Ramaphosa, anti-African sentiments erupted in violence. As a mob attacked a group of immigrants, one man was set ablaze. His scorched body was not identified for two weeks. Pictures of the burning man, who was finally identified as Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave of Mozambique, hit media outlets the next day. More xenophobic violence against immigrants from African countries ensued. Thousands were forced from their homes. The message was loud and clear. 17  Nhamuave and other foreigners who came in search of work, even for meager salaries, were not welcome in South Africa. 18

• 1 Brendan Gallagher, “ Former South Africa captain Francois Pienaar recalls the day no one fluffed his lines ,” The Telegraph , January 29, 2010.
• 2 Quoted in John Carlin, Invictus: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation (London: Penguin Books, 2008).
• 3 Quoted in Peter Hain, Mandela (London: Hachette, 2010).
• 4 Steven Friedman, “Before and After: Reflections on Regime Change and Its Aftermath,” Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa no. 75 (2011): 4–12.
• 5 Michael MacDonald, “The Political Economy of Identity Politics,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Fall 2004.
• 6 MacDonald, “The Political Economy of Identity Politics.”
• 7 Elke Zuern, “Why Protests Are Growing in South Africa,” Current History vol. 112 (May 2013): 175.
• 8 Zuern, “Why Protests Are Growing in South Africa.”
• 9 Hein Marais, South Africa, Limits to Change: The Political Economy of Transition (Zed Books, 2001).
• 10 Kristin Henrard, “Post-apartheid South Africa: Transformation and Reconciliation,” World Affairs 166, no. 1 (2003): 42.
• 11 In 2015, for instance, education received just under 20% of the 1.35-trillion-rand budget (a bit more than 107 billion US dollars); Budget Review 2015 , Republic of South Africa, National Treasury website.
• 12 Moeketsi Letseka, “South African Education Has Promises to Keep and Miles to Go,” Phi Delta Kappa no. 94 (March 1, 2013): 74–75.
• 13 Simeon Maile, “The Absence of a Home Curriculum in Post-apartheid Education in South Africa,” International Journal of African Renaissance Studies 6, no. 2 (2011): 104.
• 14 Gail Weldon, “A Comparative Study of the Construction of Memory and Identity in the Curriculum in Societies Emerging from Conflict: Rwanda and South Africa,” PhD dissertation, University of Pretoria, 2009, 150.
• 15 Republic of South Africa Department of Higher Education and Training, “ Manifesto on Values, Education and Democracy, Republic of South Africa ,” accessed July 26, 2015.
• 16 Latoya Newman, “History That Embraces Africa,” The Mercury (South Africa), November 30, 2007, 12.
• 17 Glynnis Underhill and Sibonile Khumalo, “ No Justice for Burning Man ,” Mail and Guardian, July 30, 2010, accessed June 4, 2015.
• 18 Stephen Bevan, “ The Tale of the Flaming Man Whose Picture Woke the World Up to South Africa’s Xenophobia ,” Daily Mail online, June 9, 2008, accessed June 4, 2015.

Aftermath of the Ramaphosa Riots

A child pushes a trolley cart through burnt debris after violent xenophobic clashes at the Ramaphosa informal settlement on the outskirt of Johannesburg on May 21, 2008.

Many South Africans questioned why foreigners were the target of such violence after remarkable strides had been made to overcome decades of racial hatred. For some, the violence pointed to a need to address hatred and anti-migrant prejudice as well as the profound lingering inequality in South Africa. The persistent xenophobia also shed light on the need to continue the work of confronting the past, particularly the sensitive issues of the violence of the 1980s and the transition. Notably, many South Africans were pained by the violence, protested against it, and spoke about how the very people who were targeted in these attacks were from countries that had harboured South African refugees during the struggle against apartheid.

Migrant labor remains an integral part of South Africa’s economy, and studies have shown that migrants bring valuable skills into the country. The Consortium for Migrants and Refugees in South Africa, a collection of social service and activist organizations, argued in a public letter that the roots of the xenophobic violence were largely political:

Research conducted by the Forced Migration Studies Programme (FMSP) at Wits University has shown that the trigger for violence against foreign nationals or other ‘outsiders’ is primarily about competition for both formal and informal political power as well as economic power. Xenophobic violence in most cases has thus been the result of local leaders mobilising people to attack foreign nationals or other ‘outsiders’ as a means of strengthening their power in the local area. . . . Whilst it is widely acknowledged that immigration reform is needed to improve South Africa’s management of migration in order to better utilise migration as a development tool, we need to be extremely cautious in suggesting that illegal or irregular migration is the primary cause of xenophobic violence . . . . Tackling xenophobic violence and violence against other ‘outsiders’ is more about strengthening structures of governance and rule of law than tackling irregular migration. 1

• 1 Duncan Breen, Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (CoRMSA), “Causes of Xenophobic Violence,” July 21, 2009.

