essay on functioning of democracy

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Normative democratic theory deals with the moral foundations of democracy and democratic institutions, as well as the moral duties of democratic representatives and citizens. It is distinct from descriptive and explanatory democratic theory, which aim to describe and explain how democracy and democratic institutions function. Normative democracy theory aims to provide an account of when and why democracy is morally desirable as well as moral principles for guiding the design of democratic institutions and the actions of citizens and representatives. Of course, normative democratic theory is inherently interdisciplinary and must draw on the results of political science, sociology, psychology, and economics in order to give concrete moral guidance.

This brief outline of normative democratic theory focuses attention on seven related issues. First, it proposes a definition of democracy. Second, it outlines different approaches to the question of why democracy is morally valuable at all. Third, it discusses the issue of whether and when democratic institutions have authority and different conceptions of the limits of democratic authority. Fourth, it explores the question of what it is reasonable to demand of citizens in large democratic societies. This issue is central to the evaluation of normative democratic theories. A large body of opinion has it that most classical normative democratic theory is incompatible with what we can reasonably expect from citizens. Fifth, it surveys different accounts of the proper characterization of equality in the processes of representation and the moral norms of representation. Sixth, it discusses the relationship between central findings in social choice theory and democracy. Seventh, it discusses the question of who should be included in the group that makes democratic decisions.

1. Democracy Defined

2.1.1.1 the production of relatively good laws and policies: responsiveness theories, 2.1.1.2 the production of relatively good laws and policies: epistemic theories, 2.1.1.3 character-based arguments, 2.1.2 instrumental arguments against democracy, 2.1.3 grounds for instrumentalism, 2.2.1 liberty, 2.2.2 democracy as public justification, 2.2.3 equality, 3.1 instrumentalist conceptions of democratic authority, 3.2.1 democracy as collective self-rule, 3.2.2 freedom and democratic authority, 3.2.3 equality and authority, 3.3.1 internal limits to democratic authority, 3.3.2 the problem of persistent minorities, 3.3.3 external limits to democratic authority, 4.1 the problem of democratic participation, 4.2.1 elite theory of democracy, 4.2.2 interest group pluralism, 4.2.3 neo-liberalism.

• 4.2.4. The self-interest assumption

4.2.5 The Division of Democratic Labor

4.3.1 the duty to vote, 4.3.2 principled disobedience of the law, 4.3.3 accommodate disagreement through compromise and consensus, 5.1 what sort of representative system is best, 5.2 the ethics of representation, 6. social choice and democracy, 7. the boundary problem: constituting the demos, other internet resources, related entries.

The term “democracy”, as we will use it in this entry, refers very generally to a method of collective decision making characterized by a kind of equality among the participants at an essential stage of the decision-making process. Four aspects of this definition should be noted. First, democracy concerns collective decision making, by which we mean decisions that are made for groups and are meant to be binding on all the members of the group. Second, we intend for this definition to cover many different kinds of groups and decision-making procedures that may be called democratic. So there can be democracy in families, voluntary organizations, economic firms, as well as states and transnational and global organizations. The definition is also consistent with different electoral systems, for example first-past-the-post voting and proportional representation. Third, the definition is not intended to carry any normative weight. It is compatible with this definition of democracy that it is not desirable to have democracy in some particular context. So the definition of democracy does not settle any normative questions. Fourth, the equality required by the definition of democracy may be more or less deep. It may be the mere formal equality of one-person one-vote in an election for representatives to a parliament where there is competition among candidates for the position. Or it may be more robust, including substantive equality in the processes of deliberation and coalition building leading up to the vote. “Democracy” may refer to any of these political arrangements. It may involve direct referenda of the members of a society in deciding on the laws and policies of the society or it may involve the participation of those members in selecting representatives to make the decisions.

The function of normative democratic theory is not to settle questions of definition but to determine which, if any, of the forms democracy may take are morally desirable and when and how. To evaluate different moral justifications of democracy, we must decide on the merits of the different principles and conceptions of human beings and society from which they proceed.

2. The Justification of Democracy

In this section, we examine different views concerning the justification of democracy. Proposed justifications of democracy identify values or reasons that support democracy over alternative forms of decision-making, such as oligarchy or dictatorship. It is important to distinguish views concerning the justification of democracy from views concerning the authority of democracy, which we examine in section 3 . Attempts to establish democratic authority identify values or reasons in virtue of which subjects have a duty to obey democratic decisions. Justification and authority can come apart (Simmons 2001: ch. 7)—it is possible to hold that the balance of values or reasons supports democracy over alternative forms of decision-making while denying that subjects have a duty to obey democratic decisions.

We can evaluate the justification of democracy along at least two different dimensions: instrumentally, by reference to the outcomes of using it compared with other methods of political decision; or intrinsically, by reference to values that are inherent in the method.

2.1 Instrumentalism

2.1.1 instrumental arguments in favor of democracy.

Two kinds of in instrumental benefits are commonly attributed to democracy: (1) the production of relatively good laws and policies and (2) improvements in the characters of the participants.

It is often argued that democratic decision-making best protects subjects’ rights or interests because it is more responsive to their judgments or preferences than competing forms of government. John Stuart Mill, for example, argues that since democracy gives each subject a share of political power, democracy forces decision-makers to take into account the rights and interests of a wider range of subjects than are taken into account under aristocracy or monarchy (Mill 1861: ch. 3). There is some evidence that as groups are included in the democratic process, their interests are better advanced by the political system. For example, when African Americans regained the right to vote in the United States in 1965, they were able to secure many more benefits from the state than previously (Wright 2013). Economists argue that democracy promotes economic growth (Acemoglu et al. 2019). Several contemporary authors defend versions of this instrumental argument by pointing to the robust empirical correlation between well-functioning democratic institutions and the strong protection of core liberal rights, such as rights to a fair trial, bodily integrity, freedom of association, and freedom of expression (Gaus 1996: ch. 13; Christiano 2011; Gaus 2011: ch. 22).

A related instrumental argument for democracy is provided by Amartya Sen, who argues that

no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent country with a democratic form of government and a relatively free press. (Sen 1999: 152)

The basis of this argument is that politicians in a multiparty democracy with free elections and a free press have incentives to respond to the expressions of needs of the poor.

Epistemic justifications of democracy argue that, under the right conditions, democracy is generally more reliable than alternative methods at producing political decisions that are correct according to procedure-independent standards. While there are many different explanations for the reliability of democratic decision-making, we outline three of the most prominent explanations here: (1) Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, (2) the effects of cognitive diversity, and (3) information gathering and sharing.

The most prominent explanation for democracy’s epistemic reliability rests on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (CJT), a mathematical theorem developed by eighteenth-century mathematician the Marquis de Condorcet that builds on the so-called “law of large numbers”. CJT states that, when certain assumptions hold, the probability that a majority of voters support the correct decision increases and approaches one as the number of voters increases. The assumptions are (Condorcet 1785):

• each voter is more likely than not to identify the correct decision (the competence assumption );
• voters vote for what they believe is the correct decision (the sincerity assumption );
• votes are statistically independent of one another (the independence assumption ).

While Condorcet’s original proof was restricted to decisions with only two choices, more recent work argues that CJT can be extended to decisions with three or more choices (List & Goodin 2001). The use of CJT to explain democracy’s reliability is often thought to originate with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s claim that

[i]f, when a sufficiently informed populace deliberates, the citizens were to have no communication among themselves, the general will would always result from the large number of small differences, and the deliberation would always be good. (Rousseau 1762: Book III, ch. IV)

Contemporary theorists continue to rely on CJT, or variants of it, to justify democracy (Barry 1965; Cohen 1986; Grofman and Feld 1988; Goodin & Spiekermann 2019).

The appeal of CJT for epistemic democrats derives from the fact that, if its underlying assumptions are satisfied, decisions produced by even moderately-sized electorates are almost certain to be correct. For example, if the assumptions of CJT hold for an electorate of 10,000 voters, and if each voter is 51 percent likely to identify the correct decision of two options, then the probability that a majority will select the correct decision is 99.97 percent. The formal mathematics of CJT are not subject to dispute. However, critics of CJT-based arguments for democracy argue that the assumptions underlying CJT are rarely, if ever, satisfied in actual democracies (see Black 1963: 159–65; Ladha 1992; Estlund 1997b; 2008: ch. XII; Anderson 2006). First, many have remarked that voters’ opinions are not independent of each other. Indeed, the democratic process seems to emphasize persuasion and coalition building. Second, the theorem does not seem to apply to cases in which the information that voters have access to, and on the basis of which they make their judgments, is segmented in various ways. Segmentation occurs when some sectors of the society do not have the relevant information while others do have it. Modern societies and politics seem to instantiate this kind of segmentation in terms of class, race, ethnic groupings, religion, occupational position, geographical place and so on. Finally, all voters approach issues they have to make decisions on with strong ideological biases that undermine the claim that each voter is bringing a kind of independent observation on the nature of the common good to the vote.

Advocates of CJT-based justifications of democracy generally respond to these sorts of criticisms by attempting to develop variations of CJT with weaker assumptions. These assumptions are more easily satisfied in democracies and so the revised theorems may show that even moderately-sized electorates are almost certain to produce correct decisions (Grofman & Feld 1988; Austen-Smith 1992; Austen-Smith & Banks 1996).

A second common epistemic justification for democracy—which is often traced to Aristotle ( Politics , Book II, Ch. 11; see Waldron 1995)—argues that democratic procedures are best able to exploit the underlying cognitive diversity of large groups of citizens to solve collective problems. Since democracy brings a lot of people into the process of decision making, it can take advantage of many sources of information and perspectives in assessing proposed laws and policies. More recently, Hélène Landemore (2013) has drawn on the “diversity-trumps-ability” theorem of Scott Page and Lu Hong (Hong & Page 2004; Page 2007)—which states that a random collection of agents drawn from a large set of limited-ability agents typically outperforms a collection of the very best agents from that same set—to argue that democracy can be expected to produce better decisions than rule by experts. Both Page and Hong’s original theorem and Landemore’s use of it to justify democracy are subject to dispute (see Quirk 2014; Brennan 2014; Thompson 2014; Bajaj 2014).

A third common epistemic justification for democracy relies on the idea that democratic decision-making tends to be more informed than other forms of decision-making about the interests of citizens and the causal mechanisms necessary to advance those interests. John Dewey argues that democracy involves “a consultation and a discussion which uncovers social needs and troubles”. Even if experts know how best to solve collective problems, they need input from the masses to correct their biases tell them where the problems lie (Dewey 1927 [2012: 154–155]; see also Anderson 2006; Knight & Johnson 2011).

Many have endorsed democracy on the grounds that democracy has beneficial effects on the characters of subjects. Many agree with Mill and Rousseau that democracy tends to make people stand up for themselves more than other forms of rule do because it makes collective decisions depend on their input more than monarchy or aristocracy do. Hence, in democratic societies individuals are encouraged to be more autonomous. Relatedly, by giving citizens a share of control over political-decision-making, democracy cultivates citizens with active and productive characters rather than passive characters. In addition, it has been argued that democracy tends to get people to think carefully and rationally more than other forms of rule because it makes a difference to political outcomes whether they do or not. Finally, some argue that democracy tends to enhance the moral qualities of citizens. When they participate in making decisions, they have to listen to others, they are called upon to justify themselves to others and they are forced to think in part in terms of the interests of others. Some have argued that when people find themselves in this kind of circumstance, they can be expected genuinely to think in terms of the common good and justice. Hence, some have argued that democratic processes tend to enhance the autonomy, rationality, activity, and morality of participants. Since these beneficial effects are thought to be worthwhile in themselves, they count in favor of democracy and against other forms of rule (Mill 1861 [1991: 74]; Elster 1986 [2003: 152]; Hannon 2020).

Some argue in addition that the above effects on character tend to enhance the quality of legislation as well. A society of autonomous, rational, active, and moral decision-makers is more likely to produce good legislation than a society ruled by a self-centered person or a small group of persons who rule over slavish and unreflective subjects. Of course, the soundness of any of the above arguments depends on the truth of the causal theories of the consequences of different institutions.

Not all instrumental arguments favor democracy. Plato argues that democracy is inferior to various forms of monarchy, aristocracy and even oligarchy on the grounds that democracy tends to undermine the expertise necessary to the proper governance of societies (Plato 1974, Book VI). Most people do not have the kinds of intellectual talents that enable them to think well about the difficult issues that politics involves. But in order to win office or get a piece of legislation passed, politicians must appeal to these people’s sense of what is right or not right. Hence, the state will be guided by very poorly worked out ideas that experts in manipulation and mass appeal use to help themselves win office. Plato argues instead that the state should be ruled by philosopher-kings who have the wisdom and moral character required for good rule. He thus defends a version of what David Estlund calls “epistocracy”, a form of oligarchy that involves rule by experts (Estlund 2003).

Mill defends a form of epistocracy that is sometimes referred to as the “plural voting” scheme (1861: ch. 4). While all rational adults get at least one vote under this scheme, some citizens get a greater number of votes based on satisfying some measure of political expertise. While Mill identifies the relevant measure of expertise in terms of formal education, the plural voting scheme is consistent with other measures. This scheme might be thought to combine the instrumental value of political expertise with the intrinsic value of broad inclusion.

One objection to any form of epistocracy—the demographic objection —holds that any criterion of expertise is likely to select demographically homogeneous individuals who are be biased in ways that undermine their ability to produce political outcomes that promote the general welfare (Estlund 2003).

Hobbes argues that democracy is inferior to monarchy because democracy fosters destabilizing dissension among subjects (Hobbes 1651: chap. XIX). On his view, individual citizens and even politicians are apt not to have a sense of responsibility for the quality of legislation because no one makes a significant difference to the outcomes of decision making. As a consequence, citizens’ concerns are not focused on politics and politicians succeed only by making loud and manipulative appeals to citizens in order to gain more power, but all lack incentives to consider views that are genuinely for the common good. Hence the sense of lack of responsibility for outcomes undermines politicians’ concern for the common good and inclines them to make sectarian and divisive appeals to citizens.

Many contemporary theorists expand on these Platonic and Hobbesian criticisms. A good deal of empirical data shows that citizens of large-scale democracies are ill-informed and apathetic about politics. This makes room for special interests to control the behavior of politicians and use the state for their own limited purposes all the while spreading the costs to everyone. Moreover, there is empirical evidence that democratic citizens often engage in motivated reasoning that unconsciously aims to affirm their existing political identities rather than arrive at correct judgments (Lord, Ross, & Lepper 1979; Bartels 2002; Kahan 2013; Achen & Bartels 2016). Some theorists argue that these considerations justify abandoning democracy altogether, while modest versions of these arguments have been used to justify modification of democratic institutions (Caplan 2007; Somin 2013; Brennan 2016). Relatedly, some theorists argue that rather than having beneficial effects on the characters of subjects as Mill and others argue, democracy actually has deleterious effects on the subjects’ characters and relationships (Brennan 2016: ch. 3).

Pure instrumentalists argue that these instrumental arguments for and against the democratic process are the only bases on which to evaluate the justification of democracy or compare it with other forms of political decision-making. There are a number of different kinds of argument for pure instrumentalism. One kind of argument proceeds from a more general moral theory. For example, classical utilitarianism has no room in its monistic axiology for the intrinsic values of fairness and liberty or the intrinsic importance of an egalitarian distribution of political power. Its sole concern with maximizing utility—understood as pleasure or desire satisfaction—guarantees that it can provide only instrumental arguments for and against democracy.

But one need not be a thoroughgoing utilitarian to argue for instrumentalism in democratic theory. There are arguments in favor of instrumentalism that pertain directly to the question of democracy and collective decision making generally. One argument states that political power involves the exercise of power of some over others. And it argues that the exercise of power of one person over another can only be justified by reference to the protection of the interests or rights of the person over whom power is exercised. Thus no distribution of political power could ever be justified except by reference to the quality of outcomes of the decision making process (Arneson 1993 [2002: 96–97]; 2003; 2004; 2009). Another sort of argument for instrumentalism proceeds negatively, attempting to show that the non-instrumental values most commonly used in attempted justifications for democracy do not actually justify democracy, and that an instrumental justification for democracy is therefore the only available sort of justification (Wall 2007).

Other arguments question the coherence of the idea of intrinsically fair collective decision making processes. For instance, social choice theory questions the idea that there can be a fair decision making function that transforms a set of individual preferences into a rational collective preference. The core objection is that no general rule satisfying reasonable constraints can be devised that can transform any set of individual preferences into a rational social preference. And this is taken to show that democratic procedures cannot be intrinsically fair (Riker 1982: 116). Ronald Dworkin argues that the idea of equality, which is for him at the root of social justice, cannot be given a coherent and plausible interpretation when it comes to the distribution of political power among members of the society. The relation of politicians to citizens inevitably gives rise to inequality; the process of democratic deliberation inevitably gives those with superior argument making abilities and greater willingness to participate more influence and therefore more power, than others, so equality of political power cannot be intrinsically fair or just (Dworkin 2000). In later work, Dworkin has pulled back from this originally thoroughgoing instrumentalism (Dworkin 1996).

2.2 Non-instrumentalism

Few theorists deny that political institutions must be at least in part evaluated in terms of the outcomes of having those institutions. Some argue in addition, that some forms of decision making are morally desirable independent of the consequences of having them. A variety of different approaches have been used to show that democracy has this kind of intrinsic value.

