INTRODUCTION: THE ORIGINS OF THE DEMOCRATIC IDEAL
The word democracy itself is of Greek origin. The Greek word demokratia is a combination of the words demos (meaning the people) and kratos (meaning rule). This gives democracy its meaning as a form of government in which the people rule, whether directly — through personal participation — or indirectly, through elected representatives.
The main difference between ancient and modern democracies, of course, is in the way in which ‘the people’ were defined. In the ancient Greek polity, the ‘demos’ was rather restrictively defined, and notably excluded three main categories of persons: the slaves, women, and metics (the foreigners who lived and worked in the city-state).
This meant that barely a quarter of the total population were members of the citizen body. Nevertheless, the direct participation of a 40,000 strong citizen body was no mean achievement.
At its best, however, Athenian democracy conveys an impressive picture of direct participation by citizens in the assembly which deliberated and took decisions on all policy matters, and met on as many as 300 days in the year. Citizens also participated directly in the government, as they were chosen by lot to serve in official administrative and judicial positions.
2.2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Democracy has been described as one of the “characteristic institutions of modernity”, and as such it was the result of complex and intertwined processes of ideological, social and economic change. In Britain, this change was signalled by the Industrial Revolution that began in the middle of the eighteenth century, while in France and America it was launched by the political revolutions in the last quarter of the same century.
Britain is regarded as the first modern democracy because, in the aftermath of the Civil War in the seventeenth century, royal absolutism was brought to an end, and powers were transferred from the crown to the two houses of parliament, of which one, the House of Commons, was an elected chamber. Though the franchise continued to be highly restricted—based on ownership of property—control of the executive had effectively passed to a loose coalition of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, such that political conflict was henceforth peacefully conducted between the competing elites.
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and three Reform Acts later, about two-thirds of the male population stood enfranchised. It was, however, not until 1929 that women secured the right to vote, and universal adult suffrage was fully achieved only in 1948, when plural voting was abolished in favour of the principle of one-person one-vote.
In France, the more radical tradition of democracy was inaugurated by the Revolution of 1789, with its stirring call of Liberty–Equality–Fraternity, and its emphasis on the principle of popular sovereignty. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen proclaimed the rights of personal liberty, freedom of thought and religion, security of property and political equality as the natural and imprescriptible entitlements not merely of French citizens, but of “mankind” at large.
Initially, the revolutionary constitution of 1791 established something akin to universal male suffrage, and even the property requirement for the right to vote was low enough to exclude only domestic servants, vagrants and beggars. Thus, four million male citizens won the right to vote in 1791, but four years later more restrictive property requirements were introduced, bringing down the number of voters to just 100,000 prosperous taxpayers. Universal male suffrage was reintroduced only after the Revolution of 1848, and universal adult franchise only a century later in 1946, when women won the right to vote.
In the United States of America too, the advance of democracy in the aftermath of the Civil War was restricted to white men, and the enfranchisement of women, as also of indigenous and black people, was not achieved until the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the Declaration of Independence (1776) was the document that simultaneously effected the legal creation of the United States of America, and that of democracy in that country. Though slavery continued to be practised until the mid-nineteenth century, the American Revolution did give the modern world its first democratic government and society.
Hereditary power—of monarchy and aristocracy alike—was overthrown as a republican government, in which all citizens were at least notionally equal, was put in place. An important institutional mechanism of the separation of powers between the three branches of government—the executive, the legislature and the judiciary—was also effected, making it difficult for any one branch to exercise arbitrary or untrammelled power.
The political ideas of the Levellers, John Locke and Tom Paine, and documents like the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), and the American Declaration of Independence (1776), expressed the important ideas and principles that have underpinned democracy in the modern world. These writings and documents are also often seen as charters of liberalism, and liberalism was indeed an important handmaiden of democracy at this time. This is why it is not surprising that the beginnings of democratic theory are distinguished by a strong emphasis on the concept of liberty, rather than the concept of equality with which it later came to be identified.
As their name indicates, the Levellers in seventeenth-century England advanced a radical conception of popular sovereignty and civil liberties. Interrogating property ownership as the basis for political rights, they advocated a nearly universal male suffrage, though—echoing ancient Athens—servants and criminals, apart from women, were to be excluded.
John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government (1681) is an important source book of classical liberal ideas. In this work, Locke presents an account of a hypothetical state of nature, governed by a Law of Nature, which mandates that no individual ought to harm another in life, health, liberty or possessions. The natural equality of men—stemming not from any equality of endowment in terms of virtue or excellence, but from the fact that they are all equally creatures of God—gives them the equal right to freedom.