Demonstrations Against Xenophobia in Cape Town

Groups of people hold banners and chant slogans during an anti-xenophobia demonstration in Khayelitsha region of Cape Town, South Africa on April 27, 2015 as a reaction to widespread anti-foreigner protests and violence.

The Shadow of Apartheid: Economics and Health

The 1994 elections that brought majority rule to South Africa and made Nelson Mandela president inspired great optimism in many people, both inside and outside the country. The new political system included impressive democratic structures, a new constitution, guaranteed minority representation, and strong legal protections of human rights. People enjoyed new freedoms of speech, movement, and assembly. With the majority black population finally in control of political institutions that had been used for decades to oppress and keep them in poverty, people hoped that new opportunities would open up for all people, leading to a redistribution of the country’s wealth.

View of Johannesburg

A view of Johannesburg and its northern suburbs as seen from the top floor of the Carlton Centre, depicting the city’s modern infrastructure.

The economic legacies of apartheid, however, have proven difficult to overcome. In negotiations, as mentioned, the former government insisted on many protections for the white minority population, including the guarantee that white wealth would be protected. In 1994, shortly after Mandela’s election, the government passed the Restitution of Land Rights Act, a law that would allow individuals whose land was taken through discriminatory legislation dating back to 1913 to apply to have their land restored. But the bill faced strong opposition from both the right wing and the Inkatha Freedom Party, and in the end it had very little impact. When the parliament passed an amendment to the law in 2014 that sought to make it easier to reclaim stolen land, the Constitutional Court declared the amendment unconstitutional. The vast majority of South Africa’s most fertile farmland remains in the hands of white owners.

Improving the quality of housing for the black South Africans and correcting the gross inequalities in the education and health systems also proved to be daunting challenges. A significant portion of the population lived in temporary dwellings such as shacks or shantytowns, a problem that persists, as explored in the reading  The Housing Clause in the South African Bill of Rights: The Continuing Struggle . The terrible conditions of schools and hospitals serving black communities meant that massive investments were needed, but the government was limited in how heavily it could tax the country’s wealthy (mostly white) population. The new government thus hoped that foreign investment could expand the economy and provide the income needed to fund social and economic improvements. These goals have been hard to meet, as investors were very slow to return, fearing instability after the transition. Many companies that had been willing to invest in South Africa when it was controlled by whites were initially unwilling to do so once black South Africans took power.

As a result, although the country has enjoyed steady economic growth and the income of the very poor has risen, gaps between rich and poor remain severe. Despite the promotion of a black middle class through initiatives such as the Black Economic Empowerment program, the majority of the country’s businesses are still owned by whites. Healthcare and education are more equitable than before, but millions of black South Africans still live in abject poverty. The freedom of movement that came with apartheid has meant that millions of people have migrated into urban areas, where the government’s program to build thousands of new homes has simply not been able to keep up with demand.

Although social programs have been implemented to improve the standard of living for South Africa’s poor, some argue that black laborers remain vulnerable to exploitation. This is especially true in the mining industry, which relies on a large number of migrant workers. According to 2015 reports, “[w]hites comprised 81 per cent of the highest income earners, Africans 10 per cent, Indians 5 per cent and Coloureds 4 per cent. Thus income inequality, always cited by critics of apartheid as one of the most important indicators of the effects of white supremacy, remains among the highest in the world in post-apartheid South Africa despite massive economic expansion.” Many mine workers continue to find employment miles from their families, living in squalid makeshift homes.

