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).
