DEMOCRACY

DEMOCRACY (OXFORD)

Greek, ‘rule by the people’. Since the people are rarely unanimous, democracy as a descriptive term is synonymous with majority rule. In ancient Greece, and when the word was revived in the eighteenth century, most writers were opposed to what they called democracy. In modern times, the connotations of the word are so overwhelmingly favourable that regimes with no claim to it at all appropriated it (the German Democratic Republic, Democratic Kampuchea). Even when not used emptily as propaganda, ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic’ are frequently applied in ways which have no direct connection with majority rule: for instance, The Democratic Intellect (G. E. Davie) is a well-known discussion of the (supposed) egalitarianism of the Scottish educational system in the nineteenth century. Such uses of ‘democracy’ to mean ‘what I approve of ’ are not considered further here. Issues relating to majority rule include:

(1) Who are to count as ‘the people’ and what is a ‘majority’ of them? Ancient Athens called itself a democracy (from c.500 bc to c.330 bc) because all citizens could take part in political decisions. But women, slaves, and resident aliens (including people from other Greek cities) had no rights to participate. Citizens were thus less than a quarter of the adult population. Modern writers have nevertheless accepted the self-description of classical Athens as ‘democratic’ (see also Athenian democracy). Likewise, well under half the adult population of the United Kingdom had the vote before the first women were enfranchised in 1918; but 1918 is not usually given as the year in which Britain became a democracy. What minimum proportion of adults must be enfranchised before a regime may be called democratic? This simple question seems to lack simple answers.‘Majority’ appears to be more clear-cut than ‘people’; it means ‘more than half ’. In votes between two options or candidates this poses no difficulty; in votes among three or more it does. The difficulty was studied by various isolated people (Pliny the Younger, c. ad 105; Ramon Lull in the thirteenth century; Nicolas Cusanus in the fifteenth) but first systematically tackled by Borda and Condorcet in the late eighteenth century. The plurality rule (‘Select the candidate with the largest single number of votes, even if that number is less than half of the votes cast’) may select somebody whom the majority regard as the worst candidate. Nevertheless, countries using this rule for national elections (including Britain, the United States, and India) are normally described as ‘democratic’. Borda proposed to select the candidate with the highest average ranking; Condorcet proposed to select the candidate who wins in pairwise comparisons with each of the others. Although these are the two best interpretations of ‘majority rule’ when there are more than two candidates, they do not always select the same candidate; and the Condorcet winner—that is, the candidate who wins every pairwise comparison—sometimes does not exist. In this case, whichever candidate is chosen, there is always a majority who prefer some other, and the meaning of ‘majority rule’ is unclear.Voting in legislatures is usually by the binary resolution-and-amendment procedure, which always ensures that the winning option has beaten its last rival by a majority (but does not solve the problems mentioned in the previous paragraph).

(2) Why (if at all) should majorities rule minorities? The first argument for democracy in ancient Greece is that attributed by Thucydides to Pericles, one of the democratic leaders of Athens, in 430 bc. Pericles argued that democracy is linked with toleration, but made no special claims for majority rule. Plato and Aristotle both deplored democracy, Plato on the grounds that it handed control of the government from experts in governing to populist demagogues and Aristotle on the grounds that government by the people was in practice government by the poor, who could be expected to expropriate the rich. However, Aristotle did first mention as a justification of majority rule that ‘the majority ought to be sovereign, rather than the best, where the best are few…. [A] feast to which all contribute is better than one given at one man's expense.’ In medieval elections, the usual phrase was that the ‘larger and (or “or”) wiser part’ ought to prevail. But every losing minority could claim that it was the wiser part. Only in the seventeenth century did a defence of democracy based on an assumption of equal rights for all citizens begin to re-emerge, perhaps as a by-product of the Protestant Reformation. Hobbes and Locke both assume the political equality of citizens, but neither draws explicitly democratic conclusions. A stronger claim of equality was asserted by Colonel Rainborough of Cromwell's army in 1647, with his claim that the ‘poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee’.Significant widening of the franchise in Western regimes began in the late eighteenth century. In the French Revolution, the franchise was at first restricted to fairly substantial property-holders, but it was widened to something approaching manhood franchise in the constitution of 1791 and the proposed constitution of 1793. Many of the American colonies had broad suffrage before 1776, and the Constitution of 1787 lays the groundwork for democracy in federal elections by giving each state representation in the House and in presidential elections in proportion to its population (except for Indians and slaves). Except between 1865 and the 1890s, however, Southern blacks remained disenfranchised until 1965. The first British act to widen the franchise was in 1832; universal suffrage was achieved in 1928. The leading commentators of the period from 1780 to 1920 all accepted the basic premiss that the ‘poorest hee’ (and for Condorcet and J. S. Mill the poorest she) had as good a right to a vote as the richest, although many of them were concerned about the ‘tyranny of the majority’ (see 4 below) and Mill proposed weighting votes in favour of the richer and the better-educated. (See also Madison; Tocqueville.)Another strand of democratic thought argues from equal competence rather than equal rights. This revives Aristotle's feast. Democrats who see politics as a matter of judgement rather than opinion (including Rousseau and Condorcet) argue that, other things being equal, the more people who are involved in arriving at a decision the more likely the decision is to be correct. Condorcet formalized this in his jury theorem, which states that, providing a large enough majority is required, a large number of only moderately competent people can be relied on to take the right decision.

(3) Direct v. representative democracy. Athenian democracy was direct. All citizens were expected to participate, and the attendance at the sovereign Assembly may have been as high as 6,000. When decision-taking bodies had to be smaller, their members were selected by lot rather than by election. Every citizen of Athens had a reasonably high probability of being chief executive for a day.When democracy was reinvented in the eighteenth century, every system was indirect: voters elected representatives who took decisions for which they were answerable only at the next election. Rousseau argued that this was no democracy (‘The people of England think they are free. They are gravely mistaken. They are free only during the election of Members of Parliament’), but was a lone voice. Interest in direct democracy revived in the 1890s when the referendum became more popular, and to a greater extent in the 1960s, when many people especially on the new left revived Rousseau's criticism of representation. Modern communications and computers have removed many of the technical obstacles to direct democracy, but it is not popular either among politicians (whose jobs it imperils) or among political philosophers (the majority of whom accept Schumpeter's argument that direct democracy is incompatible with responsible government).

(4) Is democracy merely majority rule or are other features necessarily part of the definition? Most of the classical theorists of democracy were liberals; and they all saw a tension between democracy and liberty. If the majority voted to invade the minority's rights, this could be tyrannical. Therefore Madison proposed the divisions of powers, both among branches of government and between levels of government, that are a feature of the US Constitution; and Mill proposed to weight the votes of the more educated. Although Madison's scheme protects only some groups from majority tyranny (until 1954 it did nothing for black people in Southern states), the Madisonian principle has been accepted by Schumpeter and many other modern theorists of democracy. Schumpeter's opponents argue that he ‘posed a false dilemma’ because the persecution of minorities ‘cannot be squared with democratic procedure’. This suggestion leaves undetermined the many cases in the world where majorities vote to persecute minorities: not only are places like Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and the West Bank not democracies, but they would not be democracies whichever faction controlled them. It is probably better to restrict ‘democracy’ narrowly to majority rule, and treat toleration, entrenchment of rights, and so on as preconditions for democracy but not as constitutive of democracy itself.