In addition, the World Bank recently reported that life expectancy at birth in South Africa is only slightly more than 60 years. 1  South Africa today is home to 5.7 million people who are H.I.V.-positive — more than any other nation, almost one in five adults. 2  According to another report, “In 2011, less than one in six households had adequate access to food, less than one in six individuals belonged to a medical aid scheme . . . and one in three adult South Africans still had no access to a formal financial institution.” 3

Tackling the AIDS crisis in South Africa has proven difficult, not just because of the number of cases and cost of treatment but also because of the attitudes of some leaders. Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor and president from 1999 to 2008, publicly disputed the scientific research into both the causes and treatment of the disease. During that time, South Africa faced an urgent and growing AIDS crisis; research by scientists at Harvard University now suggests that “the South African government would have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people earlier this decade if it had provided antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients and widely administered drugs to help prevent pregnant women from infecting their babies.” 4  When Mbeki lost power, Barbara Hogan was brought in as health minister. She told reporters, “The era of denialism is over completely in South Africa.” 5

The Marikana Miners’ Strike and Massacre

The British-owned Lonmin platinum mine is located in Marikana, about 60 miles northwest of Johannesburg in the North West province. On August 10, 2012, 3,000 workers walked off the job, demanding more pay. The management called it an illegal strike. 6  The miners made approximately 5,000 rand per month in take-home pay (approximately $400 in 2018) and were demanding an increase of 2,500 rand (approximately $200) per month. Over the days that followed, the strike grew increasingly violent and came to include not just the striking parties but also policemen, security personnel from the mine, and an escalating rivalry between the National Union of Mineworkers and the more radical Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). Ten people were killed in the early days of the strike, including two police officers and two security personnel.

On Thursday, August 16, the South African Police Service (SAPS) fired automatic weapons into the crowd of miners who were only a few feet away. Thirty-four people were killed, 78 people were injured, and 259 people were arrested. The SAPS claimed that they were under attack by miners carrying clubs, machetes, and spears. Some of the violence was documented by the media, including some police killings. Video footage showed that many of the strikers did not present a threat to the lives of the police officers. Some were standing too far away, others had no weapons, and still others were shot in the back.

News of what became known as the Marikana massacre quickly spread across South Africa and the world via traditional and social media. Many commentators made connections between the killings and the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, when police killed 69 people. Some have argued that the comparison is not in the details of the Marikana and Sharpeville events but in what they represent: an increasingly violent state and security forces using lethal force against people seeking dignified lives. In the case of Sharpeville, race played a critical role, with primarily white officers killing black South Africans. In the case of Marikana, the police officers were black. Writer Richard Stupart argues:

As events like Sharpeville made it impossible for our parents to claim ignorance about the violence of the apartheid state and the abominable inequality that made such repression necessary, so Marikana has made it impossible for us to claim to the next generation that we were unaware that the majority was being repressed. Predictably, there is outrage at appropriating a memory from our history and throwing it back at the current government. “The current government is vastly different to that of the old South Africa” runs the refrain. But there is a difference between “we are vastly different to the old South Africa” and “we have changed in all respects”. And it is in the respects that the state and nation have not changed that the comparisons to apartheid symbols like Sharpeville burn most incandescent. We are still a nation structured towards the economic exploitation of the majority. The state still uses violence to crush those who wish for a dignified life. 7

In the immediate wake of the massacre and this media attention, President Zuma formed the Marikana Commission of Inquiry and appointed judge Ian Farlam as its head. The commission issued its report in 2015. But little meaningful action has been taken to support the victims, their families, or the improvement of conditions for South African miners. Shortly after he came to office in 2018, President Ramaphosa told the parliament that the government had failed South Africa during the Marikana episode, saying that the tragedy “stands out as the darkest moment in the life of our young democracy.” 8

Looking Forward

South Africa entered 2018 in crisis. The president, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, stood accused of corruption and misconduct charges. Other members of the ANC governing party were known to be caught up in scandals, and the Constitutional Court ruled that the National Assembly had failed to hold President Zuma accountable. In February 2018, Zuma resigned, paving the way for Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, the new head of the ANC, to become president. In his State of the Nation Address, Ramaphosa repeatedly invoked Nelson Mandela, calling on South Africans to continue the journey of transformation that Mandela began for them. Ramaphosa said:

We should honour Madiba [Mandela] by putting behind us the era of discord, disunity and disillusionment. We should put behind us the era of diminishing trust in public institutions and weakened confidence in leaders. We should put all the negativity that has dogged our country behind us because a new dawn is upon us. It is a new dawn that is inspired by our collective memory of Nelson Mandela and the changes that are unfolding. As we rid our minds of all negativity, we should reaffirm our belief that South Africa belongs to all who live in it. For though we are a diverse people, we are one nation. There are 57 million of us, each with different histories, languages, cultures, experiences, views and interests. Yet we are bound together by a common destiny. 9

Ramaphosa ended his speech with an appeal to memory and a call to action—a call for South Africans to make history together, to find opportunity for renewal and progress in the coming period of change. He concluded:

We have done it before and we will do it again — bonded by our common love for our country, resolute in our determination to overcome the challenges that lie ahead and convinced that by working together we will build the fair and just and decent society to which Nelson Mandela dedicated his life. As I conclude, allow me to recall the words of the late great Bra Hugh Masekela [a legendary South African jazz musician]. In his song, ‘Thuma Mina’, he anticipated a day of renewal, of new beginnings. He sang: “I wanna be there when the people start to turn it around When they triumph over poverty I wanna be there when the people win the battle against AIDS I wanna lend a hand I wanna be there for the alcoholic I wanna be there for the drug addict I wanna be there for the victims of violence and abuse I wanna lend a hand Send me.” 10

Parliament responded with a standing ovation and by breaking into song.