One prominent justification for democracy appeals to the value of liberty. According to one version of the view, democracy is grounded in the idea that each ought to be master of his or her life. Each person’s life is deeply affected by the larger social, legal and cultural environment in which he or she lives. Only when each person has an equal voice and vote in the process of collective decision-making will each have equal control over this larger environment. Thinkers such as Carol Gould conclude that only when some kind of democracy is implemented, will individuals have a chance at self-government (Gould 1988: 45–85). Since individuals have a right of self-government, they have a right to democratic participation. The idea is that the right of self-government gives one a right, within limits, to do wrong. Just as an individual has a right to make some bad decisions for himself or herself, so a group of individuals have a right to make bad or unjust decisions for themselves regarding those activities they share.

One major difficulty with this line of argument is that it appears to require that the basic rule of decision-making be consensus or unanimity. If each person must freely choose the outcomes that bind him or her then those who oppose the decision are not self-governing. They live in an environment imposed on them by others. So only when all agree to a decision are they freely adopting the decision (Wolff 1970: ch. 2). The trouble is that there is rarely agreement on major issues in politics. Indeed, it appears that one of the main reasons for having political decision making procedures is that they can settle matters despite disagreement.

One liberty-based argument that might seem to escape this worry appeals to an irreducibly collective right to self-determination. It is often argued that political communities have a right as a community to organize themselves politically in accordance with their values, principles, or commitments. Some argue that the right to collective self-determination requires democratic institutions that give citizens collective control over their political and legal structure (Cassese 1995). However, many argue democratic institutions are sufficient but not necessary to realize the right to collective self-determination because political communities might exercise this right to implement non-democratic institutions (Altman & Wellman 2009; Stilz 2016).

Another non-instrumental justification of democracy appeals to the ideal of public justification. The idea behind this approach is that laws and policies are legitimate to the extent that they are publicly justified to the citizens of the community. Public justification is justification to each citizen as a result of free and reasoned debate among equals.

Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of deliberative democracy has been highly influential in the development of this approach. Habermas analyses the form and function of modern legal systems through the lens of his theory of communicative action. This analysis yields the Democratic Principle:

[O]nly those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in turn has been legally constituted. (Habermas 1992 [1996: 110])

Habermas advances a conception of democratic legitimacy according to which law is legitimate only if it results from a free and inclusive democratic process of “opinion and will-formation”. What might such a process look like in a complex and differentiated society? Habermas answers by advancing a “two-track” model that understands democratic legitimation in terms of the relationship between institutionalized deliberative bodies (e.g legislatures, agencies, courts) and informal communication in the public sphere, which is “wild”, and not centrally coordinated.

One possible objection to this view is that free and inclusive democratic procedures are insufficient to satisfy the demand for deliberative consensus embodied in the Democratic Principle. This demand is unlikely to be satisfied in diverse societies, since deep disagreements about which laws ought to be enacted is likely to remain after the relevant process of opinion and will-formation. The Democratic Principle might thus be thought to embody an overly idealistic conception of democratic legitimacy (Estlund 2008: ch.10). Another possible worry is that the Discourse Principle is not a genuine moral principle, but a principle that embodies the felicity conditions of practical discourse. As such, the Discourse Principle cannot ground a conception of democratic legitimacy that yields robust moral prescriptions (Forst 2016).

Drawing on Habermas and John Rawls, among others, Joshua Cohen (1996 [2003]) develops a conception of democracy in which citizens justify laws and policies on the basis of mutually acceptable reasons. Democracy, properly understood, is the context in which individuals freely engage in a process of reasoned discussion and deliberation on an equal footing. The ideas of freedom and equality provide guidelines for structuring democratic institutions.

The aim of Cohen’s conception of democracy as public justification is reasoned consensus among citizens. But a serious problem arises when we ask about what happens when disagreement remains. Two possible replies have been suggested. It has been urged that forms of consensus weaker than full consensus are sufficient for public justification and that the weaker varieties are achievable in many societies. For instance, there may be consensus on the list of reasons that are acceptable publicly but disagreement on the weight of the different reasons. Or there may be agreement on general reasons abstractly understood but disagreement about particular interpretations of those reasons. What would have to be shown here is that such weak consensus is achievable in many societies and that the disagreements that remain are not incompatible with the ideal of public justification.

The basic principle seems to be the principle of reasonableness according to which reasonable persons will only offer principles for the regulation of their society that other reasonable persons can reasonably accept. One only offers principles that others, who restrain themselves in the same way, can accept. Such a principle implies a kind of principle of restraint which requires that reasonable persons avoid proposing laws and policies on the basis of controversial moral or philosophical principles. When individuals offer proposals for the regulation of their society, they ought not to appeal to the whole truth as they see it but only to that part of the whole truth that others can reasonably accept. To put the matter in the way Rawls puts it: political society must be regulated by principles on which there is an overlapping consensus (Rawls 2005: Lecture IV). This is meant to obviate the need for a complete consensus on the principles that regulate society.

However, it is hard to see how this approach avoids the need for a complete consensus, which is highly unlikely to occur in any even moderately diverse society. The reason for this is that it is not clear why it is any less of an imposition on me when I propose legislation or policies for the society that I must restrain myself to considerations that other reasonable people accept than it is an imposition on others when I attempt to pass legislation on the basis of reasons they reasonably reject. For if I do restrain myself in this way, then the society I live in will not live up to the standards that I believe are essential to evaluating the society. I must then live in and support a society that does not accord with my conception of how it ought to be organized. It is not clear why this is any less of a loss of control over society than for those who must live in a society that is partly regulated by principles they do not accept. If one is a problem, then so is the other, and complete consensus is the only solution (Christiano 2009).

Many democratic theorists have argued that democracy is a way of treating persons as equals when there is good reason to impose some kind of organization on their shared lives but they disagree about how best to do it. Peter Singer argues that when people insist on different ways of arranging matters properly, each person in a sense claims a right to be dictator over their shared lives (Singer 1973: 30–41). But these claims to dictatorship cannot all hold up. Democracy embodies a kind of peaceful and fair compromise among these conflicting claims to rule. Each compromises equally on what he claims as long as the others do, resulting in each having an equal say over decision making. In effect, democratic decision making respects each person’s point of view on matters of common concern by giving each an equal say about what to do in cases of disagreement (Singer 1973; Waldron 1999: chap. 5).

What if people disagree on the democratic method or on the particular form democracy is to take? Are we to decide these latter questions by means of a higher order procedure? And if there is disagreement on the higher order procedure, must we also democratically decide that question? The view seems to lead to an infinite regress.

An alternative way of justifying democracy on the basis of equality is to ground democracy in public equality. Public equality is a principle of equality which ensures that people can see that they are being treated as equals. This view arises from three ideas. First, there is the basic egalitarian idea that people’s interests ought to be equally advanced, or at least that they ought to have equal opportunities to advance them. Second, human beings generally have highly fallible and biased understandings of their own and other people’s interests. Third, persons have fundamental interests in being able to see that they are being treated as equals. Public equality is an egalitarian principle that can be seen to be realized among persons despite the dramatically incomplete forms of knowledge people have. It is not all of justice, but it is essential that the principle be realized in a pluralistic society.

Democracy is a uniquely publicly egalitarian way to make collective decisions when there is substantial disagreement and conflict of interest among persons about how to shape the society they share. Each can see that the only plausible way of overcoming persistent disagreement over how to shape the society they all live in, while still publicly treating all persons as equals in the face of bias and fallibility, is to give each person an equal say in the process of shaping that society. Thus, democracy is necessary to the realization of public equality in a political society. Within the framework determined by this publicly realized equality, persons are permitted to attempt to bring about their more particular ideas about justice and the common good that they think are right.

The idea of public equality also grounds limits to democratic decision making. The thought is that a society cannot democratically decide to abolish the democratic rights of some of its members. Public equality also requires that basic liberal and civil rights be respected as well, by the democratic process and so serves as a limit to democratic decision making (Christiano 2008; Valentini 2013).

A number of worries attend this kind of view. First, it is generally thought that majority rule is required for treating persons as equals in collective decision making. This is because only majority rule is neutral towards alternatives in decision making. Unanimity tends to favor the status quo as do various forms of supermajority rule. But if this is so, the above view raises the twin dangers of majority tyranny and of persistent minorities, i.e., groups of persons who find themselves always losing in majority decisions. Surely these latter phenomena must be incompatible with public equality. Second, the kind of view defended above is susceptible to the worry that political equality is not a coherent ideal in any modern state with a complex division of labor and the need for representation. This last worry will be discussed in more detail in the next sections on democratic citizenship and legislative representation. The first worry will be discussed more in the discussion on the limits to democratic authority.

A related approach grounds democracy in the ideal of relational equality . A concern with relational equality is a concern for

human relationships that are, in certain crucial respects at least, unstructured by differences of rank, power, or status. (Scheffler 2010: 225)

Niko Kolodny argues that democratic institutions are an essential component of relational equality (Kolodny 2014a,b). One line of Kolodny’s argument holds that political decisions involve the use of coercive force. Inequalities in the power to use force undermine equal social status at least in part because the power to use force is “the power that usually determines the distribution of other powers” (Kolodny 2014b: 307). Individuals who have superior power to use force on others have a superior social status. An egalitarian distribution of political power is thus essential for realizing social equality. And only democratic institutions provide an egalitarian distribution of political power. We will discuss the relationship between relational equality and democracy further when we discuss the authority of democracy in Part 3 below.

3. The Authority of Democracy

Since democracy is a collective decision process, the question naturally arises about whether there is any duty of citizens to obey democratic decisions when they disagree with it.

There are three main concepts of the legitimate authority of the state. First, a state has legitimate authority to the extent that it is morally justified in coercively imposing its rule on the members. Legitimate authority on this account has no direct implications concerning the obligations or duties that citizens may hold toward that state. It simply says that if the state is morally justified in doing what it does, then it has legitimate authority. Second, a state has legitimate authority to the extent that its directives generate duties in citizens to obey. The duties of the citizens need not be owed to the state but they are real duties to obey. The third is that the state has a right to rule that is correlated with the citizens’ duty to it to obey it. This is the strongest notion of authority and it seems to be the core idea behind the legitimacy of the state. The idea is that when citizens disagree about law and policy it is important to be able to answer the question, who has the right to choose?

Instrumental arguments for democracy give some reason for why one ought to respect the democracy when one disagrees with its decisions. There may be many instrumental considerations that play a role in deciding on the question of whether one ought to obey. And these instrumental considerations are pretty much the same whether one is considering obedience to democracy or some other form of rule.

There is one instrumentalist approach which is quite unique to democracy and that seems to ground a strong conception of democratic authority. That is the epistemic approach inspired by the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which we discussed in section 2.1.1.2 above. There, we discussed a number of difficulties with the application of the Condorcet Jury Theorem to the case of voting in elections and referenda in large-scale democracies, including lack of independence, informational segmentation, and the existence of ideological biases.

One further worry about the Jury Theorem’s epistemic conceptions of authority is that it would prove too much since it undermines the common practice of the loyal opposition in democracies. If the background conditions of the Jury Theorem are met, a large-scale democracy majority is practically certain to produce the right decisions. On what basis can citizens in a political minority rationally hold on to their competing views? The members of the minority have a powerful reason for shifting their allegiance to the majority position, since each has very good reason to think that the majority is right. The epistemic conception of authority based on the Jury Theorem thus threatens to be objectionably authoritarian, since it looks like it demands not only obedience of action but obedience of thought as well. Even in scientific communities the fact that a majority of scientists favor a particular view does not make the minority scientists think that they are wrong, though it does perhaps give them pause (Goodin 2003: ch. 7).

Some theories of democratic authority combine instrumental and non-instrumental considerations. David Estlund argues that democratic procedures have legitimate authority because they are better than random and epistemically the best of the political systems that are acceptable to all reasonable citizens (Estlund 2008). They must be better than random because, otherwise, why wouldn’t we use a fair random procedure like a lottery or coin flip? Democratic authority must have an epistemic element. And the justification of democratic procedure must be acceptable to all reasonable citizens in order to respect their freedom and equality. Estlund’s conception of democratic authority—which he calls “epistemic proceduralism”— thus combines the ideal of public justification with a concern for the tendency of democracies to produce good decisions.

3.2 Intrinsic Conceptions of Democratic Authority

Some theorists argue that there is a special relation between democracy and legitimate authority grounded in the value of collective self-rule. John Locke argues that when a person consents to the creation of a political society, they necessarily consent to the use of majority rule in deciding how the political society is to be organized (Locke 1690: sec. 96). Locke thinks that majority rule is the natural decision rule when there is disagreement. He argues that a society is a kind of collective body that must move in the direction of the greater force. One way to understand this argument is as follows. If we think of each member of society as an equal and if we think that there is likely to be disagreement beyond the question of whether to join society or not, then we must accept majority rule as the appropriate decision rule. This interpretation of the greater force argument assumes that the expression “greater force” is to be understood in terms of the equal worth of each person’s interests and rights, so the society must go in the direction in which the greater number of persons wants it to go.

Locke thinks that a people, which is formed by individuals who consent to be members, could choose a monarchy by means of majority rule and so this argument by itself does not give us an argument for democracy. But Locke refers back to this argument when he defends the requirement of representative institutions for deciding when property may be regulated and taxes levied. He argues that a person must consent to the regulation or taxation of his property by the state. But he says that this requirement of consent is satisfied when a majority of the representatives of property holders consent to the regulation and taxation of property (Locke, 1690: sec. 140). This does seem to be moving towards a genuinely democratic conception of legitimate authority.

Rousseau argues that when individuals consent to form a political community, they agree to put themselves under the direction of the “general will” (Rousseau 1762). The general will is not a mere aggregation of individuals’ private wills. It is, rather, the will of the political community as a whole. And since the general will can only emerge as the product of a properly organized democratic procedure, individuals consent to put themselves under the direction of a properly organized democratic procedure. On one interpretation of Rousseau, democratic procedures are properly organized only when they (1) define rights that apply equally to all, (2) via a procedure that considers everyone’s interests equally, and (3) everyone who is coerced to obey the laws has a voice in that procedure.

There are at least two ways of understanding the idea of the general will. On what might be called the constitutive interpretation, the general will is constituted by the results of a properly organized democratic procedure. That is, the results of a properly organized democratic procedure are the general will in virtue of the fact that they emerge from a properly organized democratic procedure, and not because they reflect some procedure-independent truth about the common good. On what might be called the epistemic interpretation, the results of a properly organized democratic procedure are the way of tracking the procedure-independent truth about the common good. As we discussed in section 3.1 , Rousseau is often interpreted as appealing to Condorcet’s Jury Theorem to support the epistemic credentials of a properly organized democratic procedure.

Anna Stilz develops an account of democratic authority that appeals to the value of “freedom as independence” (Stilz 2009). Freedom as independence is freedom from being subject to the will of another. In order not to be subject to the will of others, individuals need property rights and a protected sphere of autonomy to pursue one’s plans. Drawing on Kant, Stilz argues that attempts by particular individuals, no matter how conscientious, to define and secure rights to property and autonomy in a state of nature will be inconsistent with freedom as independence. Such attempts unilaterally impose new obligations on others through acts of private will in the face of competing claims. But even if individuals in a state of nature do agree to a resolution of their competing claims, they are dependent on the will of others to honor this agreement. Stilz thus argues that justice must be administered by an authoritative legal system which can coercively impose one set of objective rules—rules we must respect even when we disagree—to adjudicate our conflicting claims. But if such a system is to be consistent with the freedom of subjects, it cannot be imposed by the private wills of rulers. The solution, Stilz argues, lies in Rousseau’s idea of the general will. When subjects obey the general will, they are not obeying the private will of any individual; they are obeying a will that arises from all and applies to all.

One worry with this account is that those who oppose democratically-enacted laws or policies can complain that those laws or policies are imposed against their will. Perhaps they are not subject to the will of a particular individual, but they are subject to the will of a majority. This might be thought to constitute a significant threat to individuals’ freedom as independence. Another worry, which Stilz’s view arguably inherits from Rousseau, is that the conditions for the general will to emerge are so demanding that the view implies that no state that exists or has existed has legitimate political authority. Stilz’s view might thus be thought to entail what A.J. Simmons calls “a posteriori anarchism” (Simmons 2001).

Another approach to democratic authority asserts that failing to obey the decisions of a democratic assembly amounts to treating one’s fellow citizens as inferiors (Christiano 2008: ch. 6). In the face of disagreement about substantive law and policy, democracy realizes a kind of public equality by giving each individual an equal say in determining which laws or policies will be enacted. Citizens who skirt laws made by suitably egalitarian procedures act contrary to the equal right of all citizens to have a say in making laws. Those who refuse to pay taxes or respect property laws on the grounds that they are unjust are affirming a superior right to that of others in determining how the shared aspects of social life ought to be arranged. Thus, they violate the duty to treat others publicly as equals. And there is reason to think this duty must normally have some pre-eminence. Public equality is the most important form of equality and democracy is required by public equality. The other forms of equality in play in substantive disputes about law and policy are ones about which people can have reasonable disagreements (within limits specified by the principle of public equality). Citizens thus have obligations to abide by the democratic process even if their favored conceptions of justice or equality are passed by in the decision making process.

Daniel Viehoff develops an egalitarian conception of democratic authority based on the ideal of relational equality (Viehoff 2014; see section 2.2.3 above for more on relational equality). Viehoff argues that relational equality is threatened by “subjection” in a relationship, which occurs when individuals have significantly different power over how they interact with and relate to one another. According to Viehoff, obeying the outcomes of egalitarian democratic procedures is necessary and sufficient for citizens to achieve coordination on common rules without subjection. It is sufficient because democratic procedures distribute decision-making power equally, which ensures that coordination is not determined by unequal power advantages. It is necessary because parties must set aside the considerations of greater and lesser power to realize non-subjection in their relationship.

