A Relativized Definition of ‘Democracy’
The term ‘democracy’ is clearly heavily contested; so much so that the task of imposing a single meaning or definition has seemed hopeless to many. We find it used in a wide variety of ways – for instance, we talk of democracy at a variety of levels, from workplaces and local government to national government and even global democracy, not to mention in more extended uses, such as democratic peace or democratic equality. Moreover, since the term has come to bear positive connotations, a number of very different regimes claim to be ‘democratic’ – for example, Britain is generally regarded as a democracy despite having a monarch, the USA represents a presidential democracy, and even North Korea claims to be a Democratic People’s Republic.This is not a new phenomenon. Seeking to appeal to the term’s Greek etymology does little to reduce our confusion since, even if the term’s meaning has not shifted over the last two and a half millennia, we find that ‘demokratia’ was equally contested in ancient Greek times.[1]Such is the variation with which the term has been used that it could even been claimed that democracy is an essentially contested concept, because there is no way to settle which of various so-called democracies is most true to the democratic ideal, since each capture different aspects of it.[2] Perhaps, more modestly, these different uses of the term share no universal common core or essence, but are united rather by overlapping ties of ‘family resemblance,’ and thus it is fruitless to seek necessary or sufficient conditions for something being democratic.[3]
These considerations provide reason to doubt that we can establish a clear and useful definition of democracy, but they do not prove a priori that such a task is impossible. Wittgenstein, after all, counselled us to look and see whether we can find universal features of the phenomena in question, rather than simply assuming that there were none. Before concluding that ‘democracy’ is simply essentially contested, and nothing informative can be said about it, we ought to investigate whether it has any determinate content. This is a task that naturally falls to political theorists and philosophers, who have been engaged in the task of conceptual clarification and definition since Socrates first asked his fellow Athenians about the nature of the virtues. In what follows, I argue that democracy does indeed have some determinate content, which provides some restriction on our use of the term and some guidance as to how we should think about it. Its content is, however, rather minimal, which partly explains why it can be used so variably. Before proceeding, however, I should say that I am not primarily concerned to stipulate how we use the word. There can be a variety of reasons to use words in different, even non-literal (e.g. metaphorical) ways, butat the end of the day a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. My concern is not to regulate the use of the word ‘democracy’ but to interpret the underling concept or idea to which that word is generally attached.[4]
1 Description vs. Evaluation
Before going any further, a necessary preliminary is to settle whether ‘democracy’ is to be used in what we may call an evaluative or descriptive sense. The contestation over the term arises largely because of the positive evaluative connotations that the word now carries in popular discourse (though in the past it was due to negative connotations). Regimes claim to be democratic because it is commonly assumed that democratic endorsement bestows legitimacy on the rulers. Nonetheless, it is objected that an evaluative definition is not useful because it confuses substantive questions about the value of democracy with definitional ones about its meaning and reduces the term to meaning nothing more than that the regime in question is a good one.[5]If we understand democracy as an evaluative term, then whether or not a given state – be it the USA or North Korea – is democratic becomes a matter of substantive controversy. This may indeed reflect the contested way in which the term is actually used in ordinary language, but is not useful for political scientists.
It is often suggested that we need to adopt an evaluatively neutral – or purely descriptive – account of democracy. This is the practice often employed by international bodies such as Freedom House, who rate countries according to indicators such as regular elections, multi-party competition, a free press, and so on.[6] If we take such an approach, then we can uncontroversially identify which countries count as democracies and then ask substantive questions, such as whether or not democracies better respect human rights or promote social justice. Certainly this approach is more useful for social scientists, who need to be able to identify regimes for study without simply getting bogged down in controversy about evaluative questions. Nonetheless, if we take this approach, then what counts as a democracy becomes a stipulative and uninteresting matter, because all the important work remains to be done later.Knowing that so-defined democracies are, for example, less likely to go to war with other so-defined democracies may itself be interesting and, provided some causal mechanism is established, it may give us reason to want our political regimes to fit this definition of democracy. Nonetheless, if the definition remains strictly neutral then we cannot assume that it is better to be democratic as so defined than undemocratic. A non-democratic regime may better realize whatever values we endorse, such as social justice or freedom, than one that qualifies as democracy. That the former happens not to fit our stipulated definition of democracy does not count against it whatsoever.