In the days following the speech, journalists and commentators celebrated and critiqued it, and many pointed to the new feeling of hope in the air. They also addressed how close South Africa’s democracy came to the brink of disaster and turned a necessary spotlight on the essential roles that fundamental institutions—and the individuals within them—played in protecting liberal democracy, including a free press, an independent judiciary, and a strong civil society.

• 1 The World Bank, “Life expectancy at birth total (years),” World Bank Open Data website, accessed June 2018.
• 2 Celia W. Dugger, “ Study Cites Toll of AIDS Policy in South Africa ,” New York Times , November 25, 2016.
• 3 “South African Economic Outlook,” Câmara de Comércio Luso-Sul Africana website, accessed May 23, 2018.
• 4 Celia W. Dugger, “ Study Cites Toll of AIDS Policy in South Africa ,” New York Times , November 25, 2016.
• 5 Dugger, “ Study Cites Toll of AIDS Policy in South Africa .”
• 6 It was formally an unprotected industrial action; see “ Marikana Commission of Inquiry: Report on Matters of Public, National and International Concern Arising out of the Tragic Incidents at the Lonmin Mine in Marikana, in the North West Province ” (South Africa Human Rights Commission), 55. For more information, see also “ Marikana Massacre 16 August 2012,” South African History Online website; Greg Nicolson, “ Marikana Report: Key Findings and Recommendations ,” Daily Maverick , June 26, 2015; Nick Davies, “ Marikana Massacre: The Untold Story of the Strike Leader Who Died for Workers’ Rights ,” The Guardian , May 19, 2015.
• 7 Richard Stupart, “Why Marikana Is Our Sharpeville,” African Scene , August 23, 2012.
• 8 Jan Gerber, “ Ramaphosa Promises 'Healing, Atonement' For Marikana ,” Huffington Post , February 21, 2018.
• 9 “ Read Cyril Ramaphosa's first state of the nation address ,” Times Live , February 16, 2018.
• 10 “ Read Cyril Ramaphosa's first state of the nation address ,” Times Live .

How to Cite This Reading

Facing History & Ourselves, “ Introduction: Transition to Democracy ”, last updated August 3, 2018.

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The History of Democracy

How it works

At the turn of the last Century, a new type of communal identity arose – the Progressives, with a mindset to advocate for social equality and justice. People from different cultures, classes, backgrounds, and ethnicities shared these common, yet branched roots of progressivism, which all had reactions to everything they felt was ethically wrong. Although it was over a hundred years ago, many of their legacies are still prevalent in our modern society. These men, women, workers, farmers, politicians, and journalists that were part of this 20th Century movement would come to reshape the country democratically.

Journalists in particular used their power of freedom of speech to capture true stories in forms of writing and photography, of how developing cities were divided by urbanization. Being the unofficial fourth branch of the government, journalists had a say in politics as well. Investigative reporters in the Progressive era, with a not so redolent name, were called “muckrakers.” A term coined by the progressive president Theodore Roosevelt (Kanopy, Yearning to Breathe Free, min. 16:29). Although Roosevelt knew a lot of journalists, he did not always favor the way muckrakers brought their agenda to attention into national politics (OpenStax, U.S. History, p. 602). However, the life work of muckrakers Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair proved that Progressives were democratic in nature by exposing corrupted corporations and dangerous industries.