Fabienne Peter develops a fairness-based conception of democratic authority that incorporates epistemic considerations (Peter 2008; 2009). Drawing on insights from proceduralist epistemology, Peter’s “pure epistemic proceduralism” holds that suitably egalitarian democratic decisions are binding at least in part because they result from a fair procedure of knowledge-production. This account differs from Estlund’s epistemic proceduralism (see section 5.1 above) because it does not condition the authority of democratic procedures on their ability to produce decisions that track the procedure-independent truth. Rather, the authority of democratic procedures is grounded in their fairness. And it differs from pure procedural accounts because the relevant notion of fairness is fairness in knowledge-production.

3.3 Limits to the Authority of Democracy

What are the limits to democratic authority? A limit to democratic authority is a principle violation of which defeats democratic authority. When the principle is violated by the democratic assembly, the assembly loses its authority in that instance or the moral weight of the authority is overridden. A number of different views have been offered on this issue. We can distinguish between internal and external limits to democratic authority. An internal limit arises from the constitutive requirements of the democratic process or from the principles that ground democracy. An external limit arises from principles that are independent of the values or requirements that ground democracy.

External limits to democratic authority are rebutting limits, which are principles that weigh against—and may sometimes outweigh the principles that ground democracy. So in a particular case, an individual may see that there are reasons to obey the assembly and some reasons against obeying the assembly and in the case at hand the reasons against obedience outweigh the reasons in favor of obedience. Internal limits to democratic authority are undercutting limits. These limits function not by weighing against the considerations in favor of authority, they undercut the considerations in favor of authority altogether; they simply short circuit the authority. When an undercutting limit is in play, it is not as if the principles which ground the limit outweigh the reasons for obeying the democratic assembly, it is rather that the reasons for obeying the democratic assembly are undermined altogether; they cease to exist or at least they are severely weakened.

Some have argued that the democratic process ought to be limited to decisions that are not incompatible with the proper functioning of the democratic process. So they argue that the democratic process may not legitimately take away the political rights of its citizens in good standing. It may not take away rights that are necessary to the democratic process such as freedom of association or freedom of speech. But these limits do not extend beyond the requirements for proper democratic functioning. They do not protect non political artistic speech or freedom of association in the case of non political activities (Ely 1980: chap. 4).

Another kind of internal limit is a limit that arises from the principles that underpin democracy. And the presence of this limit would seem to be necessary to making sense of the first limit because in order for the first limit to be morally important we need to know why a democracy ought to protect the democratic process.

Locke gives an account of the internal limits of democracy in his idea that there are certain things to which a citizen may not consent (Locke 1690: ch. XI). She may not consent to arbitrary rule or the violation of fundamental rights including democratic and liberal rights. Since consent is the basis of democratic authority for Locke, this account provides an explanation of the idea behind the first internal limit, that democracy may not be suspended by democratic means but it goes beyond that limit to suggest that rights that are not essentially connected with the exercise of the franchise may also not be violated because one may not consent to their violation.

More recently, Ronald Dworkin has defended an account of the limits of democratic authority (Dworkin 1996). He argues that democracy is justified by appeal to a principle of self-government. He argues that self-government cannot be realized unless all citizens are treated as full members of the political community, because, otherwise, they are not able to identify as members of the community. Among the conditions of full membership, he argues, are rights to be treated as equals and rights to have one’s moral independence respected. These principles support robust requirements of non-discrimination and of basic liberal rights.

The conception of democratic authority that grounds it in public equality also provides an account of the limits of that authority (Christiano 2008: ch. 6). Since democracy is founded in public equality, it may not violate public equality in any of its decisions. The basic idea is that overt violation of public equality by a democratic assembly undermines the claim that the democratic assembly embodies public equality. Democracy’s embodiment of public equality is conditional on its protecting public equality. To the extent that liberal rights are grounded in public equality and the provision of an economic minimum is also so grounded, this suggests that democratic rights and liberal rights and rights to an economic minimum create a limit to democratic authority. This account also provides a deep grounding for the kinds of limits to democratic authority defended in the first internal limit and it goes beyond these to the extent that protection of rights that are not connected with the exercise of the franchise is also necessary to public equality.

This account of the authority of democracy also provides some help with a vexing problem of democratic theory. This problem is the difficulty of persistent minorities. There is a persistent minority in a democratic society when that minority always loses in the voting. This is always a possibility in democracies because of the use of majority rule. If the society is divided into two or more highly unified voting blocks in which the members of each group votes in the same ways as all the other members of that group, then the group in the minority will find itself always on the losing end of the votes. This problem has plagued some societies, particularly those with indigenous peoples who live within developed societies. Though this problem is often connected with majority tyranny it is distinct from the problem of majority tyranny because it may be the case that the majority attempts to treat the minority well, in accordance with its conception of good treatment. It is just that the minority never agrees with the majority on what constitutes proper treatment. Being a persistent minority can be highly oppressive even if the majority does not try to act oppressively. This can be understood with the help of the very ideas that underpin democracy. Persons have interests in being able to correct for the cognitive biases of others and to be able to make the world in such a way that it makes sense to them. These interests are set back for a persistent minority since they never get their way.

The conception of democracy as grounded in public equality can shed light on this problem. It can say that the existence of a persistent minority violates public equality (Christiano 2008: chap. 7). In effect, a society in which there is a persistent minority is one in which that minority is being treated publicly as an inferior because it is clear that its fundamental interests are being set back. Hence to the extent that violations of public equality undercut the authority of a democratic assembly, the existence of a persistent minority undermines the authority of the democracy at least with respect to the minority. This suggests that certain institutions ought to be constructed so that the minority is not persistent.

One natural kind of limit to democratic authority is the external kind of limit. Here the idea is that there are certain considerations that favor democratic decision making and there are certain values that are independent of democracy that may be at issue in democratic decisions. For example, many theories recognize core liberal rights—such as rights to property, bodily integrity, and freedom of thought and expression—as external limits to democratic authority. Locke is often interpreted as arguing that individuals have natural rights to property in themselves and the external world that democratic laws must respect in order to have legitimate authority (Locke 1690).

Some views may assert that there are only external limits to democratic authority. But it is possible to think that there are both internal and external limits. Such an issue may arise in decisions to go to war, for example. In such decisions, one may have a duty to obey the decision of the democratic assembly on the grounds that this is how one treats one’s fellow citizens as equals but one may also have a duty to oppose the war on the grounds that the war is an unjust aggression against other people. To the extent that this consideration is sufficiently serious it may outweigh the considerations of equality that underpin democratic authority. Thus one may have an overall duty not to obey in this context. Issues of foreign policy in general seem to give rise to possible external limits to democracy.

4. The Demands of Democratic Participation

In this section, we examine the demands of participation in large-scale democracies. We begin by examining a core challenge to the idea that democratic citizens are capable of governing a large and complex society. We then explore different proposed solutions to the core challenge. Finally, we examine the moral duties of democratic citizens in large-scale democracies in light of the core challenge.

A vexing problem of democratic theory has been to determine whether ordinary citizens are up to the task of governing a large and complex society. There are three distinct problems here:

• Plato argued that some people are more intelligent and informed about political matters than others and have a superior moral character, and that those persons ought to rule ( The Republic , Book VI)
• Others have argued that a society must have a division of labor. If everyone were engaged in the complex and difficult task of politics, little time or energy would be left for the other essential tasks of a society. Conversely, if we expect most people to engage in other difficult and complex tasks, how can we expect them to have the time and resources sufficient to devote themselves intelligently to politics?
• Since individuals have so little impact on the outcomes of political decision making in large societies, they have little sense of responsibility for the outcomes. Some have argued that it is not rational to vote since the chances that an individual’s vote will a decide the outcome of an election (i.e., will determine whether a candidate gets elected or not) are nearly indistinguishable from zero. For example, one widely accepted estimate puts the odds of an individual casting the deciding vote in a United States presidential election at 1 in 100 million. Many estimates put the odds much lower. Worse still, Anthony Downs has argued that almost all of those who do vote have little reason to become informed about how best to vote (Downs 1957: ch.13). On the assumption that citizens reason and behave roughly according to the Downsian model, either the society must in fact be run by a relatively small group of people with minimal input from the rest or it will be very poorly run. As we can see these criticisms are echoes of the sorts of criticisms Plato and Hobbes made.

These observations pose challenges for any robustly egalitarian or deliberative conception of democracy. Without the ability to participate intelligently in politics one cannot use one’s votes to advance one’s aims nor can one be said to participate in a process of reasoned deliberation among equals. So, either equality of political power implies a kind of self-defeating equal participation of citizens in politics or a reasonable division of labor seems to undermine equality of power. And either substantial participation of citizens in public deliberation entails the relative neglect of other tasks or the proper functioning of the other sectors of the society requires that most people do not participate intelligently in public deliberation.

4.2 Proposed Solutions to the Problem of Democratic Participation

Some modern theorists of democracy, called elite theorists, have argued against any robustly egalitarian or deliberative forms of democracy in light of the problem of democratic participation. They argue that high levels of citizen participation tend to produce bad legislation designed by demagogues to appeal to poorly informed and overly emotional citizens. They look upon the alleged uninformedness of citizens evidenced in many empirical studies in the 1950s and 1960s as perfectly reasonable and predictable. Indeed they regard the alleged apathy of citizens in modern states as highly desirable social phenomena.

Political leaders are to avoid divisive and emotionally charged issues and make policy and law with little regard for the fickle and diffuse demands made by ordinary citizens. Citizens participate by voting but since they know very little they are not effectively the ruling part of the society. The process of election is usually just a fairly peaceful way of maintaining or changing those who rule (Schumpeter 1942 [1950: 269]).

On Schumpeter’s view, however, citizens do have a role to play in avoiding serious disasters. When politicians act in ways that nearly anyone can see is problematic, the citizens can throw the bums out.

So the elite theory of democracy does seem compatible with some of the instrumentalist arguments given above but it is strongly opposed to the intrinsic arguments from liberty, public justification and equality. To be sure, there can be an elite deliberative democracy wherein elites deliberate, perhaps even out of sight of the population at large, on how to run the society.

A view akin to the elite theory but less pessimistic about citizens’ political agency and competence argues that a well-functioning representative democracy can function as a kind of “defensible epistocracy” (Landa & Pevnick 2020). This view holds that, under the right conditions, elected officials can be expected to exercise political power more responsibly than citizens in a direct democracy because each official is far more likely to cast the deciding vote in legislative assemblies (the “pivotality effect”) and officials have more incentive to exercise power with due regard for the general welfare (the “accountability effect”). Moreover, under the right conditions, representative democracy allows individuals to assess the competence of candidates for office and to select candidates who are best able to help the community pursue its commitments.

One approach that is in part motivated by the problem of democratic citizenship but which attempts to preserve some elements of equality against the elitist criticism is the interest group pluralist account of politics. Robert Dahl’s early statement of the view is very powerful.

In a rough sense, the essence of all competitive politics is bribery of the electorate by politicians… The farmer… supports a candidate committed to high price supports, the businessman…supports an advocate of low corporation taxes… the consumer…votes for candidates opposed to a sales tax. (Dahl 1959: 69)

In this conception of the democratic process, each citizen is a member of an interest group with narrowly defined interests that are closely connected to their everyday lives. On these subjects citizens are supposed to be quite well informed and interested in having an influence. Or at least, elites from each of the interest groups that are relatively close in perspective to the ordinary members are the principal agents in the process. On this account, democracy is not rule by the majority but rather rule by coalitions of minorities. Policy and law in a democratic society are decided by means of bargaining among the different groups.

This approach is conceivably compatible with the more egalitarian approach to democracy. This is because it attempts to reconcile equality with collective decision making by limiting the tasks of citizens to ones which they are able to perform reasonably well. It is not particularly compatible with the deliberative public justification approach because it takes the democratic process to be concerned essentially with bargaining among the different interest groups where the preferences are not subject to further debate in the society as a whole.

A third approach inspired by the problem of participation may be called the neo-liberal approach to politics favored by public choice theorists such as James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock (1962). Against elite theories, they contend that elites and their allies will tend to expand the powers of government and bureaucracy for their own interests and that this expansion will occur at the expense of a largely inattentive public. For this reason, they argue for severe restrictions on the powers of elites. They argue against the interest group pluralist theorists that the problem of participation occurs within interest groups more or less as much as among the citizenry at large. Only powerful economic interests are likely to succeed in organizing to influence the government and they will do so largely for their own benefit. Since economic elites will advance their own interests in politics while spreading the costs to others, policies will tend to be more costly (because imposed on everyone in society) than they are beneficial (because they benefit only the elites in the interest group.)

Neo-liberals infer that one ought to transfer many of the current functions of the state to the market and limit the state to the enforcement of basic property rights and liberties. These can be more easily understood and brought under the control of ordinary citizens.

But the neo-liberal account of democracy must answer to two large worries. First, citizens in modern societies have more ambitious conceptions of social justice and the common good than are realizable by the minimal state. The neo-liberal account thus implies a very serious curtailment of democracy of its own. More evidence is needed to support the contention that these aspirations cannot be achieved by the modern state. Second, the neo-liberal approach ignores the problem of large private concentrations of wealth and power that are capable of pushing small states around for their own benefit and imposing their wills on populations without their consent.

Somin (2013) also argues that government be significantly reduced in size so that citizens have a lesser knowledge burden to carry. But he calls for government decentralization so that citizens can vote with their feet in favor of or against competing units of government, in effect creating a kind of market in governments among which citizens can choose.

4.2.4 The self-interest assumption

A considerable amount of the literature in political science and the economic theory of the state are grounded in the assumption that individuals act primarily and perhaps even exclusively in their self-interest narrowly construed. The problem of participation and the accounts of the democratic process described above are in large part dependent on this assumption. When the preferences of voters are not assumed to be self-interested the calculations of the value of participation change. For example, if a person is a motivated utilitarian, the small chance of making a difference is coupled with a huge accumulated return to many people if there is a significant difference between alternatives. It may be worth it in this case to become reasonably well informed (Parfit 1984: 74). Even more weakly altruistic moral preferences could make a big difference to the rationality of becoming informed, for example if one had a preference to comply with perceived civic duty to vote responsibly (see section 4.3.1 for discussion of the duty to vote). Any moral preference can be formulated in consistent utility functions.

Moreover, defenders of deliberative democracy often claim that concerns for the common good and justice are not merely given prior to politics but that they can evolve and improve through the process of discussion and debate in politics (Elster 1986 [2003]; Gutmann & Thompson 2004; Cohen 1989 [2009]). They assert that much debate and discussion in politics would not be intelligible were it not for the fact that citizens are willing to engage in open minded discussion with those who have distinct morally informed points of view. Empirical evidence suggests that individuals are motivated by moral considerations in politics in addition to their interests (Mansbridge 1990).

Public deliberation in any large-scale democracy will occur within a complex and differentiated “deliberative system”, a

wide variety of institutions, associations, and sites of contestation accomplish political work. (Mansbridge et. al. 2012)

Moreover, the deliberative system of a complex democracy will be characterized by a division of democratic labor , with different parts of the system making different contributions to the overall system. The question arises: what is the appropriate role for a citizen in this division of labor? Philosophically, we should ask two questions. What ought citizens have knowledge about in order to fulfill their role? What standards ought citizens’ beliefs live up to in order to be adequately supported? One promising view is that citizens must think about what ends the society ought to aim at and leave the question of how to achieve those aims to experts (Christiano 1996: ch 5). The rationale for this division of labor is that expertise is not as fundamental to the choice of aims as it is to the development of legislation and policy. Citizens are capable in their everyday lives of understanding and cultivating deep understandings of values and of their interests. And if citizens genuinely do choose the aims and others faithfully pursue the means to achieving those aims, then citizens are in the driver’s seat in society and they can play this role as equals.

To be sure, citizens need to know who to vote for and whether those they vote for are genuinely advancing their aims. This would appear to require some basic knowledge of about how best to achieve their political aims. How is this possible without extensive knowledge? In addition, there is empirical evidence that those who are better informed have more influence on representatives (Erikson 2015). So, if this task requires some kind of knowledge to do well, how can this be compatible with equality?

One promising response is that ordinary citizens do not need individually to have a lot of knowledge of social science and particular facts in order to make political decisions based on such knowledge. Recent research in cognitive science indicates the individuals use “cognitive shortcuts” to save on time in acquiring information about the world they live in (Lupia & McCubbins 1998). This use of shortcuts is common and essential throughout economic and political life. In political life, we see part of the rationale for the many intermediate institutions between government and citizens (Downs 1957: 221–229). Citizens save time by making use of institutions such as the press, unions and other interest group associations, political parties, and opinion leaders to get information about politics. They also rely on interactions in the workplace as well as conversations with friends and families. Political parties can connect ordinary citizens in various ways to expertise because each one contains a division of labor within them that mirrors that in the state. Experts in parties have incentives to make their expertise intelligible to other members (Christiano 2012). In addition, under favorable conditions, political parties stimulate the development of citizens’ normative perspectives and facilitate a healthy public competition of political justifications based on those perspectives (White & Ypi 2016).

People are dependent on social networks in other ways in a democracy. People receive “free” information (which they do not deliberately seek out) about politics and law in school, through their jobs, in discussion with friends, colleagues and family and incidentally through the media. And this can form a better or worse basis on which to pursue other information. Institutions can make a difference to the stream of free information individuals receive. Education can be distributed in a more or less egalitarian way. The circumstances of work can provide more or less free information about politics and law. People who have jobs with a significant amount of power such as lawyers, business persons, government officials will be beneficiaries of very high quality free information. They need to know about law and politics to do their jobs properly. Those who hold low skilled and non-unionized jobs will receive much less free information about politics at work. To the extent that we can alter the economic division of labor by for example giving more place to unions or having greater worker participation, we might be able to reduce inequalities of information among citizens.