There are obvious reasons why positivistic social scientists may want a value-free definition of democracy, but it does not fit our ordinary usage of democracy, according to which the fact that a regime is democratic is something good about it, even if it performs worse with respect to other values such as justice. This does not, however, mean that we are condemned to treating ‘democracy’ as no more than a vague term of commendation, attached to any regimes that we happen to favour.The contrast between a neutral, factual description and an evaluative definition is needlessly stark. We need not assume that the term is either simply evaluative, without descriptive content, or merely a neutral description.[7] There is an alternative; namely that the term combines both descriptive and evaluative elements. We might appeal here to an analogy with what Bernard Williams describes as ‘thick evaluative terms,’ such as bravery or honesty.[8]When we call someone honest, we are not simply commending her character in a vague way, as when we say she is good or virtuous. Nor, however, are we merely describing her conduct in a neutral way, as when we say that what she just said was true. Rather, we are commending her as good in a particular way. This therefore gives us some indication of how it was that she acted, while leaving open questions about whether her behaviour was all things considered the correct thing to do.
The possibility can be well illustrated by appeal to the Aristotelian notion that virtues are a mean between two vices.[9] One might think that courage or bravery is naturally contrasted only to cowardice, on which view it is always brave to face danger; but if we take this purely descriptive view of bravery then it is always an open question whether bravery is called for in a given situation. Sometimes it will be a good thing to be brave and sometimes it would have been better not to be brave. Aristotle, however, suggests what amounts to an evaluative definition of the virtues. On this alternative picture, the commendatory virtue term – bravery – is only appropriately applied to someone who feels the right thing, to the right extent, in the right circumstances. Bravery is not, then, one end of a continuum opposed only to cowardice, but rather somewhere between two opposing vices; cowardice on the one hand and recklessness on the other. Someone who chooses to stand and fight against overwhelming odds should not then be called brave but foolish, as the descriptive account would have it, but rather simply reckless. Bravery, understood in the evaluative sense, does not call for such reckless lack of self-concern. Thus, to call an action brave is always to commend it as appropriate to the circumstances, but it still has some descriptive content, for bravery can be distinguished from other virtues such as honesty or charity as being that which involves facing danger. One who responds appropriately to danger is brave, whatever other virtues and vices they possess.[10]
We may take a similar approach to democracy, regarding it as one value amongst others. Sometimes, we may be willing to sacrifice a little democracy for the sake of other values, such as getting decisions that are substantively more just. Nonetheless, other things being equal, we prefer more democracy to less. It should be noted that this does not commit us to saying that any regime that we judge to be democratic is therefore justified.[11] We have only said that it is in one way good. Someone committed to the value of equality may recognize that the distribution (4,4) is in one way good, because equal, yet still prefer a Pareto superior inequality, such as (7,5).[12]Similarly, it is possible to recognize democracy as being of value without thereby foreclosing further questions about whether a democratic regime is, all things considered, better than a non-democratic one or whether democracy can be justified. Democracy may be a value without being all that we value. Thus an evaluative definition of democracy does not foreclose all questions of evaluation; it merely implies that our overall assessment of two regimes may require us to balance the importance of democracy against that of other values, such as social justice. It may be that a just distribution of wealth can be better achieved by a society governed by a narrow elite, while extending the franchise will predictably result in less substantively just policies being enacted. In this case, we face a trade off and we may, in the end, decide that justice is more important than democracy.[13] We should not, however, deny the real loss involved when we choose some other value over democracy.
Another consequence of this evaluative approach is that whether or not a given regime is democratic is more easily recognized to be a matter of degree. It is not that some regimes perfectly realize the value of democracy while others completely fail to do so; rather some better approximate it than others, for instance a broadly-based oligarchy (as Athens arguably was) comes closer to the ideal than a monarchy. For the reasons just given, this does not mean that a more democratic regime is always to be preferred to a less democratic one, if it involves a loss of some other value.A direct democracy, in which the people vote on laws themselves through popular referendums, may be more democratic than a country in which people merely vote for representatives every four or five years or where the popular will is checked by a judiciary, but we may favour the latter arrangements if they better serve substantive justice. Note also that it is not strictly necessary to adopt an evaluative definition in order to appreciate that the extent to which any given regime is democratic is a matter of degree. Obviously, different regimes may more or less closely fit a neutral description, since calling a person tall is not evaluative, yet we can recognize that it better fits some people than others. Nonetheless, if the motivation behind a neutral, descriptive definition is that it is less contestable and therefore more useful for social scientists, then for the same reason a binary classification will likely be sought. If scientists want to study whether or not democracies are likely to have higher welfare spending, for example, then they will presumably want to classify any given regime as democratic or not, and it would be less useful to have them ranked according to degrees of democracy. An evaluative definition and a scalar account of democracy seem to fit harmoniously together, though this is of course not a decisive point in favour of either approach, since one may reject either of them. Nonetheless, this seems to me to be the more attractive way to conceive of democracy, even if less useful for empirical study.