Ida Tarbell, an American teacher, author, and journalist was a hardcore Progressive and spent years to uncover the truth about the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company (Kanopy, Yearning to Breathe Free, min. 17:16). Tarbell was encouraged by her editor at McClure’s Magazine, a leading newsprint, to write an exposé about Standard Oil Company’s monopoly in the industry. Tarbell’s father owned a small oil business and was affected by Rockefeller’s greed and need for control and power, which was probably what fueled Tarbell to take Rockefeller down (Treckel, Lady MUCKRAKER, ¶. 5). After four years of meticulous work and investigative reporting, Tarbell was able to “build her case against the great monopoly” (Treckel, Lady MUCKRAKER, ¶. 22). Tarbell exposed how Standard Oil Company used methods such as spying and industrial terrorism to achieve domination. During all this time, Rockefeller refused to meet up with Tarbell, and called her “Miss Tarbarrel” (Treckel, Lady MUCKRAKER, ¶. 23). On November 15, 1906, the Standard Oil Company and its trustees were charged for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and were also found guilty of creating a monopoly which restrained interstate commerce by the use of railroad refunds and failing. In addition, they were indicted for controlling pipelines, using industrial espionage, and illegally destroying competition from the marketplace, which made the Supreme Court to put an end to the monopoly. Personally, Tarbell’s victory against the non-democratic activity earned her the nickname “Lady Muckraker,” and her series of articles were published in the well-known two-volume book The History of Standard Oil Company (Amazon). For democracy, Tarbell’s “raking muck” contributed to a pathway of new laws to protect competition in corporate marketplaces.

The Era of Reform, the primetime when Progressives was determined to influence and reform the country. Another well-known historical figure; muckraker and socialist is Upton Sinclair, who is mostly famous for uncovering the truth about the meat packing industry (OpenStax, U.S. History, pp. 621-622). With his book The Jungle published February 26, 1906, he wanted to shed light on a dark but true story about a Lithuanian immigrant family and their struggle for survival in Chicago’s meatpacking district (Kanopy, The 1911 Triangle Fire and Reform, ep. 18, min. 26:31). Sinclair’s attempt to get his readers to show compassion and to get rid of capitalism and share his values of socialism, failed. His interviews of workers and undercover visits to meat factories showed him the repelling ways meat was processed, which he vividly included in his book. Maybe not so surprising, the readers were disgusted by learning the truth about how their meat was produced, and did not react in the way Sinclair was striving for. “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” he said (Sinclair). The word had spread to President Roosevelt, and although he did not share Sinclair’s thoughts about socialism, he decided to meet up with him (OpenStax, U.S. History, pp. 621-622). They also had a few exchange of letters where Sinclair’s shares his notes from his revealing, and Roosevelt complimenting with understanding of Sinclair’s findings. (National Archive Catalogs, Sinclair’s letter to President Roosevelt & Teaching American History, Roosevelt’s letter to Upton Sinclair). Not long after, Congress addressed this scandal and Roosevelt signed a new federal law implementing the nation’s first meat inspection act, The Meat Inspection Act of June 1906. In less than four months after Sinclair’s book was published he had helped reform the country in a way that industries should be supervised and regulated by the government, for the sake of people’s health.

Whether it was deliberately like in Tarbell’s case, or accidently in Sinclair’s, as Progressives and muckrakers, they utilized and alluded to the first amendment to expose corruption and ethical misconduct. Moreover, they proved that a free press is essential to democracy. In two different centuries, a hundred years apart, social movements today such a “Black Live Matters” and “#MeToo,” are not more different from Progressive’s agenda in the 20th Century, in the aspect of what they were fighting for – Democracy.

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How Democracy Developed in Ancient Greece

By: Becky Little

Updated: June 29, 2023 | Original: August 2, 2021

In the late 6th century B.C., the Greek city-state of Athens began to lay the foundations for a new kind of political system. This demokratia , as it became known, was a direct democracy that gave political power to free male Athenian citizens rather than a ruling aristocratic class or dictator, which had largely been the norm in Athens for several hundred years before.

Athens’ demokratia, which lasted until 322 B.C., is one of the earliest known examples of democracy; and although recent scholarship has complicated the Eurocentric view that it was the first democracy, this ancient political system was extremely influential in the Mediterranean region. It inspired similar political systems in other Greek city-states and influenced the ancient Roman Republic.

Athenian Men Join the Assembly

The last tyrannos , or tyrant, to rule Athens was Hippias, who fled the city when Sparta invaded in 510 B.C. Two or three years later, an Athenian aristocrat named Cleisthenes helped introduce democratic reforms. Over the next several decades, subsequent reforms expanded this political system while also narrowing the definition of who counted as an Athenian citizen.

What was Cleisthenes’ motivation for initiating these changes? Unfortunately, “we don’t have any good contemporary historical Athenian sources that tell us what’s going on,” says Paul Cartledge , a classics professor at the University of Cambridge. After the 514 B.C. assassination of Hippias’ brother, Cleisthenes may have sensed there was growing public support for a system in which the city-state was not governed by an elite ruling class.