4.3 The Moral Duties of Democratic Citizens

What are the moral duties of democratic citizens in complex democracies? In this section, we discuss three important democratic duties: (1) the duty to vote, (2) the duty to promote justice through principled disobedience of the law, and (3) duties to accommodate disagreement through compromise and consensus.

It is often thought that democratic citizens have a moral duty to vote in elections. But this is not obvious. Individual votes are a causally insignificant contribution to the democratic process. In large-scale democracies, the chance that any particular citizen’s vote will decide the outcome of an election is minuscule. What moral reason do democratic citizens have to participate in politics even though they’re almost certain not to make the difference to who gets elected? Why shouldn’t they seek to promote the good or justice in other ways?

Parfit develops an act-utilitarian answer to this question (Parfit 1984: 73–75). Act-utilitarians hold that morally right actions maximize the total expected sum of the utilities of all persons in the society. Parfit argues that voting might nonetheless maximize expected utility if one candidate is significantly superior to the other(s). If we add the benefits to each member of the society of having the superior candidate win, we get a very large difference in value. So when we multiply that value by the probability of casting the deciding vote, which is often thought to be about 1/100,000,000 in a United States presidential election, we might still get a reasonably high expected value. When we subtract the cost to the voter and others of voting, which is often quite low, from this number, we may still have a good reason to vote.

One worry with Parfit’s view is that it faces a version of what Jason Brennan calls “the particularity problem” (Brennan 2011). This is the problem of explaining why citizens ought to promote value through political participation as opposed to through non-political acts. Voting is just one way of promoting overall utility; we need to know the expected utility of the different acts they might perform instead. Even if the argument above is correct, it might be the case that many individuals maximize expected utility by not voting and doing something even more beneficial with their time.

Alex Guerrero argues that citizens have moral reasons to vote because candidates who win by a larger proportion of votes can claim a greater “normative mandate” to govern (Guerrero 2010). Still each individual vote makes only a tiny contribution to the proportion of votes a candidate receives. So, we might doubt the strength of the reason to vote that Guerrero identifies.

Some theorists argue that individuals have a moral duty to vote in order to absolve themselves of complicity in state injustices (Beerbohm 2012; Zakaras 2018). All states commit injustices—they make and enforce unjust laws, wage unjust wars, and much else. And citizens of large-scale democracies have a kind of standing responsibility, by paying taxes and obeying laws, for their state’s injustices of which they must actively absolve themselves The complicity account argues that citizens avoid shared responsibility for their state’s injustices if they oppose those injustices through voting and of public advocacy (Beerbohm 2012).

One worry is that it is unclear why voting and publicly advocating against injustice should be thought to absolve responsibility that is established by paying taxes and obeying laws. Another worry is that one’s concern to oppose injustice should derive from a more direct concern for the wrongs suffered by victims of injustice rather than a concern with keeping one’s hands clean.

One sort of account that avoids this worry grounds the moral duty to vote in the importance of doing one’s fair share of the demands of political justice consistent with public equality. The demands of creating and sustaining just institutions distribute fairly among all citizens (Maskivker 2019). If one fails to do one’s fair share of these demands, then one fails to show due regard for the eventual victims of injustice. Furthermore, voting provides citizens with a mechanism for doing their fair shares of the demands of making their institutions just in a way that is consistent with respecting the public equality of fellow citizens. By showing up and casting a vote, citizens can contribute to the collective achievement of justice while maintaining equal decision-making power with fellow citizens.

Civil disobedience has long been recognized as a central mechanism through which democratic citizens may legitimately promote political justice in their society. According to the standard view, civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law that aims to change laws or government policies. People who engage in civil disobedience are willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions in order to show fidelity to the law (Bedau 1961; Rawls 1971: ch. 55). The standard definition of civil disobedience has been subjected to challenge. For example, some argue that the private acts in which the disobedient seeks to evade legal consequences can count as instances of civil disobedience (Raz 1979; Brownlee 2004, 2007, 2012).

Perhaps the most common way of justifying civil disobedience argues that the same considerations that ground the pro tanto duty to obey the law sometimes make it appropriate to engage in civil disobedience of the law (see, e.g., Rawls 1971: ch. 57; Sabl 2001; Markovits 2005; Smith 2011). For example, Rawls argues that while citizens of a “nearly just” society have a pro tanto duty to obey its laws in virtue of it being nearly just, civil disobedience can be justified as a way of making the relevant society more just (Rawls 1971: ch. 57). Similarly, Daniel Markovits argues that members of a society with suitably egalitarian and inclusive democratic procedures have a general duty to obey its laws because they are produced by procedures that are suitably egalitarian and inclusive, but that civil disobedience can be justified as a way of making the relevant procedures more egalitarian or inclusive (Markovits 2005).

It is easy to see why this constitutes an attractive way of justifying civil disobedience, since it justifies it by appeal to the same values that ground the pro tanto duty to obey the law. On the other hand, as Simmons notes, if there is no general duty to obey the law, there would seem to be no presumption in favor of obedience and thus no special need for a justification of civil disobedience; obedience and disobedience would stand equally in need of justification (Simmons 2007: ch 4).

Advocates of the standard approach generally assume that only civil disobedience can be justified in this way. However, some argue civil disobedience does not enjoy a special normative presumption over uncivil disobedience. The core idea that insofar as the values that ground a pro tanto duty to obey the law—for example, justice or democratic equality—are sometimes best served by civil disobedience of the law, they are sometimes best served by covert, evasive, anonymous, or even violent disobedience of the law (Delmas 2018; Lai 2019; Pasternak 2018).

Disagreement about what laws, policies, or principles ought to be implemented is a persistent feature of democratic societies. It is often argued that citizens and officials have duties to moderate their political activity in order to accommodate the competing views of fellow citizens or officials. Two duties of accommodation are widely discussed in the literature: duties of compromise and duties of public justification.

A compromise can be understood as an agreement between parties to advance laws or policies that all regard as suboptimal because they disagree about which laws or policies are optimal (May 2005). While it is widely accepted that there are sometimes compelling instrumental reasons to compromise, whether there are intrinsic moral reasons to compromise is more controversial. Some defend intrinsic reasons to compromise based on democratic values like inclusion, mutual respect, and reciprocity (Gutmann and Thompson 2014; Wendt 2016; Weinstock 2013). However, Simon May argues that such arguments fail and that all reasons to compromise are pragmatic (May 2005).

Advocates of the public justification approach to democracy (see section 2.2.2 ) often argue that democratic citizens and officials have individual moral duties of public justification. John Rawls argues for a “duty of civility” that requires citizens and officials to be prepared to give mutually acceptable justifications for important laws when voting and engaged in public advocacy. Given the inevitability of disagreement about comprehensive moral and philosophical truth in free democracies, the duty of civility requires citizens to appeal to a reasonable “political” conception of justice that can be the object of an “overlapping consensus” between different comprehensive doctrines. While different theorists motivate duties of public justification in different ways, many appeal to the need for exercises of coercive political authority to respect citizens’ freedom and equality.

5. Democratic Representation

Representation is an essential part of the division of labor of large-scale democracies. In this section, we examine two moral questions concerning representation. First, what sort of representative system is best? Second, by what moral principles are representatives bound?

A number of debates have centered on the question of what kinds of representative systems are best for a democratic society. What choice we make here will depend heavily on our underlying moral justification of democracy, our conception of citizenship as well as on our empirical understanding of political institutions and how they function. The most basic types of formal political representation available are single member district representation, proportional representation and group representation. In addition, many societies have opted for multicameral legislative institutions. In some cases, combinations of the above forms have been tried.

Single member district representation returns single representatives of geographically defined areas containing roughly equal populations to the legislature and is prominent in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India, among other places. The most common form of proportional representation is party list proportional representation. In a simple form of such a scheme, a number of parties compete for election to a legislature that is not divided into geographical districts. Parties acquire seats in the legislature as a proportion of the total number of votes they receive in the voting population as a whole. Group representation occurs when the society is divided into non-geographically defined groups such as ethnic or linguistic groups or even functional groups such as workers, farmers and capitalists and returns representatives to a legislature from each of them.

Many have argued in favor of single member district legislation on the grounds that it has appeared to them to lead to more stable government than other forms of representation. The thought is that proportional representation tends to fragment the citizenry into opposing homogeneous camps that rigidly adhere to their party lines and that are continually vying for control over the government. Since there are many parties and they are unwilling to compromise with each other, governments formed from coalitions of parties tend to fall apart rather quickly. The post war experience of governments in Italy appears to confirm this hypothesis. Single member district representation, in contrast, is said to enhance the stability of governments by virtue of its favoring a two party system of government. Each election cycle then determines which party is to stay in power for some length of time.

Charles Beitz argues that single member district representation encourages moderation in party programs offered for citizens to consider (Beitz 1989: ch. 7). This results from the tendency of this kind of representation towards two party systems. In a two party system with majority rule, it is argued, each party must appeal to the median voter in the political spectrum. Hence, they must moderate their programs to appeal to the median voter. Furthermore, they encourage compromise among groups since they must try to appeal to a lot of other groups in order to become part of one of the two leading parties. These tendencies encourage moderation and compromise in citizens to the extent that political parties, and interest groups, hold these qualities up as necessary to functioning well in a democracy.

In criticism, advocates of proportional and group representation have argued that single member district representation tends to muffle the voices and ignore the interests of minority groups in the society (Mill 1861; Christiano 1996). Minority interests and views tend to be articulated in background negotiations and in ways that muffle their distinctiveness. Furthermore, representatives of minority interests and views often have a difficult time getting elected at all in single member district systems so it has been charged that minority views and interests are often systematically underrepresented. Sometimes these problems are dealt with by redrawing the boundaries of districts in a way that ensures greater minority representation. The efforts are invariably quite controversial since there is considerable disagreement about the criteria for apportionment.

In proportional representation, by contrast, representatives of different groups are seated in the legislature in proportion to citizens’ choices. Minorities need not make their demands conform to the basic dichotomy of views and interests that characterize single member district systems so their views are more articulated and distinctive as well as better represented.

Advocates of group representation, like Iris Marion Young, have argued that some historically disenfranchised groups may still not do very well under proportional representation (Young 1990: ch. 6). They may not be able to organize and articulate their views as easily as other groups. Also, minority groups can still be systematically defeated in the legislature and their interests may be consistently set back even if they do have some representation. For these groups, some have argued that the only way to protect their interests is legally to ensure that they have adequate and even disproportionate representation.

One worry about group representation is that it tends to freeze some aspects of the agenda that might be better left to the choice of citizens. For instance, consider a population that is divided into linguistic groups for a long time. And suppose that only some citizens continue to think of linguistic conflict as important. In the circumstances a group representation scheme may tend to be biased in an arbitrary way that favors the views or interests of those who do think of linguistic conflict as important.

What moral norms apply to representatives carrying out their official duties? We can get a better handle on possible answers by introducing Hannah Pitkin’s famous distinction between trustees and delegates (Pitkin 1967). Representatives who act as trustees rely on their own independent judgments in carrying out their duties. Norms of trusteeship are supported in recognition that, given a natural division of democratic labor, officials are in a much better position to make well-reasoned and well-informed political decisions than ordinary citizens.

Representatives who act as delegates defer to the judgments of their citizens. These norms might be thought to reflect the value of democratic accountability. Because the people authorize representatives to govern, it is natural to think that representatives are accountable to the people to enact their judgments. If representatives are not accountable in this way, citizens lose democratic control over their representatives’ actions.

Which norms should win out when they conflict? Pitkin argues that the answer varies by context. This seems plausible. For example, if we take the view that citizens primarily have the role of determining the aims of the society, we might think that representatives ought to be delegates with regard to the aims, but trustees with regard to the ways of realizing the aims (Christiano 1996). See Suzanne Dovi’s discussion of representation for a deeper and more nuanced discussion of these issues.

Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem is thought by some to provide a major set of difficulties for democratic theory (Arrow 1951). William Riker, Russell Hardin, and others have thought that the impossibility theorem shows that there are deep problems with democratic ideals (Riker 1982; Hardin 1999). Neither of these thinkers are opposed to democracy itself, they both think that there are good instrumental reasons for having democracy.

The basic results of social choice theory are laid out in detail elsewhere in the encyclopedia (List 2013). Here we will simply articulate the basic result and an illustration. The question of Arrowian social choice theory is: how do we determine a social preference for a society overall on the basis of the set of the individual preferences of the members? Arrow shows that a social choice function that satisfies a number of plausible constraints cannot be defined when there are three or more alternatives to be chosen by the group. He lays out a number of conditions to be imposed on a social choice function. Unlimited domain : The social choice function must be able to give us a social preference no matter what the preferences of the individuals over alternatives are. Non dictatorship : the social choice function must not select the preference of one particular member regardless of others’ preferences. Transitivity and completeness : The individual preferences orderings must be transitive and complete orderings and the social preference derived from them must be transitive and complete. Independence of irrelevant alternatives : the social preference between two alternatives must be the result only of the individual orderings between those two alternatives. Pareto condition : if all the members prefer an alternative x over y , then x must be ranked above y in the social preference. The theorem says that no social choice function over more than two alternatives can satisfy all of these conditions.

A useful illustration of this idea involves an extension of majority rule to cases of more than two alternatives. The Condorcet rule says that an alternative x wins when, for every other alternative, a majority prefers x over that alternative. For example, suppose we have three persons A , B and C and three alternatives x , y and z . A prefers x over y , y over z ; B prefers y over z and z over x ; C prefers x over z and z over y . In this case, x is the Condorcet winner since it beats y , and it beats z . The problem with this plausible sounding rule is the case of a majority cycle. Suppose you have three persons A , B and C , and three alternatives, x , y and z . In the case in which A prefers x over y and y over z , while B prefers y over z and z over x , and C prefers z over x and x over y , the Condorcet rule will yield a social preference of x over y , y over z and z over x . One can see here that the Condorcet rule satisfies all the conditions except transitivity of social preference. One way to avoid intransitivity is to restrict the domain of preferences from which the social preference arises. Another is to introduce cardinal information that compares the how much people prefer alternatives (violating independence). Another might be to make one person a dictator. So, this case nicely illustrates that one cannot satisfy all of the constraints simultaneously.

Riker argues that the theorem shows that the idea that the popular will can be the governing element in a society is false. If an existence condition for a popular will is a restricted set of preferences the question naturally arises as to whether such a condition is always or normally met in a moderately complex society. We might wonder whether a highly pluralistic society with a very complex division of labor is likely to satisfy the restricted preference set condition necessary to avoid cycles or other pathologies of social choice. Some have argued that we have empirical evidence to the effect that modern societies do normally satisfy such conditions (Mackie 2003). Others have argued that this seems unlikely (Riker 1982; Ingham 2019). This is not merely a defense of unlimited domain. It is a defense of the thesis that normally the collections of preferences in modern societies are not likely to have the properties that enable them to avoid cycles.

The fairness critique from social choice theory is based on the idea that when a voting process meets requirements of fairness, the fairness of the process and the preferences may not generate determinate outcomes. If cycles are pervasive, the outcomes of democratic processes may be determined by clever strategies and not by the fairness of the procedures (Riker 1982). Three remarks are in order here. First, it is compatible with the process being completely fair that the outcomes of the process are indeterminate. After all, coin flips are fair. Second, there is some question as to how prominent the cycles are. Third, one might think that if the conditions which enable opposing sides to strategize effectively are themselves roughly equal, then the concerns for fairness are fully met. If resources for persuasion and organization are distributed in an egalitarian way, perhaps the fairness account is vindicated after all. This point can be made more compelling when we consider Sean Ingham’s account of political equality. He includes intensity of preference in his account of fairness. This is a departure from the Arrowian approach, but it is in many ways a realistic one. The idea is that majorities have equal control over policy areas when they are able to get what they want with the same amount of intensity of preferences. And equality holds generally when all groups of the same size have the same control (Ingham 2019). There remains an extreme case in which all majorities have equal intensity of preference and are caught in a majority cycle. But the chances of this happening are very slim, even if the chances of majority cycles more generally are not as small. Even if there are a lot of majority cycles, if the issues are resolved in such a way that those majorities that have most at stake in the conflict are the ones that get their way, then we can have fairness in a quite robust sense even while having pervasive majority cycles.

If democratic societies allow members to participate as equals in collective decision making, a natural question arises: who has the right to participate in making collective decisions? We can ask this question within a particular jurisdiction (ought all adults have the right to participation? Ought children have the right to participation? Ought all residents have such rights?). But we can also ask what the extent of the jurisdiction ought to be. How many of the people in the world ought to be included in the collective decision-making? An easy, though slightly misleading, way of asking this question is, what ought the physical boundaries of a particular institution of collective decision-making be? We see partially democratic societies within the confines of the modern nation-state. But we might ask, why should we restrict the set of persons who participate in making decisions of the modern state just to those who happen to be the physical inhabitants of those states? Surely there are many other persons affected by decisions made by democratic states aside from those persons. For example, activities in one society A can pollute another society B . Why shouldn’t the members of B have a say in the decisions regarding the polluting activities in A ? And there can be many other effects that activities in A can have on B .

Some have suggested that the boundaries of a state ought to be determined through a principle of national self-determination. We identify a nation as an ongoing group of persons who share certain cultural, historical and political norms and who identify with each other and with a piece of land. Then we determine the boundaries of the territory by appeal to the size of the group of people and the land they cherish (Miller 1995; Song 2012). This is an appealing idea in many ways: shared nationality breeds a willingness to share the sacrifices that arise from collective decision making; it generates a sense of at-homeness for people. But it is hard to use as a general principle for dividing land among persons when one of the central facts for many societies is that a diversity of nations, ethnic groups and cultures co-mingle on the very same land.