Though this state of nature is governed by a Law of Nature that endorses these rights, there is no agency to administer and enforce this law. Therefore, to prevent others from invading their rights or to exact retribution for such invasions, men will enforce the law as they interpret it. In a state of nature that is largely characterised by peace and mutual assistance, the absence of such an agency contains endless possibilities for conflict, and these are the chief inconveniences of the state of nature, which is therefore transcended through a social contract.
This social contract, founded in the consent of every individual, is the basis of legitimate government. Civil law must now conform to the eternal rule that is natural law, and thus the purpose of political society and of government is the preservation of the life, liberty and property of individuals (and Locke accordingly supplements this account with a defence of private property). If the government fails to discharge the purposes for which it was created, the people have the right to resist and replace it. It is this statement of the core principles of classical liberalism—individualism, popular sovereignty and limited government—that provided the foundation for liberal democracy.
These principles were also celebrated in the American Declaration of Independence (1776), which followed Locke in describing as natural and inalienable the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (the last widely interpreted as a euphemism for property). The continued exclusion of slaves and women from the category of those who possessed such rights is only one example of the contradiction between the universalism of liberal principles and the selectivity of liberal practices.
The French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) reflected the republican spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in idealising citizenship by presenting individuals as public-spirited members of a community. For Rousseau, however, representative government simply was not good enough, and the only form of free government was direct democracy in which citizens would participate directly. Of course, Rousseau was aware that gross inequalities of wealth as well as large political communities were obstacles to popular sovereignty, while liberty, welfare and public education in the context of a small city-state provided the ideal conditions for democracy.
However, it has now come to be recognised that the link between liberalism and democracy is not a necessary one. Liberal-democracy may be seen as a historically specific form of democracy, based on a culturally specific theory of individuation. It combines liberalism as a theory of the state with democracy as a form of government. As such, for societies that attach greater significance to the community than to the individual, the democratic part of liberal-democracy (such as free elections and freedom of speech) may be adopted without the liberal component. It has, thus, become possible today to speak not only of different paths to democracy, but also of different ways of being democratic, or even being “differently democratic”.
The twentieth century saw an unparalleled extension of democracy in terms of both its inclusiveness as well as its spatial expansion. Beginning with the extension of the suffrage to women in the older western democracies, and ending with the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, democracy in the twentieth century became more inclusive. This phenomenon has been described in terms of “waves of democratisation”.
The democratisation of many countries in Europe in the nineteenth century is viewed as the first wave of democratisation. The second wave is dated to the period following World War I, when many countries of Europe—including those of Scandinavia—became democratic. The third wave of democracy came after the Second World War, when new democracies were established in countries like Germany and Italy after the collapse of Nazism and Fascism; and following decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s, democracy was eagerly adopted by most of the new nations of Asia and Africa. The fourth wave of democratisation saw a return to democracy in post-Communist Eastern Europe, as well as in many countries of Latin America that had turned their backs on democracy.
2.3 THE CONCEPTUAL FAMILY OF DEMOCRACY:
AUTONOMY, RIGHTS, LIBERTY AND EQUALITY
The concept of democracy may be seen as a part of a conceptual cluster or a family of concepts, in which the concepts of rights, freedom and equality are most central. Underpinning these is the principle of individualism and individual autonomy as developed in the early liberal tradition, especially in the writings of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.
The principle of autonomy expresses the value that we attach to possessing control over our own individual persons, decisions and life-choices. Individuals are autonomous beings, capable of rational thought and, therefore, of determining what is good for them. However, while we are individuals acting for ourselves, we are also members of collectives or associations, and decisions taken in these affect our lives. Hence, we assert the right to participate in the making of those decisions, and this constitutes an act of self-determination as much as the decisions we make in our private lives about our career and other personal matters.
In classical liberal political theory, autonomy, freedom and equality form the cornerstone of the liberal theory of democracy. The principle of autonomy, along with the concept of freedom, suggests the importance of popular government. As in the writings of John Locke, government must guarantee the rights and personal liberty of the individual, and it is the job of the government to protect the individual’s life, liberty and property from being undermined by other individuals and the state alike. It asserts that all individuals, by virtue of being human beings, equally possess these rights.
But how is equality to be achieved in the making of political decisions? Democratic theorists make a distinction between prospective equality and retrospective equality. Prospective equality obtains when, in a decision that is to be made, every citizen starts off with an equal chance of influencing the outcome of the democratic process, and no persons or groups suffer particular disabilities that prevent them from determining that decision…