“Cleisthenes, I think probably partly for his own personal self-promotion, put himself forward as champion of the majority view, which was that we must have some form of popular, ‘people’ regime,” Cartledge says.

To participate in the demokratia, a person had to be free, male and Athenian. In the beginning of the democratic period, Athenian men had to have an Athenian father and a free mother. By the mid-5th century B.C., Athens changed the law so that only men with Athenian fathers and mothers could claim citizenship. Because there were no birth certificates (or DNA tests) to prove parentage, a young Athenian man’s political life began when his father introduced him at their local demos , or political unit, by swearing that he was his father and bringing witnesses to attest to this, Cartledge says.

The Athenian democracy was direct, rather than representative, meaning that Athenian men themselves made up the Assembly. Because there were no population censuses, we don’t know exactly how many Athenian men there were in the 5th century B.C., but historians have commonly estimated the number to be around 30,000. Of those, around 5,000 might regularly attend Assembly meetings. In addition, Athenian men served on juries and were annually selected by lot to serve on the Council of 500.

There were other government positions that were in theory open to all Athenian men, although wealth and location played a large role in whether a man could take on a full-time government job or even make it to the Assembly to vote in the first place. Still, there were some positions that were only open to elites: the treasurers were always wealthy (ostensibly because wealthy men knew how to handle finances), and the 10 generals who occupied the top government office were always elite, well-known men.

Political Citizenship Remained Narrow

And then, of course, there were all the other people in Athens who were completely cut off from political participation.

Assuming that there were about 30,000 Athenian men when the city-state developed its democracy, historians estimate there were probably about 90,000 other people living in Athens. A sizable portion of these people would have been non-Athenians who were enslaved (by law, Athenians couldn’t enslave other Athenians). Others were “resident aliens” who were free and lived in Athens but didn’t meet the requirements for Athenian citizenship. The rest were Athenian women and children, both of whom couldn’t join the Assembly.

Although these groups never gained the same political rights as Athenian men, there was some debate about whether they should be able to, says Josiah Ober , a classics professor at Stanford University.

“We know that the question of ‘could women be political beings?’ was debated,” he says. In 391 B.C., the Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote a comedy,  Assemblywomen,  in which women take over Athens’ government. “It’s meant to be funny in some ways, but there’s a serious thought behind it,” he says. Although Aristotle thought women weren’t psychologically fit for politics, Ober notes that Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, wrote in The Republic (circa 375 B.C.) that an ideal political system would include both women and men.

In addition, “there were moves several times in Athenian crisis history to…free large numbers of slaves to make them citizens, or at least make them resident aliens, on the argument that [Athens] needed more people who were full participants in the war effort,” Ober says. However, “these tended to get defeated.”

Athens’ democratic period also coincided with the city-state’s tightening of its control over what was originally a voluntary alliance of Greek city-states, but had now become an Athenian empire. The city-states had their own governments, some of which were influenced by Athens’ democratic system, but didn’t have any political power in Athens’ demokratia.

Athens’ democracy officially ended in 322 B.C., when Macedonia imposed an oligarchic government on Athens after defeating the city-state in battle. One of the Athenian democracy’s major legacies was its influence on the Roman Republic, which lasted until 27 B.C. The Roman Republic took the idea of direct democracy and amended it to create a representative democracy—a form of government that Europeans and European colonists became interested in several centuries later.

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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

Defending Privacy: a Pillar of Autonomy and Democracy

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What is Functioning Democracy and Its Specification

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Strengthening Democracy Through Ensuring The Rights of The Marginalised

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Digital Democracy and Internet Freedom

Effectively composed parliament through proper electoral system, discussion on whether prisoners should have right to vote, comparing and contrasting analysis of the maximalist and minimalist democracy, democracy: the influence of interest groups on political decisions through lobbying, the possibility of countries in the middle east to ever become democratic, the present situation with democracy in bangladesh, the controversial question of the use of civil disobedience as a method of protest in a democracy, the "bull moose" campaign of 1912, the american constitution as not the only possible basis for the democratic system, successful consolidation of democracy in nigeria & india, evaluation of plato's view of democracy, nigeria’s democracy in the era of fake news, political significance of social media, research of how loss of reputation has played a major role in the decline of indian national congress, the age of jacksonian democracy in america, questioning democracy in thoreau's and melville's works, how pluralist democracy are affected by pressure groups, the state of democracy in africa, abolishing the electoral college: a case for popular vote, relevant topics.

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