Is there a democratic solution to the boundary problem? A number of ideas have been suggested. The first idea is that the people ought to decide what the boundaries are. But this suggestion, while it may be a pragmatic resolution to the problem, seems to beg the question about who the members are and who are not (Whelan 1983).

A second theoretical solution that has some democratic credentials is to invoke the principle that all who are subjected to decision making, in the sense of who are coerced or have duties imposed upon them, ought to have a say in the decision making (Abizadeh 2008). This principle is plausible enough, but it doesn’t get at enough cases. The pollution case above is not a case of subjection.

A third proposed theoretical solution is the all-affected principle. One formulation is “all affected persons ought to have a say in the decisions that affect them”. This does suggest that when the activities in one state affect those of another state, the people of the other state ought to have a say in those activities. Some have thought that this principle tends to lead to a kind of politically cosmopolitan principle in support of world government (Goodin 2007).

But the all-affected principle is conceptually quite uncertain and morally deeply problematic, and it provides very little, if anything, in the way of a solution to the boundary problem.

First, “having a say” is not clear. Does it require having a vote in collective decision-making? Or is it also satisfied by a person’s being able to modify another’s action by negotiating with them, as we see when there is bargaining over an externality? This latter version would undermine the idea that the all-affected principle has direct implications for the boundary problem. When the United States permits activities that produce acid rain in Canada, Canada can negotiate with the United States to lessen the production of acid rain and/or to compensate Canada for the harm. As long as there is a fair and effective system of negotiation, this would seem to satisfy the all-affected principle without giving Canadians a vote in American politics or Americans a vote in Canadian politics.

Second, it is not clear what “being affected” means. One, does a person being affected just mean that there is a change in the person’s situation or must the effect involve the setting back of one’s preferences, or interests, or legitimate interests, or exercise of one’s capacities or one’s good? Two, are one’s interests affected by a decision only when they are advanced or set back relative to some baseline (either the present state of affairs or some morally defined baseline like what you have promised me), or am I affected by decisions that could be to my advantage or disadvantage but end up making no difference? For example, if I am drowning in a pool and you are deciding whether to save me or go buy yourself a candy bar, am I affected by your buying the candy bar? If I am not affected when no change occurs, then who is affected by a decision often depends on who participates in the decision and we have no solution to the problem of inclusion. If I am affected, then the principle has some quite extraordinary implications. Now it turns out that impoverished persons in South Asia are affected by my buying a candy bar, since I could have sent the money to them (Goodin 2007).

The all-affected principle is a merely suggestive and rhetorically effective phrase. It is a conversation starter and a list of topics to be discussed, not a genuine principle. For example, if I must include everyone possibly affected by my decision for every decision I make, I will not be able to make many decisions and my decision making will no longer enable me to give a shape to my own life and my relations with others. My life becomes fragmented and lacks integrity (Williams 1973). An analog of this problem would arise for political societies, presumably. Each society would have to include a variety of different persons in each decision. It is hard to see how any society could take on any particular character if this is the case.

A more plausible principle that encompasses some of the suggestions of the all-affected principle is that a framework of institutions should be set up so that people have power to advance and protect their legitimate interests in life.

But if we understand the principle in this way, it is not clear that it helps us much with the boundary problem. First of all, there are different ways in which people can be said to possess power over their lives. One kind of power is the power to participate as an equal in a collective decision-making process. Another kind is to be able to advance one’s interests in a decentralized process like a market or a system of agreement making like international law. Recalling our pollution problem above, we could give the state of which they are members power to negotiate with the polluting state terms that are mutually agreeable. Only the power to participate as an equal in collective decision-making involves the boundaries of collective decision-making.

Another solution to the boundary problem is a conservative one. The basic idea is to keep the boundaries of states roughly as they are except if there is a pressing need to change them. Trying to alter the boundaries of political societies is a recipe for serious conflict because there is no institution that has the legitimacy or power actually to resolve problems at an international level and there is likely to be a lot of disagreement on how to do it. States as we know them, are by far the most powerful political entities in the international system. They have developed more effective practices of accountability of power than any other entity in the system. They have created unified societies with highly interdependent populations. Finally, states and the individuals in them can be made accountable to some degree to other individuals and states through the process of negotiation and international law making. The origin of these boundaries may be arbitrary, but it is not, for all that, irrelevant. To be sure, there are clear cases where borders can be changed. One source of pressing need is serious injustice within a country. Another might be the existence of permanent minorities that are sectionally defined. Here, we ask only how to revise boundaries and the basis of such revision is that it is a remedy for serious injustice (Buchanan 1991).

• Abizadeh, Arash, 2008, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders”, Political Theory , 36(1): 37–65. doi:10.1177/0090591707310090
• Acemoglu, Daron, Suresh Naidu, Pascual Restrepo, and James A. Robinson, 2019, “Democracy Does Cause Growth”, Journal of Political Economy , 127(1): 47–100. doi:10.1086/700936
• Achen, Christopher H. and Larry M. Bartels, 2016, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton Studies in Political Behavior), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Altman, Andrew and Christopher Heath Wellman, 2009, A Liberal Theory of International Justice , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199564415.001.0001
• Anderson, Elizabeth, 2006, “The Epistemology of Democracy”, Episteme , 3(1–2): 8–22. doi:10.3366/epi.2006.3.1-2.8
• Aristotle, Politics: Writings from the Complete Works , Jonathan Barnes (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
• Arneson, Richard J., 1993 [2003], “Democratic Rights at National and Workplace Levels”, in The Idea of Democracy , David Copp, Jean Hampton, and John Roember, 118–138, 143–147; reprinted as “Democracy at the National Level” in Christiano 2003: 95–115.
• –––, 2003, “Defending the Purely Instrumental Account of Democratic Legitimacy”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 11(1): 122–132. doi:10.1111/1467-9760.00170
• –––, 2004, “Democracy Is Not Intrinsically Just”, in Justice and Democracy , Keith Dowding, Robert E. Goodin, and Carole Pateman (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 40–58. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490217.003
• –––, 2009, “The Supposed Right to a Democratic Say”, in Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy , Thomas Christiano and John Christman (eds.), Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 195–212. doi:10.1002/9781444310399.ch11
• Arrow, Kenneth J., 1951, Social Choice and Individual Values , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Austen-Smith, David, 1992, “Strategic Models of Talk in Political Decision Making”, International Political Science Review , 13(1): 45–58. doi:10.1177/019251219201300104
• Austen-Smith, David and Jeffrey S. Banks, 1996, “Information Aggregation, Rationality, and the Condorcet Jury Theorem”, American Political Science Review , 90(1): 34–45. doi:10.2307/2082796
• Bajaj, Sameer, 2014, “Review of Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many , by Hélène Landemore”, Ethics , 124(2): 426–431. doi:10.1086/673507
• Barry, Brian, 1965, Political Argument , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Bartels, Larry M., 2002, “Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions”, Political Behavior , 24(2): 117–150. doi:10.1023/A:1021226224601
• Bedau, Hugo A., 1961, “On Civil Disobedience”, Journal of Philosophy , 58(21): 653–665. doi:10.2307/2023542
• Beerbohm, Eric Anthony, 2012, In Our Name: The Ethics of Democracy , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Beitz, Charles R., 1989, Political Equality: An Essay on Democratic Theory , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Black, Duncan, 1963, The Theory of Committees and Elections , second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Brennan, Jason, 2011, The Ethics of Voting , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2014, “How Smart Is Democracy? You Can’t Answer That Question a Priori”, Critical Review , 26(1–2): 33–58. doi:10.1080/08913811.2014.907040
• –––, 2016, Against Democracy , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Brownlee, Kimberley, 2004, “Features of a Paradigm Case of Civil Disobedience”, Res Publica , 10(4): 337–351. doi:10.1007/s11158-004-2326-6
• –––, 2007, “The Communicative Aspects of Civil Disobedience and Lawful Punishment”, Criminal Law and Philosophy , 1(2): 179–192. doi:10.1007/s11572-006-9015-9
• –––, 2012, Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199592944.001.0001
• Buchanan, Allen, 1991, Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania to Quebec , Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Buchanan, James and Gordon Tullock, 1962, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy , Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
• Caplan, Bryan, 2007, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Cassese, Antonio, 1995, Self-Determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Christiano, Thomas, 1996, The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory , Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• ––– (ed.), 2003, Philosophy and Democracy: An Anthology , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2004, “The Authority of Democracy”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 12(3): 266–290. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2004.00200.x
• –––, 2006, “A Democratic Theory of Territory and Some Puzzles about Global Democracy”, Journal of Social Philosophy , 37(1): 81–107. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9833.2006.00304.x
• –––, 2008, The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and Its Limits , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198297475.001.0001
• –––, 2009, “Must Democracy Be Reasonable?”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 39(1): 1–34. doi:10.1353/cjp.0.0037
• –––, 2011, “An Instrumental Argument for a Human Right to Democracy: An Instrumental Argument for a Human Right to Democracy”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 39(2): 142–176. doi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.2011.01204.x
• –––, 2012, “Rational Deliberation among Experts and Citizens”, in Parkinson and Mansbridge 2012: 27–51. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139178914.003
• –––, 2015, “Self-Determination and the Human Right to Democracy”, in Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights , Rowan Cruft, S. Matthew Liao, and Massimo Renzo (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 459–480. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199688623.003.0026
• Cohen, Joshua, 1986, “An Epistemic Conception of Democracy”, Ethics , 97(1): 26–38. doi:10.1086/292815
• –––, 1989 [2009], “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy”, in The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State , Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit (eds.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 17–34; reprinted in Philosophy, Politics, Democracy: Selected Essays , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 16–37.
• –––, 1996 [2003], “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy”, in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political , Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 95–119; reprinted in Christiano 2003: 17–38.
• Condorcet, Marquis de, 1785, Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues àla pluralité des voix , Paris; reprinted Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139923972
• Dahl, Robert A., 1959, A Preface to Democratic Theory , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Delmas, Candice, 2018, A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190872199.001.0001
• Dewey, John, 1927 [2012], The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry , New York: Henry Holt; reprinted, Melvin L. Rogers (ed.), University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2012.
• Downs, Anthony, 1957, An Economic Theory of Democracy , New York: Harper and Row.
• Doyle, Michael W., 2011, Liberal Peace: Selected Essays , New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203804933
• Dworkin, Ronald, 1996, Freedom’s Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2000, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Elster, Jon, 1986 [2003], “The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory”, in Foundations of Scoial Choice Theory , Jon Elster and Aanund Hyllund (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 103–132; reprinted in Christiano 2003: 138–158.
• Ely, John Hart, 1980, Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Erikson, Robert S., 2015, “Income Inequality and Policy Responsiveness “, Annual Review of Political Science , 18: 11–29. doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-020614-094706
• Estlund, David, 1997a [2003], “Beyond Fairness and Deliberation: The Epistemic Dimension of Democratic Authority”, in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics , James Bohman and William Rehg (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 173–204; reprinted in Christiano 2003: 69–91.
• –––, 1997b, “The Epistemic Dimension of Democratic Authority”:, The Modern Schoolman , 74(4): 259–276. doi:10.5840/schoolman199774424
• –––, 2003, “Why Not Epistocracy”, in Desire, Identity, and Existence: Essays in Honor of T.M. Penner , Naomi Reshotko (ed.), Kelowna, BC: Academic Printing and Publishing, 53–69.
• –––, 2006, “Democracy and the Real Speech Situation”, in Deliberative Democracy and Its Discontents , Samantha Besson and José Luis Martí (eds.), London: Routledge, 75–92.
• –––, 2008, Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Estlund, David M., Jeremy Waldron, Bernard Grofman, and Scott L. Feld, 1989, “Democratic Theory and the Public Interest: Condorcet and Rousseau Revisited”, American Political Science Review , 83(4): 1317–1340. doi:10.2307/1961672
• Farber, Henry S. and Joanne Gowa, 1995, “Polities and Peace”, International Security , 20(2): 123–146. doi:10.2307/2539231
• Forst, Rainer, 2016, “The Justification of Basic Rights: A Discourse-Theoretical Approach”, Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy , 45(3): 7–28. doi:10.5553/NJLP/221307132016045003002
• Gartzke, Erik, 2007, “The Capitalist Peace”, American Journal of Political Science , 51(1): 166–91.
• Gaus, Gerald F., 1996, Justificatory Liberalism: An Essay on Epistemology and Political Theory , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2011, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511780844
• Goodin, Robert E., 2003, Reflective Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199256179.001.0001
• –––, 2007, “Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 35(1): 40–68. doi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.2007.00098.x
• Goodin, Robert E. and Kai Spiekermann, 2019, An Epistemic Theory of Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198823452.001.0001
• Gould, Carol C., 1988, Rethinking Democracy: Freedom and Social Cooperation in Politics, Economics and Society , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Grofman, Bernard and Scott L. Feld, 1988, “Rousseau’s General Will: A Condorcetian Perspective”, American Political Science Review , 82(2): 567–576. doi:10.2307/1957401
• Guerrero, Alexander A., 2010, “The Paradox of Voting and the Ethics of Political Representation”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 38(3): 272–306. doi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.2010.01188.x
• Gutmann, Amy and Dennis Thompson, 2004, Why Deliberative Democracy? , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2014, The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Habermas, Jürgen, 1992 [1996], Faktizität und Geltung. Beiträge zur Diksurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Translated as Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy , William Rehg (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
• Hannon, Michael, 2020, “Empathetic Understanding and Deliberative Democracy”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 101(3): 591–611. doi:10.1111/phpr.12624
• Hardin, Russell, 1999, Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198290845.001.0001
• Hayek, Friedrich A., 1960, The Constitution of Liberty , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Hobbes, Thomas, 1651, Leviathan , London; reprinted, C.B. MacPherson (ed.), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968.
• Hong, Lu and Scott E. Page, 2004, “Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of High-Ability Problem Solvers”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 101(46): 16385–16389. doi:10.1073/pnas.0403723101
• Hume, David, 1748, “Of the Original Contract”; reprinted in Hume’s Ethical Writings: Selections from David Hume , Alasdair MacIntyre (ed.), Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965.
• Ingham, Sean, 2019, Rule by Multiple Majorities: A New Theory of Popular Control , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108683821
• Kahan, Dan M., 2013, “Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection”, Judgment and Decision Making , 8(4): 407–424
• Kant, Immanuel, 1795, Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf , Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius. Translated as “Toward Perpetual Peace” in Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy , Mary J. Gregor (trans./ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 311–352.
• Knight, Jack and James Johnson, 2011, The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Kolodny, Niko, 2014a, “Rule Over None I: What Justifies Democracy?”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 42(3): 195–229. doi:10.1111/papa.12035
• –––, 2014b, “Rule Over None II: Social Equality and the Justification of Democracy”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 42(4): 287–336. doi:10.1111/papa.12037
• Ladha, Krishna K., 1992, “The Condorcet Jury Theorem, Free Speech, and Correlated Votes”, American Journal of Political Science , 36(3): 617–634. doi:10.2307/2111584
• Lai, Ten-Herng., 2019, “Justifying Uncivil Disobedience”, in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 5 , David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne, and Steven Wall (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 90–114. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198841425.003.0004
• Landa, Dimitri and Ryan Pevnick, 2020, “Representative Democracy as Defensible Epistocracy”, American Political Science Review , 114(1): 1–13. doi:10.1017/S0003055419000509
• Landemore, Hélène, 2013, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Layne, Christopher, 1994, “Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace”, International Security , 19(2): 5–49. doi:10.2307/2539195
• Levy, Jack S. and William R. Thompson, 2010, Causes of War , Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell.
• List, Christian, 2013, “Social Choice Theory”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , (Winter 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/social-choice/ >
• List, Christian and Robert E. Goodin, 2001, “Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 9(3): 277–306. doi:10.1111/1467-9760.00128
• Locke, John, 1690, Second Treatise on Civil Government , London; reprinted C.B. MacPherson (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980.
• Lord, Charles G., Lee Ross, and Mark R. Lepper, 1979, “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence.”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 37(11): 2098–2109. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.37.11.2098
• Lupia Arthur and Matthew D. McCubbins, 1998, The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need To Know? , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Mackie, Gerry, 2003, Democracy Defended , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490293
• Madison, James, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, 1787–1788, The Federalist Papers , New York; reprinted Isaac Kramnick (ed.), Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1987. [ Federalist Papers available online ]
• Mansbridge, Jane J. (ed.), 1990, Beyond Self-Interest , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Mansbridge, Jane, James Bohman, Simone Chambers, Thomas Christiano, Archon Fung, John Parkinson, Dennis F. Thompson, and Mark E. Warren, 2012, “A Systemic Approach to Deliberative Democracy”, in Parkinson and Mansbridge2003: 1–26. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139178914.002
• Markovits, Daniel, 2005, “Democratic Disobedience”, Yale Law Journal , 114(8): 1897–1952.
• Maskivker, Julia, 2019, The Duty to Vote , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190066062.001.0001
• May, Simon Cabulea, 2005, “Principled Compromise and the Abortion Controversy”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 33(4): 317–348. doi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.2005.00035.x
• Mill, John Stuart, 1861 [1991], Considerations on Representative Government , London: Parker, Son, and Bourn; reprinted Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991.
• Miller, David, 1995, On Nationality , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Nozick, Robert, 1974, Anarchy, State and Utopia , New York: Basic Books.
• Page, Scott E., 2007, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Parfit, Derek, 1984, Reasons and Persons , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019824908X.001.0001
• Parkinson, John and Jane Mansbridge (eds.), 2012, Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139178914
• Pasternak, Avia, 2018, “Political Rioting: A Moral Assessment”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 46(4): 384–418. doi:10.1111/papa.12132
• Peter, Fabienne, 2008, “Pure Epistemic Proceduralism”, Episteme , 5(1): 33–55. doi:10.3366/E1742360008000221
• –––, 2009, Democratic Legitimacy , New York: Routledge.
• Pevnick, Ryan, 2020, “The Failure of Instrumental Arguments for a Human Right to Democracy”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 28(1): 27–50. doi:10.1111/jopp.12197
• Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, 1967, The Concept of Representation , Berkeley, CA: University of California.
• Plato, The Republic , revised/trans. by Lee, D., Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974, 2 nd edition.
• Quirk, Paul J., 2014, “Making It up on Volume: Are Larger Groups Really Smarter?”, Critical Review , 26(1–2): 129–150. doi:10.1080/08913811.2014.907046
• Rawls, John, 1971, A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2005, Political Liberalism , New York: Columbia University Press, expanded edition.
• Ray, James Lee, 1995, Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition , Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
• Raz, Joseph, 1979, The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Riker, William H., 1982, Liberalism Against Populism: A Confrontation Between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice , San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman.
• Rosenblum, Nancy L., 2008, On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Rousseau, David L., Christopher Gelpi, Dan Reiter, and Paul K. Huth, 1996, “Assessing the Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace, 1918–88”, American Political Science Review , 90(3): 512–533. doi:10.2307/2082606
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1762, Du contrat social; ou Principes du droit politique , Amsterdam. Translated as The Social Contract , Charles Frankel (trans.), New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1947.
• Russett, Bruce M., 1993, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post–Cold War World , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Russett, Bruce M. and Harvey Starr, 2003, “From Democratic Peace to Kantian Peace: Democracy and Conflict in the International System”, in Handbook of War Studies II , Manus I. Midlarsky (ed.), Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 93–128.
• Sabl, Andrew, 2001, “Looking Forward to Justice: Rawlsian Civil Disobedience and Its Non-Rawlsian Lessons”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 9(3): 307–330. doi:10.1111/1467-9760.00129
• Scheffler, Samuel, 2010, Equality and Tradition: Questions of Value in Moral and Political Theory , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Schumpeter, Joseph A., 1942 [1950], Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy , New York: Harper and Row; second edition 1947; third edition 1950.
• Sen, Amartya, 1999, Development as Freedom , New York: Knopf.
• Simmons, A. John, 2001, Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511625152
• –––, 2007, Political Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Singer, Peter, 1973, Democracy and Disobedience , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Smith, William, 2011, “Civil Disobedience and the Public Sphere”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 19(2): 145–166. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2010.00365.x
• Somin, Ilya, 2013, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Song, Sarah, 2012, “The Boundary Problem in Democratic Theory: Why the Demos Should Be Bounded by the State”, International Theory , 4(1): 39–68. doi:10.1017/S1752971911000248
• Stilz, Anna, 2009, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2016, “The Value of Self-Determination”, in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 2 , David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne, and Steven Wall (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, ch. 8. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198759621.003.0005
• Thompson, Abigail, 2014, “Does Diversity Trump Ability?” Notices of the AMS , 61(9): 1024–1030. [ Thompson 2014 available online ]
• Valentini, Laura, 2013, “Justice, Disagreement and Democracy”, British Journal of Political Science , 43(1): 177–199. doi:10.1017/S0007123412000294
• Viehoff, Daniel, 2014, “Democratic Equality and Political Authority”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 42(4): 337–375. doi:10.1111/papa.12036
• Waldron, Jeremy, 1995, “The Wisdom of the Multitude: Some Reflections on Book 3, Chapter 11 of Aristotle’s Politics ”, Political Theory , 23(4): 563–584. doi:10.1177/0090591795023004001
• –––, 1999, Law and Disagreement , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Wall, Steven, 2007, “Democracy and Equality”, The Philosophical Quarterly , 57(228): 416–438. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.495.x
• Weart, Spencer R., 1998, Never at War: Why Democracies Will Never Fight One Another , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Wendt, Fabian, 2016, Compromise, Peace and Public Justification: Political Morality Beyond Justice , London: Palgrave Macmillon. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-28877-2
• Weinstock, Daniel, 2013, “On the Possibility of Principled Moral Compromise”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy , 16(4): 537–556. doi:10.1080/13698230.2013.810392
• Whelan, Frederick G., 1983, “Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem”, Nomos 25: Liberal Democracy , J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (eds.), American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, 13–47.
• White, Jonathan and Lea Ypi, 2016, The Meaning of Partisanship , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199684175.001.0001
• Williams, B., 1973, “A Critique of Utilitarianism”, in Utilitarianism: For and Against , with J.J.C. Smart, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wolff, Robert Paul, 1970, In Defense of Anarchism , New York, NY: Harper and Row.
• Wright, Gavin, 2013, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Young, Iris Marion, 1990, Justice and the Politics of Difference , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Zakaras, Alex, 2018, “Complicity and Coercion: Toward and Ethics of Political Participation”, in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy (Volume 4), David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne, and Steven Wall (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, ch. 8.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• [Please contact the author with suggestions]

