American Democracy in Context. Joseph A. Pika

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and government by religious leaders (Iran). In this chapter, however, we will focus on democratic government because that is the form of government in the United States.

      Democracy as a Form of Government

      In a democracy, all citizens can participate in the making of governmental policy, at least to some extent, even if indirectly. Though democracy is generally defined as “rule by citizens,” this definition is more an ideal than a concrete, observable phenomenon. As we will see in this section, a variety of factors influence how fully and how directly citizens in a democracy share in the rule of the country. In fact, there is no country in the world where all citizens have precisely equal roles in making the decisions of the country. However, a number of countries approximate the ideal well enough that we call them democracies. As shown in Figure 1.1, 116 countries—more than half of all countries in the world—are democracies.

      Description

      Figure 1.1 Democracies of the World

      Source: Freedom House, Electoral Democracies 2018.

      Direct Democracy

      The closest approximation to rule by all citizens is direct democracy, in which all of the citizens of a community gather to decide policies for that community. It was the mode of government in some ancient Greek city-states, and it still exists today in New England town meetings where all citizens come together to discuss and decide issues.⁴ Direct democracy is possible only in a small community with relatively simple issues to decide. Even a direct democracy does not exactly accomplish “rule by the citizens,” at least in the sense that all citizens contribute equally to the decision-making process. As in any group formed to accomplish assigned tasks, some people are more experienced or articulate than others, so not everyone is able to contribute equally. In fact, a direct democracy may actually express the will of only a fairly small group of leaders.

      democracy Rule by the people.

      direct democracy Democracy in which all of the people of a community gather to decide policies for the community.

      indirect democracy Democracy in which the people do not decide policies for the community themselves but elect representatives to decide the policies.

      Indirect Democracy

      Direct democracy is impossible in a complex, modern country such as the United States. How could millions of U.S. citizens come together to make decisions? Faced with thousands of complex, detailed issues each year, how could all citizens participate adequately and still do anything else with their lives? Accordingly, almost all democracies today are indirect democracies, also called representative democracies. In an indirect democracy, all citizens vote to choose, from among alternative candidates, the people who will be in charge of making decisions and implementing policies. In the United States, for example, the people of a city may elect a mayor and members of a city council; residents of each state elect a governor and other statewide officials as well as members of the state’s legislature. Every eligible U.S. citizen can vote to elect the president and members of Congress to represent them.

      What is needed for indirect democracy to work well? Obviously, elections are a basic requirement. But are elections enough? Earlier in the chapter, we explained that Singapore holds elections regularly, but we noted that in the 2015 election, the People’s Action Party, which has ruled the country since 1965, got 70 percent of the vote, winning 83 of the 89 seats in Singapore’s Parliament. The government achieved this result by suppressing opposition. Such outcomes show that elections alone do not a democracy make. Thus, effective indirect democracy goes beyond merely holding elections; a number of other pieces must also be in place to ensure that the elections offer citizens a chance to affect decisions through their vote:

       open elections

       broad participation in the elections

       freedom of speech and media

       the right to organize

       majority rule … but with protection for minority rights

      The first four requirements are discussed in this section. The twin requirements of majority rule and protection of minority rights are discussed later in this chapter in the section titled “The Challenges of Democracy.”

      The first requirement, of course, is that elections must be held regularly, and all qualified citizens must have an equal right to participate. Which citizens are considered “qualified” may evolve over time. Women’s right to vote is viewed differently today than it was in the early nineteenth century, for instance, and in every country, there is some age below which citizens are not considered qualified to vote. But a democracy is limited if it denies the right to citizens who are widely regarded as qualified. Democracy in the United States was limited by the systematic denial of African Americans’ right to vote in much of the South until 1965, when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.

      For much of the twentieth century, it was legal to require citizens to pay a poll tax as part of their qualification for voting. Rosa Parks herself paid $1.50 in 1957 for the right to vote in Alabama.

      There should also be broad participation in the elections. This is a matter of degree—there is never 100 percent participation. But as we will see in Chapter 9, countries vary a good deal in how fully their citizens participate in elections. This is partly a function of citizens’ own willingness to honor their responsibility to participate, but it is also a function of whether the government makes it easy for citizens to vote or sets up impediments to make it inconvenient for them to do so.

      A third basic requirement of democracy, beyond the formal arrangements of voting and elections, is sufficient individual freedom to allow open debate. This in turn requires freedom of speech and a free, uncontrolled media. A country might hold regular elections and yet not be a democracy. Singapore is such a country. Another good example is Russia, which holds regular elections with alternative candidates but maintains such stringent governmental control over the media that the country cannot be considered a full democracy.

      Finally, citizens of a democracy need to be able to organize independently into political parties and other organizations to pool their political efforts. Again, countries may hold elections yet fail to meet this requirement. For instance, China, which is ruled tightly by its Communist Party, holds elections in which individuals are allowed to run for office freely and sometimes can even win against the official candidate. But these independents are not allowed to form an organization to coordinate their efforts, which prevents them from having an effective voice. The Chinese system is not a democracy because isolated individuals—individuals who cannot combine with others—cannot challenge the sole legal political organization, the Communist Party, in any effective way.

      For a democracy to function effectively, therefore, it needs more than just elections. A true democracy allows those with competing points of view to present their ideas in a lively and effective way through the following principles and structures:

       competing СКАЧАТЬ