2 Descriptive Content
I have argued that democracy is, at least in part, an evaluative idea. To call a regime democratic is to say that it is in one way good (though exactly what is good about democracy must be left for another occasion). It is not simply saying that the regime in question is a good one though; it is in one way less than this, because it does not imply an all things considered judgement, but in another way more because it is more specific than a vague commendation.Whether or not democracy is of value, it seems also to have descriptive content. Plato, in the Republic, offers us a vision of a society ruled by enlightened and virtuous philosopher-kings or Guardians in the interests of all citizens. Even if we were to agree with him that such a regime would be desirable, however, it would surely be misleading to call it a democracy. Rather, Plato’s claim is that aristocracy is better than democracy, because the art of statesmanship is possessed only by the few.[14] So what is the descriptive meaning of democracy?
The term ‘democracy’ comes from the Greek demokratia, which immediately suggests that it has something to do with giving power (kratos) to the people (demos). In fact, many still associate democracy with the three conditions famously presented in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysberg Address – “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”[15]Note, however, that he was not intending to define democracy, but rather to state the conditions of good government. Moreover, only the second of these appears distinctively democratic. Government of the people is ambiguous, but means either simply rule by the people (as in the ‘rule of Henry VIII’ or ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’) or rule over the people, in which case it applies to all forms of government. Government for the people, meanwhile, refers to its ends rather than means. While Macpherson argues thatCommunist states legitimately use the term ‘democracy’ in this sense, this seems deeply revisionary, since even Plato’s Guardians may be described as rule for the people. There may be much to be said for benevolent dictatorship if it really does lead to better decision-making, and what I have said allows us to argue (like Plato) that it is preferable to democracy, but it is not democratic in our ordinary understanding of the term. The essence of democracy appears to lie in rule by the people or popular sovereignty and this, I think, is its minimal content. This, of course, raises the vexed question of who the people in question are – a matter that shall be partly addressed in the following section. Before turning to that, however, I want to clarify just how minimal this idea is, by examining two things that democracy does not require.
Firstly, it is often supposed that democracy requires – along with citizen sovereignty – political equality between these people.[16]The ideal of political equality is invoked to resist hierarchical societies in which, for example, a landed aristocracy enjoy great political power and maybe even social status. Against this, champions of democracy asserted that each man – and later each woman too – had an equal life to lead and thus called for ‘one person, one vote.’ This is sufficient to realise democracy, but not, it seems, necessary. We may note, for example, that political power is arguably unequal in many societies currently considered to be democracies, for instance due to variations in district size, turnout patterns, or ‘marginal’ seats – not to mention the fact the elected representatives possess much greater power than the citizens they represent, so at best the equality invoked could only be one of opportunity rather than outcome.[17] Great inequalities may be undemocratic because they in effect completely exclude those with a smaller share of the vote. If one person possessed so many votes that she could outvote all others, then despite the fact that they formally have votes they would not in fact have any power. This regime would be accurately described as a monarchy, rather than a democracy. The problem, however, is not that power is unequally dispersed, but that it is concentrated entirely in one person’s hands.
If democracy simply requires the broad dispersal of power, then it may be realized even if some have slightly larger shares of that power than others. Suppose, for example, that all women have two votes and men one. This may or may not be justified, but it does not seem inconsistent with the bare idea of democracy, since men would still possess a share of political power. Any objection to such an arrangement would presumably lie in the fear that men’s interests, where they differed from women’s, would be unjustly under-represented. There would be ways around this, however. Suppose instead of women having two votes, everyone has one vote, apart from 10% of the population, selected at random, who have two each. There may be no reason to institute such a scheme, but it would not seem undemocratic. It may be argued that this is because it does not actually conflict with equality of opportunity, since anyone could be selected, but this still shows that equal votes are not necessary. We might, therefore, accept a proposal like that of John Stuart Mill, according to which more votes go to the educated, provided that everyone has the opportunity to acquire the necessary qualifications.[18] Moreover, it has recently been argued that there may be a case for weighting people’s votes according to the interests that they have at stake in a given decision.[19] This is not to advocate or endorse such proposals for political inequality. In fact, it may be that the only justifiable form of democracy is an egalitarian one. Nonetheless, I have argued that democracy is only one value among many and so democracy is not always justified. Thus it may be that an inegalitarian distribution of power could qualify as democratic even if it was not all things considered justifiable.