authority | citizenship | civil disobedience | constitutionalism | egalitarianism | equality | Hobbes, Thomas | justice | justification, political: public | legitimacy, political | liberty: positive and negative | Locke, John | Mill, John Stuart | Plato | -->pluralism --> | political obligation | publicity | public reason | Rawls, John | representation, political | rights | Rousseau, Jean Jacques | rule of law and procedural fairness | voting

Copyright © 2022 by Tom Christiano < thomasc @ u . arizona . edu > Sameer Bajaj < sameer . bajaj1 @ gmail . com >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2024 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

The Role of Education in Democracy

• Posted October 8, 2020
• By Jill Anderson

Many people question the state of democracy in America. This is especially true of young people, who no longer share the same interest in democracy as the generations before them. Professor Danielle Allen , director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, has long studied what citizens need in order to succeed in democracy and how our social studies and civics education have impacted democracy.

"We have really disinvested in civic education and social studies. You can see that now in the comparison that we currently spend $54 per year per kid of federal dollars on STEM education and only 5 cents per year per kid on civics,” Allen says. “We have really ceased to lay the foundation in K–12 for young people to understand democracy, be motivated to participate in it, to have the skills and tools they need to participate effectively, and as a result, enjoy participation."

In this episode, Allen discusses how we got where we are today and what it will take to reinvest in education for democracy.

• Find ways to tell “an integrated version of U.S. history that is simultaneously honest about the crimes and wrongs of the past, but without falling into cynicism,” Allen says.
• When broaching a challenging topic in the classroom, begin from a place of inquiry. Try not to start with the instructional content or even understanding the issue, but let students think about what comes to mind about the issue and record their feelings and how they connect to it. “I think it’s really important that teachers be able to see what the starting points are – both analytically and emotionally that students have for engaging with these issues,” she says.
• To raise engaged citizens, Allen suggests bringing democratic practices of reason giving into the life of a family. “There are lots of lessons inside a family that can feed in to help the understanding of democratic practice,” Allen says.

 I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. Harvard's Danielle Allen knows young people aren't as invested in democracy like the generations before them. Today, fewer than 30% under age 40 even consider it important to live in a democracy. Allen is a political theorist who's long studied what citizens need in order for democracy to succeed.

Education plays a big part in how we think about democracy, yet America's classrooms haven't always emphasized these subjects. With the presidential election just weeks away, I wanted to understand how education can preserve democracy and whether tensions rising in America signal a change underway.

Danielle Allen: In another moment of crisis in the country, The Cold War, the country really turned to science and technology to meet the moment. So there's the period during World War II, the Manhattan Project, for example, which really brought universities into the project of supporting national security with the pursuit of the atom bomb. That was a point in time, it was really the beginning of decades long investment in STEM education. That was important.

We needed to do that, but at the same time, over that same 50 year period, we have really disinvested in civic education and social studies. You can see that now in the comparison that we currently spend $54 per year per kid of federal dollars on STEM education and only 5 cents per year per kid on civics. So we have really ceased to lay the foundation in K–12 for young people to understand democracy, be motivated to participate in it, to have the skills and tools they need to participate effectively and as a result, enjoy participation.

Jill Anderson: We're also living in a time when teaching history is being really politicized and I'm wondering how you think we can effectively teach history and democracy to young people.

Danielle Allen: I've been really privileged over the last 15 months or so to be a part of a cross-institutional network under the banners and they call it the Educating for American Democracy Project and my center Harvard, the ethics centers participating. Jane Kamensky, who directs the Schlesinger Library for Women as a PI Tufts, Arizona state university and this group has pulled together a network of hundreds of scholars across the country with the goal of developing a blueprint, a roadmap for the integration of history and civics education K–12.

The reason I'm going through all of that is because at an early point in our work, directly thinking about the issue you just raised or polarization of our national history and polarization of education around civics, we decided that we were going to do two things on our roadmap.

One was to really structure it around inquiry to really focus on the kinds of questions that should be asked over the span of K–12 more so than on the answers and also that we would really focus on design challenges. That instead of seeing the disagreement about how to narrate our nation's history as a kind of end of the conversation, we would see it as the beginning of a conversation. So for instance, one of the design challenges we put to educators is that we have to find a way to tell an integrated version of US history that is simultaneously honest about the crimes and wrongs of the past, but without falling into cynicism and also appreciative in appropriate ways of the founding era without tipping into gamification.

So what we try to do is to say, "This is a design challenge. We don't know exactly what the answer is to meriting a history in this way that integrates clear-eyed view of the problems as well as a clear-eyed view of the goods and the potentialities, but we believe it can be done and we believe that this big country with so many committed educators is a place where we can experiment our way into solutions."

Jill Anderson: Right. One of the things I think is interesting as you look at the polls and voter turnout, and you often see young people not being as engaged, but when you look at some of the protests that have been happening around the country, it seems to be largely younger people. Is that a shift happening in our democracy where young people are maybe becoming more engaged?

Danielle Allen: It's certainly the case that young people are showing engagement through their participation in social movements and protests. In that regard, the moment is a lot like the 1960s with similar levels of engagement from young people. The question is whether or not young people who engage in the democracy tool of a social movement or of a protest can also understand themselves to have access to the tool of using political institutions. So social movements are an important part of the democracy toolkit, but they're just a part.

So it's really a question of whether or not young people see value in political institutions too, and can knit these things together. To some extent, I think that actually we really need to do work to redesign, even for example, our electoral system. So when we look around and we see that lots of people are disaffected or alienated or feel disempowered, that doesn't just mean that they're sort of haven't got enough education or don't have the right perspective.

It also means that our institutions aren't delivering what they promise. They're not responsive. They don't generally empower ordinary people and they very often don't deliver sort of equal representation. So in that regard, everybody, all citizens, civic participants have a job to do to think about redesigning our institutions so that they achieve those things.

On that front. I was again, fortunate to participate with a huge network of people through the American Academy Of Arts And Sciences, a commission on the future of the of practice of democratic citizenship and we released a report in June the 31 recommendations, a chunk of which are about redesigning our electoral system to deliver that responsive, empowering form of government that also provides equal representation.

Jill Anderson: Do you think something like this pandemic could be a tipping point because so much has moved online and I'm wondering how you think that might change civic action in education?

Danielle Allen: Well, the pandemic without any question is a huge exogenous shock, as we would say in social sciences, that it's a transformative event. Period. The magnitude is so significant. I think we're a very long way from being able to see and understand all of its impacts and consequences. For me personally, one of the things it has driven home is the weaknesses in our practices of governance. These weaknesses are partly institutional and partly cultural. Our polarization is one of the significant causes of our failure to come to grips with the current crisis. So I think for lots of people, the pandemic is really bringing our vulnerabilities to the surface. Also, for example, the disparate impacts across racial and ethnic groups of the disease and the underlying disparities in health equity has really come to the fore to visibility. So I think a lot of people are really focused in a more intensive way than in the past on addressing those problems.

I always sort of have a lot of confidence in the kind of creative energies of human beings when they really sort of see and face problems. So I believe that the moment does give us an opportunity to transform our conception of what we want for our society, what it means to name the public good, what it means to invest in the public good and my hope is that we'll be able to pull energy around a concept of the public good with us in the coming years.

Jill Anderson: We have this huge election coming up and the pandemic has somewhat overshadowed the election a little bit. I look at parents and their children and wonder are there things that parents could be doing at home to help raise their children to be more engaged and value democracy?

Danielle Allen: Well, I think there are a number of things. I mean, I actually think it matters to bring democratic practices of reason giving for example, into the life of a family. That can be very hard. Family structures are often and for very good reason, very hierarchical. So within the sort of context of hierarchical family structures, how can parents foster reason giving, hear their children's reasons for things, help their children understand what it means to engage in the back and forth around reasons, help them understand what it means for one person to lose out in one decision-making moment, but then to win out in another moment and nonetheless, even though we sort of exchange sacrifices for one another over the course of collective decision-making, our commitment to our social bond is so strong that that makes that sort of exchange of burdens tolerable. So I think there are lots of lessons inside a family that can feed into help the understanding of democratic practice.

Jill Anderson: One last final question would be if you have any thoughts or advice to share with the teachers out there who are working hard, and many of them working remotely to try to teach lessons about the upcoming election and all the things happening in the world.

Danielle Allen: So teachers really always have a hard job, and it's so hard now between the remote learning and the intensity of the external environment, the political questions and the debates and so forth. I think it's really important to remember that different students will bring different kinds of perspectives and exposures with them into the classroom. So I think when a teacher is trying to engage a hard topic, whether it's a hard element of history or a controversial issue in our contemporary debates, it's really important to start by bringing to the surface what's already in students' minds.

So maybe you use a Google doc, maybe you use a chat function, but when a topic comes up before sort of launching into the instructional content or the real digesting of the issue, just go ahead and let the students record the first thing that comes to mind for them when they hear the relevant issue and let them record the emotion that they connect to that issue. I think it's really important that teachers be able to see what the starting points are, both analytically and emotionally that students have for engaging with these [inaudible 00:10:35] issues.

Jill Anderson: Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time and talking and sharing your thoughts today.

Danielle Allen: Thank you, Jill. Appreciate your interest.

Jill Anderson: Danielle Allen is the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center For Ethics at Harvard. She's a professor at the Harvard graduate school of education and faculty of arts and sciences. She leads the Democratic Knowledge Project, which focuses on how to strengthen and build that knowledge that democratic citizens need to operate their democracy. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard graduate school of education. Thanks for listening.

An education podcast that keeps the focus simple: what makes a difference for learners, educators, parents, and communities

Related Articles

Propaganda Education for a Digital Age

Love, Hope, and Education

Books, Movies, and Civic Engagement

By the People: Essays on Democracy

Harvard Kennedy School faculty explore aspects of democracy in their own words—from increasing civic participation and decreasing extreme partisanship to strengthening democratic institutions and making them more fair.

Winter 2020

By Archon Fung , Nancy Gibbs , Tarek Masoud , Julia Minson , Cornell William Brooks , Jane Mansbridge , Arthur Brooks , Pippa Norris , Benjamin Schneer

The basic terms of democratic governance are shifting before our eyes, and we don’t know what the future holds. Some fear the rise of hateful populism and the collapse of democratic norms and practices. Others see opportunities for marginalized people and groups to exercise greater voice and influence. At the Kennedy School, we are striving to produce ideas and insights to meet these great uncertainties and to help make democratic governance successful in the future. In the pages that follow, you can read about the varied ways our faculty members think about facets of democracy and democratic institutions and making democracy better in practice.

Explore essays on democracy

Archon fung: we voted, nancy gibbs: truth and trust, tarek masoud: a fragile state, julia minson: just listen, cornell william brooks: democracy behind bars, jane mansbridge: a teachable skill, arthur brooks: healthy competition, pippa norris: kicking the sandcastle, benjamin schneer: drawing a line.

Get smart & reliable public policy insights right in your inbox. 

The Politics Shed- A Free Text Book for all students of Politics.

Functions of democracy ed

Democracy : What is democracy?  

democratic deficit  

Problems with Democracy  

Is Democracy in danger?  

The Rise and Fall of British Democracy  

Elections in the UK

Is democracy in danger?

What is democracy for?

 The purpose of democracy is often questioned, as it is commonly regarded as the most effective form of government for a civilized society. Winston Churchill famously described democracy as the "worst system, apart from all the others," highlighting its flaws despite its widespread adoption and vulnerability.

Why is it so generally seen as a good thing?  

What makes democracy so great and so appealing? 

Here are some of the features of democracy which are cited as its strengths.

 It provides Legitimacy. The selection process for government branches must be legally authorized and accurately reflect the public's desires. It should not be random or unpredictable. Crucially, it must grant governments a legitimate authority. This legitimacy is based on the belief that the elected government resulted from a transparent, fair, and majority-supported process. Subsequently, the government adheres to democratic principles in governance, ensuring legal accountability to its citizens.

■   It provides Representation . There must be a means for the people to put their views to the government of the day. This can be through elected representatives or directly in assemblies of the people or juries.  Democracy is therefore responsive to popular opinion.

■  There should be Accountability. In a democratic system, there should be a mechanism for the current government to justify and be accountable for its actions. This can occur during elections, where the performance of the existing government is evaluated, elucidated, and scrutinized. Accountability should not be limited to election periods; governments should remain transparent and be prepared to defend their actions at all times. Errors, blunders, and wrongdoing should be subject to scrutiny. Accountability also entails providing some form of remedy, such as correcting mistakes or compensating those affected. Furthermore, governments must be subject to public judgment through frequent and fair elections.

■ Democracy requires Participation. There must be a way in which the people can be engaged and take part in the political process. At the very least this should be by voting in regular elections, but this can also mean forming or joining parties, engaging in debate, protesting, creating or joining pressure groups and participating in citizens juries.

■ Democracy Limits Power .   At  the least this is through  elections which can remove governments. There should also be a system that ensures power is spread across different political bodies to avoid one body becoming overly dominant. This principle of the Separation of Powers- generally means that those institutions which make the laws should not be the same as those who enforce or apply the laws. It should also mean there is no monopoly on information- a free press and access to information is necessary to limit the power of government. 

■Democracy leads to Education . The political process should be open to all and there should be an educated and informed citizenry who are able to understand the issues and make informed decisions. Elections produce debates, arguments and the consideration of alternatives. People are better informed and seek to know more.

 Democracy results in Social Cohesion : to bind society together peacefully in a social contract . Ideas of citizenship have been developed alongside the expansion of the right to vote and the development of our ideas about democracy. Peace and acceptance of alternative opinions and the result of elections means a peaceful and tolerant society that accepts change and diversity.  Democracies are therefore more efficient since failed policies are abandoned; corruption is exposed and resources are managed in a manner that balances equity with expediency. (fairness with efficiency)

International peace - Democracies ( or at least developed democracies) do not go to war with each other, so the spread of democracy should mean a more peaceful world.  Democracies are transparent they express their fears to the public, neighbours are not surprised. When a state’s powerful elite is riddled with corruption, as appears to be the case in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, among many others, it is a matter of sheer guesswork to understand the true interests, knowledge, constraints, and activities of its leaders.    In democracies, tensions can dissipate in debates or elections. In dictatorships, war can be a means of directing internal discontent away from the leadership.  Democracies tend to establish a pattern of negotiation and compromise, each democracy becomes increasingly confident that it will not find itself at war with the other.  This is a self-reinforcing cycle of mutual trust and cooperation.  

Are all of these arguments valid? 

What conditions are necessary for democracy to work in this way?

Does democracy always work this way?

Can democracies fail?

Anthony D. Romero makes the case for liberal democracy using a 14th-century fresco by Italian Renaissance master Ambrogio Lorenzetti. 

Compare the case made above with George Bush speaking in 2001 about the strengths of democracy and how it leads to good government.

You can see the main advantages - to avoid tyranny, to find a source of legitimacy based on reason rather than religion , to allow individuals to flourish, and to avoid resorting to violence for the resolution of conflict.   In this sense, democracy is an optimistic enterprise and is underpinned by a belief that human beings will rise to the challenge.

However there is always a nagging doubt that this will not always be true- As Winston Churchill also said 'The best argument against democracy is five minutes conversation with the average voter '- Does representation distance the average voter from direct decision-making? Does limited government mean short-term policies and failure to deal with pressing problems? Does argument produce agreement or division?

The Greek philosopher Plato believed that ‘the people’ would not respect decisions made by their peers, For Plato, people should be ruled by their superiors. The authority granted to a leader, he thought, would be more respected than popular decision-making. Lack of respect would lead to disorder. Furthermore, left to make their own decisions, people would fall prey to rabble-rousers and demagogues. Plato also noted that democracy treats everyone as equal, in terms of knowledge and understanding, when, in reality, they are not equal.

The democratic process continues to provoke debate, criticism and frustration. This has led to calls for the return of popular democracy, including referendums. Populist leaders have been elected cross the world and China has presented itself as an alternative to the western liberal model.

Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Forms of Government — Democracy

Essays on Democracy

Democracy essay topics and outline examples, essay title 1: the evolution of democracy: historical origins, principles, and contemporary challenges.

Thesis Statement: This essay explores the historical roots of democracy, its foundational principles, and the contemporary challenges it faces in the context of modern societies.

• Introduction
• Origins of Democracy: Ancient Greece and Beyond
• Democratic Principles: Rule of Law, Freedom, and Participation
• Democracy in Practice: Case Studies of Democratic Nations
• Challenges to Democracy: Populism, Authoritarianism, and Erosion of Institutions
• Electoral Systems: Voting Methods and Representation
• Media and Democracy: The Role of Information and Misinformation
• Conclusion: Safeguarding Democracy in the 21st Century

Essay Title 2: The Democratic Experiment: Comparative Analysis of Democratic Systems Worldwide

Thesis Statement: This essay conducts a comparative analysis of democratic systems in different countries, highlighting variations in practices, governance structures, and outcomes.

• Democratic Models: Presidential vs. Parliamentary Systems
• Democratic Variations: Federalism and Unitarism
• Elections and Representation: Proportional vs. First-Past-the-Post Systems
• Citizen Participation: Direct Democracy and Referendums
• Case Studies: Analyzing Democracies in Europe, Asia, and the Americas
• Democratic Challenges: Corruption, Voter Suppression, and Civic Engagement
• Conclusion: Lessons Learned from Global Democratic Experiences

Essay Title 3: The Digital Age and Democracy: Technology, Social Media, and the Shaping of Political Discourse

Thesis Statement: This essay examines the influence of technology and social media on democratic processes, including their impact on political communication, public opinion, and election outcomes.

• The Digital Revolution: Internet Access and Political Engagement
• Social Media Platforms: Their Role in Disseminating Information and Disinformation
• Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers: The Polarization of Political Discourse
• Online Activism: Grassroots Movements and Their Impact
• Regulation and Ethics: Balancing Free Speech and Accountability Online
• Case Studies: Examining Elections and Political Campaigns in the Digital Age
• Conclusion: Navigating the Intersection of Technology and Democracy

Theocracy, The Fourth Commonwealth, and The Ideal Common Wealth

Difference between direct democracy and dictatorship, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences

+ experts online

Importance of The Legislative Branch

The concepts and fundamental principles of democracy, what is functioning democracy and its specification, the concept of democracy and non-democracy, let us write you an essay from scratch.

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

The Importance of Participation for Democracy

The challenges to democracy in "twelve angry men", strengthening democracy through ensuring the rights of the marginalised, role of civil society in democracy today, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

Expert-written essays crafted with your exact needs in mind

The Government’s Right to Rule and Citizens’ Duty to Obey in a Democracy

The sacrifices of creating democracy, digital democracy and internet freedom, effectively composed parliament through proper electoral system, discussion on whether prisoners should have right to vote, comparing and contrasting analysis of the maximalist and minimalist democracy, democracy: the influence of interest groups on political decisions through lobbying, the possibility of countries in the middle east to ever become democratic, the present situation with democracy in bangladesh, the controversial question of the use of civil disobedience as a method of protest in a democracy, the "bull moose" campaign of 1912, the american constitution as not the only possible basis for the democratic system, successful consolidation of democracy in nigeria & india, evaluation of plato's view of democracy, nigeria’s democracy in the era of fake news, political significance of social media, research of how loss of reputation has played a major role in the decline of indian national congress, the age of jacksonian democracy in america, questioning democracy in thoreau's and melville's works, how pluralist democracy are affected by pressure groups, relevant topics.

• Electoral College
• Abraham Lincoln
• Andrew Jackson
• Thomas Jefferson
• Fire Safety
• Nelson Mandela

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

Essay on Democracy in 100, 300 and 500 Words

• Updated on  
• Jan 15, 2024

The oldest account of democracy can be traced back to 508–507 BCC Athens . Today there are over 50 different types of democracy across the world. But, what is the ideal form of democracy? Why is democracy considered the epitome of freedom and rights around the globe? Let’s explore what self-governance is and how you can write a creative and informative essay on democracy and its significance. 

Today, India is the largest democracy with a population of 1.41 billion and counting. Everyone in India above the age of 18 is given the right to vote and elect their representative. Isn’t it beautiful, when people are given the option to vote for their leader, one that understands their problems and promises to end their miseries? This is just one feature of democracy , for we have a lot of samples for you in the essay on democracy. Stay tuned!

Can you answer these questions in under 5 minutes? Take the Ultimate GK Quiz to find out!

What is Democracy? 

Democracy is a form of government in which the final authority to deliberate and decide the legislation for the country lies with the people, either directly or through representatives. Within a democracy, the method of decision-making, and the demarcation of citizens vary among countries. However, some fundamental principles of democracy include the rule of law, inclusivity, political deliberations, voting via elections , etc. 

Did you know: On 15th August 1947, India became the world’s largest democracy after adopting the Indian Constitution and granting fundamental rights to its citizens?

Must Explore: Human Rights Courses for Students 

Must Explore: NCERT Notes on Separation of Powers in a Democracy

Sample Essay on Democracy (100 words)

Democracy where people make decisions for the country is the only known form of governance in the world that promises to inculcate principles of equality, liberty and justice. The deliberations and negotiations to form policies and make decisions for the country are the basis on which the government works, with supreme power to people to choose their representatives, delegate the country’s matters and express their dissent. The democratic system is usually of two types, the presidential system, and the parliamentary system. In India, the three pillars of democracy, namely legislature, executive and judiciary, working independently and still interconnected, along with a free press and media provide a structure for a truly functional democracy. Despite the longest-written constitution incorporating values of sovereignty, socialism, secularism etc. India, like other countries, still faces challenges like corruption, bigotry, and oppression of certain communities and thus, struggles to stay true to its democratic ideals.

Did you know: Some of the richest countries in the world are democracies?

Must Read : Consumer Rights in India

Must Read: Democracy and Diversity Class 10

Sample Essay on Democracy (250 to 300 words)

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “democracy is the government of the people, by the people and for the people.” There is undeniably no doubt that the core of democracies lies in making people the ultimate decision-makers. With time, the simple definition of democracy has evolved to include other principles like equality, political accountability, rights of the citizens and to an extent, values of liberty and justice. Across the globe, representative democracies are widely prevalent, however, there is a major variation in how democracies are practised. The major two types of representative democracy are presidential and parliamentary forms of democracy. Moreover, not all those who present themselves as a democratic republic follow its values.

Many countries have legally deprived some communities of living with dignity and protecting their liberty, or are practising authoritarian rule through majoritarianism or populist leaders. Despite this, one of the things that are central and basic to all is the practice of elections and voting. However, even in such a case, the principles of universal adult franchise and the practice of free and fair elections are theoretically essential but very limited in practice, for a democracy. Unlike several other nations, India is still, at least constitutionally and principally, a practitioner of an ideal democracy.

With our three organs of the government, namely legislative, executive and judiciary, the constitutional rights to citizens, a multiparty system, laws to curb discrimination and spread the virtues of equality, protection to minorities, and a space for people to discuss, debate and dissent, India has shown a commitment towards democratic values. In recent times, with challenges to freedom of speech, rights of minority groups and a conundrum between the protection of diversity and unification of the country, the debate about the preservation of democracy has become vital to public discussion.

Did you know: In countries like Brazil, Scotland, Switzerland, Argentina, and Austria the minimum voting age is 16 years?

Also Read: Difference Between Democracy and Dictatorship

Sample Essay on Democracy for UPSC (500 words)

Democracy originated from the Greek word dēmokratiā , with dēmos ‘people’ and Kratos ‘rule.’ For the first time, the term appeared in the 5th century BC to denote the political systems then existing in Greek city-states, notably Classical Athens, to mean “rule of the people.” It now refers to a form of governance where the people have the right to participate in the decision-making of the country. Majorly, it is either a direct democracy where citizens deliberate and make legislation while in a representative democracy, they choose government officials on their behalf, like in a parliamentary or presidential democracy.

The presidential system (like in the USA) has the President as the head of the country and the government, while the parliamentary system (like in the UK and India) has both a Prime Minister who derives its legitimacy from a parliament and even a nominal head like a monarch or a President.

The notions and principle frameworks of democracy have evolved with time. At the core, lies the idea of political discussions and negotiations. In contrast to its alternatives like monarchy, anarchy, oligarchy etc., it is the one with the most liberty to incorporate diversity. The ideas of equality, political representation to all, active public participation, the inclusion of dissent, and most importantly, the authority to the law by all make it an attractive option for citizens to prefer, and countries to follow.

The largest democracy in the world, India with the lengthiest constitution has tried and to an extent, successfully achieved incorporating the framework to be a functional democracy. It is a parliamentary democratic republic where the President is head of the state and the Prime minister is head of the government. It works on the functioning of three bodies, namely legislative, executive, and judiciary. By including the principles of a sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic republic, and undertaking the guidelines to establish equality, liberty and justice, in the preamble itself, India shows true dedication to achieving the ideal.

It has formed a structure that allows people to enjoy their rights, fight against discrimination or any other form of suppression, and protect their rights as well. The ban on all and any form of discrimination, an independent judiciary, governmental accountability to its citizens, freedom of media and press, and secular values are some common values shared by all types of democracies.

Across the world, countries have tried rooting their constitution with the principles of democracy. However, the reality is different. Even though elections are conducted everywhere, mostly, they lack freedom of choice and fairness. Even in the world’s greatest democracies, there are challenges like political instability, suppression of dissent, corruption , and power dynamics polluting the political sphere and making it unjust for the citizens. Despite the consensus on democracy as the best form of government, the journey to achieve true democracy is both painstaking and tiresome. 

Did you know: Countries like Singapore, Peru, and Brazil have compulsory voting?

Must Read: Democracy and Diversity Class 10 Notes

Democracy is a process through which the government of a country is elected by and for the people.

Yes, India is a democratic country and also holds the title of the world’s largest democracy.

Direct and Representative Democracy are the two major types of Democracy.

Related Articles

Hope you learned from our essay on democracy! For more exciting articles related to writing and education, follow Leverage Edu .

Sonal is a creative, enthusiastic writer and editor who has worked extensively for the Study Abroad domain. She splits her time between shooting fun insta reels and learning new tools for content marketing. If she is missing from her desk, you can find her with a group of people cracking silly jokes or petting neighbourhood dogs.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

Very helpful essay

Thanks for your valuable feedback

Thank you so much for informing this much about democracy

Leaving already?

8 Universities with higher ROI than IITs and IIMs

Grab this one-time opportunity to download this ebook

Connect With Us

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. take the first step today..

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

September 2024

January 2025

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Acquisition
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Religion
• Music and Media
• Music and Culture
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Politics
• Law and Society
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Ethics
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Security
• Computer Games
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Strategy
• Business Ethics
• Business History
• Business and Government
• Business and Technology
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic Systems
• Economic History
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Theory
• Politics and Law
• Public Administration
• Public Policy
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

18 Democracy and Freedom

Jason Brennan is the Robert J and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Chair of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University.

• Published: 01 September 2016
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

There seems to be an intimate connection between democracy and freedom. But the nature of this connection is disputed. This chapter outlines possible connections between democracy and freedom. First, it is shown that there is indeed a robust positive correlation between democracy and various forms of liberal freedom. Second, the chapter examines and critiques an argument purporting to show that exercising equal political power in a democracy directly enhances citizens’ autonomy by making them authors of the laws. Third, it examines and critiques the argument that republican democracy is essential to enhancing freedom because it prevents citizens from being dominated. It is argued that we should be skeptical of these latter two positions. Empirically, democratic countries tend to be more free. But there is probably no essential connection between democracy and freedom.

Free countries tend to be democratic; democratic countries tend to be free. Unfree countries tend to be non-democratic, and non-democratic countries tend to be unfree. Why?

There seems to be an intimate connection between democracy and freedom. But the nature of this connection is disputed. Some hold it is merely a positive correlation: the background conditions that tend to cause liberal politics also tend to produce democratic political structures. Some think there is causation: perhaps liberalism causes democracy, democracy causes liberalism, or they are mutually reinforcing.

Many people—including most American laypeople—insist that democracy is not merely positively correlated with liberalism, and is indeed more than a useful instrument for promoting liberty. They believe that democratic politics itself is an important kind of freedom, that democracy is essential to freedom, or that the rights to vote, run for office, and participate are themselves constitutive of what it means to be free.

This chapter outlines possible connections between democracy and freedom. First, it will be shown that there is indeed a robust positive correlation between democracy and various forms of liberal freedom. Second, the chapter will examine and critique an argument purporting to show that exercising equal political power in a democracy directly enhances citizens’ autonomy by making them authors of the laws. Third, the chapter will examine and critique the argument that republican democracy is essential to enhancing freedom because it prevents citizens from being dominated. It is argued that we should be skeptical of these latter two positions.

1. Democracy and Liberalism Defined

At base, “democracy” refers to a range of ways of allocating political decision-making rights. Democracy is an answer to the question, who rules? As Thomas Christiano (2006) elaborates, the term democracy “refers very generally to a method of group decision making characterized by a kind of equality among the participants at an essential stage of the collective decision making.” David Estlund (2008 : 38) says democracy is the “actual collective authorization of laws and policies by the people subject to them.”

Democracy is defined here as a system of government in which fundamental political power is shared equally by all adult members of society. A regime will be called democratic to the extent it has regular, competitive elections, without electoral fraud or manipulation, and with universal adult suffrage ( Economist Intelligence Unit, 2012 ; Freedom House, 2013 ).

A country will be counted as liberal to the extent it recognizes and effectively protects basic civil and economic rights. Among civil liberties are included the right to free speech, free assembly, free association, freedom of conscience, right of bodily integrity and freedom from abuse and assault, freedom of lifestyle choice, rights to protest, the right to exit, and freedom of sexual choice. The definition also includes liberal procedural rights in the criminal justice system, including rights against unwarranted search and seizure, the right to a fair and expeditious trial, the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, the right to hear and question one’s accusers, and habeas corpus. Among economic liberties are included the right to acquire, hold, use, give, and in many cases destroy personal property, to make and enter into contracts, to buy and sell goods and services on terms to which all parties consent, to choose one’s occupation, to negotiate the terms under which one will work, to manage one’s wealth, to create things for sale, to start, run, and stop businesses, to own private property in the means of production, to develop property for productive purposes, and to take risks with capital.

It is not claimed that by definition democracies recognize and protect citizens’ civil or economic liberties. Some might wish to say a country that severely curtails civil liberties should not qualify as democratic, even if it has regular contested elections. However, our goal here is to determine whether a particular way of allocating political decision-rights correlates with liberal freedom. For that purpose, we should avoid loading liberalism into the very definition of democracy.

2. How Free Are Citizens of Democracies?

Liberalism and democracy are not connected on a conceptual level. At least in principle, a non-democratic regime could fully realize liberal freedoms. Similarly, a democracy could run roughshod over its citizens’ civil and economic liberties. If there is a connection between liberalism and democracy, this will be an interesting empirical finding.

We cannot measure degrees of freedom or democracy as easily as we can measure GDP, life expectancy, or height. However, each year various institutes, think tanks, and foundations conduct extensive research on the political conditions around the world. For example, Canada’s Fraser Institute produces the widely cited annual “Economic Freedom of the World” index. The Wall Street Journal , in conjunction with the Heritage Institute, also produces an annual Index of Economic Freedom. Freedom House and The Economist each produce similar ratings of protection for civil liberties, as well as indices that score countries on how well they implement basic democratic electoral procedures. Using such indices, we can examine whether various liberal freedoms and democratic political procedures tend to be correlated.

Democracy and Economic Freedom Go Together

Freedom House’s “political rights” score and The Economist ’s “electoral process and pluralism” score are both meant to measure the degree to which countries have universal adult suffrage and free, open, competitive, and uncorrupt elections. Countries that fail to have these things—whether they are active monarchies, dictatorships, communist single party states, or whatnot—receive bad scores. Both indices try to avoid conflating political rights with other civil or economic liberties. Thus, if there turns out to be any correlation between, say, Freedom House’s “political rights” score and various measures of economic or civil liberty, this is an interesting rather than trivial result.

Many countries that Freedom House or The Economist describe as authoritarian are democracies on paper . They have constitutions that formally guarantee competitive elections, universal suffrage, and fair voting rights. But Freedom House and The Economist do not rate a country as democratic unless it actually uses democratic procedures. Similarly, the Fraser Institute and The Wall Street Journal do not rate countries as economically free merely because their constitutions “guarantee” the rule of law or substantive due process in protecting property rights. They score countries by what they do, not what their constitutions say they will do.

As figure 18.1 shows, there is a clear and strong positive correlation between democracy and economic freedom. Note that in figure 18.1 , a lower political rights score counts as more democratic. Freedom House scores the freest countries a 1 and the least free countries a 7. Thus, the negative slope of the regression line shows a positive correlation between political rights and economic freedom.

Using different measures gets similar results. If we substitute The Wall Street Journal ’s rankings for the Fraser Institute’s, the correlation increases slightly to 0.4994. If we substitute The Economist ’s electoral process and pluralism ratings for Freedom House’s political rights scores, the correlation drops slightly to 0.4669. Regardless, the correlations are similar and robust.

Democracy and Civil Liberties Go Together

As figure 18.2 shows, there is an even stronger positive relationship between democracy and civil liberties. Here, The Economist ’s measure of civil liberties is graphed against Freedom House’s Political Rights score. Once again, for Freedom House, a lower political rights score indicates a country is more democratic. Thus, the negative slope represents a positive correlation.

Once again, substituting different rating systems yields similar results. (The correlation holds steady at around 0.9.)

Figure 18.2 might be misleading because it provides a snapshot of conditions at any given year. Sometimes democratic countries elect bad leaders who seize power for themselves. When democracies collapse into authoritarianism, leaders tend to suppress democratic procedures and civil liberties at the same time. 1 Since the protection of political rights and of civil liberties tend to fall in tandem, the correlation seen above might overstate just how much protection democracy offers on behalf of liberal rights. Countries that currently have high political rights scores also have high civil liberties scores, but some such countries are vulnerable to collapse.

In common English, we use the words “liberty” and “freedom” not merely to refer to a range of civil and economic rights, but also to refer to the power or capacity to achieve one’s ends. We say that Superman is free to fly while I am not, not because no one stops him from flying, but because he has the power to fly. For this reason, G. A. Cohen (1995 : 58) claims that wealth and positive freedom are intimately connected. Cohen argues that “to have money is to have freedom.” The more wealth one has, the more one is able to do, and in that sense, the more freedom one has.

For the sake of argument, let us accept Cohen’s argument and ask, do people in democracies tend to have more positive liberty? As figure 18.3 shows, they do.

Once again, substituting different measures of freedom or different GDP/GNI estimates yields similar results.

As seen in figure 18.4 , which is reproduced from Gwartney, Lawson, and Hall, 2015 : 24, if we confine ourselves to looking at the absolute levels of income held by the bottom deciles in the most and least democratic countries, we get similar results. Note that the graph below shows absolute, purchasing price parity-adjusted levels of income before any welfare payments have been made. Since richer and freer countries tend to have more generous welfare systems, figure 18.4 understates the disparity in the standard between the bottom 10 percent in the economically freer and the less free countries.

Democratic Countries Tend to Be Richer

Economic Freedom and Pre-Transfer Income of the “Poor”

Of course, strong correlation does not imply causation. These correlations do not tell us whether democratic politics tends to lead to liberal results, whether liberal politics tends to lead to democracy, whether some third factor tends to produce both, or whether democracy and liberalism tend to be mutually reinforcing. There is an extensive literature debating this question. There are empirical papers supporting each position, as well as papers arguing that democracy and liberalism are in tension, despite their strong correlation.

For instance, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (2013) recently argued that regimes fall into two broad types: extractive and inclusive. In extractive regimes, power is concentrated into the hands of the few, and these few in turn use their power to expropriate wealth and dominate the majority. In inclusive regimes, power is widely dispersed. Institutions and laws in inclusive regimes tend to be designed to benefit the majority of citizens. Inclusive regimes tend to enjoy the rule of law, respect for private property, and reduced economic rent seeking. In turn, this leads to greater economic prosperity and respect for civil rights.

Despite these correlations, we should not assume that democracies are liberal because most citizens in democracies are strong advocates of liberalism. As Scott Althaus, Bryan Caplan, and Martin Gilens each conclude (using different surveys and data sets), the modal and median citizens in the United States are much less supportive of economic or civil liberties than more elite, educated, and higher income citizens. For instance, Caplan ( 2001 ; 2007 : 51) shows that while educated or high IQ voters support free trade, the modal American advocates economic protectionism. Gilens (2012 : 106–111) similarly finds that educated, rich voters are more in favor of protecting civil liberties than typical voters, especially poor and uneducated voters. Elites tend to support same-sex marriage, oppose the Patriot Act, oppose torture, and advocate widespread access to birth control and abortion services, while modal and poor American voters tend to have the opposite preferences. Althaus (2003 : 11) obtains similar results: the typical and median voter is less in favor of economic or civil liberty than the more knowledgeable voter. The United States is significantly freer than we would expect it to be if politicians just gave the majority of voters exactly what they want. The policies that actually obtain are generally more liberal than what the model, mean, or median voter wants. Gilens (2012 : 80) argues this is because presidents and other leaders are much more responsive to the expressed policy preferences of the rich than the poor.

3. Democracy and Autonomy

Many people believe democracy is more than just a useful instrument for producing liberal freedom. In the United States, most laypeople regard the American War of Independence as a fight for freedom, not because victory was expected to produce any spectacular gains in liberal rights, but simply because it replaced a foreign constitutional monarchy with democratic self-rule. In their view, Americans became free because they became their own lawmakers.

This conception of freedom—that to be free is to be the author of the laws—has a long history. Benjamin Constant (1988 : 81) claims that the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed freedom not as a matter of liberal rights, but as authorship of the law:

the liberty . . . of the ancients . . . consisted in exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty; in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace; . . . But if this was what the ancients called liberty, they admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community. 2

Isaiah Berlin (1997 : 178) similarly noted that one prominent conception of liberty identifies liberty with autonomous self-control, and, in particular, with “self-government”: “[One] sense of the word liberty derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master.” On this conception of liberty, what makes a citizen free is not that his government leaves him alone, but that he is a part of that government.

In this vein, Justine Lacroix argues that exercising one’s equal political rights in a democracy enhances autonomy. She says (2007: 192), “Liberty . . . is rather akin to the concept of autonomy, that is to say that liberty does not mean the absence of law but rather the respect of the laws that men have made and accepted for themselves.” She thinks for citizens to be autonomous, it is not enough that one merely possess the right to vote, but must also actively vote. (Indeed, she thinks they should be forced to vote.)

Many democratic theorists—from Rousseau onward—believe democracy uniquely enables citizens to realize autonomous self-government. In an idealized democracy, the governed are themselves the authors of the laws that govern them; any constraints imposed by law are constraints they themselves imposed. Thus, the thought is, democracy enables citizens to be fully autonomous. In contrast, in a non-democratic system, citizens will always subject to laws that are not of their own making or choosing. The laws will in some way be imposed upon them.

One problem with trying to link democracy and autonomy on the conceptual level is that, in the real world, what democratic governments do is not entirely a matter of the will of the people. First, it is unclear whether we can attribute to a winning majority a collective will or point of view ( Arrow, 1950 ). Second, as Gilens (2012) has shown, in real-life democracies, some voters count more than others. In the United States, presidents are about six times more responsive to the policy preferences of the rich than the poor. Third, congresspeople, bureaucrats, and administrators do not merely implement the will of the people, but have agendas of their own ( Mueller, 2003 ). In response to worries like these, some democratic theorists claim the problem is just that real-life democracy falls short of the ideal; in an ideal, properly functioning democracy, citizens would be fully autonomous authors of the laws.

But this brings out a deeper problem, a problem that remains even in ideal conditions. Suppose every voter counted the same, and suppose government agents were mere technicians who scrupulously carried out the will of the democratic majority. Even here, while the democratic majority as a collective would have autonomy, it is unclear why this would enhance the autonomy of individual citizens. In an idealized democracy, the answer to the question of “Who rules?” is “ We —but not you or I.” Democracy empowers collectives, not individuals.

For the sake of argument, grant that by voting, a citizen can become the partial author of the laws that govern her. Grant that if she abstains, or if she is denied the right to vote, then she has no partial authorship over the laws, and thus the laws are in some way imposed upon her. Notice, however, that even on this charitable assumption, voting confers autonomy upon a voter only if her side wins. If her side loses, then she is not in part the author of the laws.

However, even if her side wins, and if she is thus a partial author of the law, it remains unclear why we should regard this as conferring upon her any morally significant degree of autonomy. In a properly functioning democracy, each citizen has an equal share of fundamental political power. But this is a small share indeed. There are 210 million eligible voters in the United States, so by law I hold 1/210 millionth of the fundamental political power in the United States. This does not empower me in any significant way. If I were to vote against a hawkish candidate, it is not as though the resulting wars will be fought a 210-millionth degree less aggressively. If I were to vote for open borders, it is not as though the borders would become a 210-millionth more open. Rather, for any one of us in a contemporary democracy, regardless of whether one votes or abstains, and regardless how one votes, the same political outcomes would happen anyway. We each have some power, but our individual power does not matter.

An individual’s vote has an effect on political outcomes only if she changes the outcome of the election. Casting a vote is like playing the lottery—there is some small chance that a single vote will break a tie. But the probability that a voter will break a tie is vanishingly small ( Brennan and Lomasky, 1993 : 56–57, 119). 3 Individual votes rarely matter. Thus, even if a voter in a winning coalition is in some way causally responsible for the laws, it seems extravagant to call her the autonomous author of the laws, or to claim that the laws that govern her are laws she herself imposed.

Robert Nozick (1974 : 290–292) gently mocks the theory that democracy grants individual citizens autonomy with a story called the “Tale of the Slave.” Suppose Hagar the Slave has a cruel master, who imposes arbitrary punishments. As the master ages, he becomes kinder. He only punishes Hagar for violating posted rules. When the master dies, he bequeaths all 10,001 of his slaves, including Hagar, to 10,000 of the slaves, excluding Hagar. As a result, 10,000 other slaves collectively own everyone, including Hagar. For Hagar, this just means she now has a 10,000-headed master rather than a one-headed master. Her new 10,000-headed master sometimes asks her for advice about what rules should be imposed upon all 10,001 slaves. As a reward for her advice, they grant her the right to make that decision herself whenever the 10,000 masters are evenly split—5,000 to 5,000—over what to do. Finally, since they have never been evenly split, they just include Hagar’s vote with theirs all the time.

At the end of the story, many readers think the slave never stopped being a slave. But by the end of the story, the situation resembles modern democracy. Being an equal member of a rule-making body, especially a large one, does not give one much control. Each slave in the Tale of the Slave can legitimately claim that everyone else makes all the decisions and that the decisions the collective makes would have occurred without her input. Individuals have no power.

In a democracy, the majority of voters, considered as a collective, in some sense rule themselves and everyone else. If majorities frequently change, every citizen might eventually have the opportunity to be part of a winning majority. But it is unclear why we should regard this as empowering individual citizens, or giving them greater real autonomy. Individual citizens have only a vanishingly small chance of making a difference. Even when an individual votes in favor of the winning side, had she reversed her vote, or refused to vote at all, the same political outcomes would have occurred anyway.

4. Democracy and Non-Domination

“ Neo-republican” political philosophers argue that there is a tight connection between democracy (of a sort) and freedom. Notably, they do so in part because they reject the traditional liberal conception of freedom. They can accept the points made above—that is, that while democracy and liberal freedom are strongly correlated, it is conceptually possible to have one without the other. But, they argue, liberals have a defective conception of freedom. Once we replace this defective conception with a superior one, we will see that freedom and democracy (of the right sort) are tightly bound, and not merely as a matter of empirical correlation.

Republican political theorist Philip Pettit asks, what is problematic about the master-slave relationship? It is not merely that the master might be cruel to the slave, or might interfere with the slave. To see why, imagine you are a slave with an unusually kind and liberal master. The master never issues any orders or interferes with you in any way. However, Pettit says, you remain in some important sense less free than non-slaves. While the master does not interfere with you or control you, he retains the right and ability to do so.

Isaiah Berlin, in his famous (1997) essay on different conceptions of liberty, claims that liberals tend to regard freedom as the absence of interference from others. Pettit maintains that this liberal conception of liberty cannot properly explain what is wrong with the master-slave relationship. After all, no one interferes with the slave, but the slave remains unfree. Pettit thinks we thus need a third conception of liberty: liberty as non-domination. Freedom is not the absence of interference; rather, freedom is the absence of domination .

One person (call him the dominator) is said to dominate another person (call him the victim) when the dominator has the capacity to interfere with the victim’s choices, and the dominator can exercise this capacity at will, with impunity ( Pettit, 1996 : 581). On this definition of freedom, a person is free only when she is not subject to the arbitrary will of another.

Republicans hold that a properly constituted democracy is essential to realizing freedom as non-domination. Though republicans have a different conception of liberty from liberals, they concur with liberals that unlimited direct democracy would undermine citizens’ freedom. Like liberals, they advocate due process of law, checks and balances, separation of powers, and constitutionally protected rights of free speech and assembly ( Lovett, 2014 ). Like liberals, they also recognize that these devices are imperfect. In any democratic government, government agents—from police officers to bureaucrats to senators—will always enjoy some degree of arbitrary power over others.

Republicans hold that to prevent domination and to reduce the degree to which government agents wield this arbitrary power, citizens must be actively engaged with politics. Frank Lovett (2014) says,

The standard republican remedy . . . is enhanced democracy. . . . Roughly speaking, the idea is that properly-designed democratic institutions should give citizens the effective opportunity to contest the decisions of their representatives. This possibility of contestation will make government agents wielding discretionary authority answerable to a public understanding of the goals or ends they are meant to serve and the means they are permitted to employ. In this way, discretionary power can be rendered non-arbitrary in the sense required for the secure enjoyment of republican liberty.

To “enhance” democracy in this way, republicans hold that we need two major sets of changes. First, there must be greater public deliberation . Political decision-makers, such as legislative bodies, courts, or bureaucracies, routinely should present the rationale behind their decisions in public fora, where the public may challenge and debate these reasons. Some republicans argue that some such fora should serve as “courts of appeals,” in which citizens can object to or even overturn decisions ( Pettit, 2012 ). Second, there should be greater inclusion and real political equality . All citizens must have an equal right to participate in such public contestation. Republicans hold that formal political equality is not enough. Some citizens (in virtue of wealth, family, or prestige) have more de facto influence and power than others. To ensure that all citizens can participate on an equitable basis, there should be limits on campaign financing, advertising, and lobbying. In summary, republicans think that regular, contested, competitive elections are not enough. They think we need deliberative democracy both before and after decisions are made. We need to protect the political sphere from being unduly influenced by money, fame, or other irrelevant factors.

Thus, republicans, unlike liberals, deny that citizens under a benevolent liberal dictator would be free. Republicans advocate what they regard as a distinct and superior conception of liberty, and hold that a robustly participatory and deliberative democratic regime of the right sort is essential to realizing this form of freedom.

Note that many republicans do not merely hold that freedom as non-interference needs to be supplemented with freedom as non-domination. They regard freedom as non-domination as an alternative. Thus, many republicans are skeptical of traditional liberal freedoms. They are committed to many traditional liberal rights only insofar as such rights are necessary to ensure equitable deliberative democracy. On this point, Brennan and Lomasky (2006 : 240) complain,

In a Pettit republic, the determinations of democratic majorities bring about far fewer restrictions of individual liberty than is the case in liberal democracies. That is not because political rule is exercised with a lighter hand; just the reverse. Rather, it is because republicans decline to classify most impositions on individual preferences as liberty restricting.

For instance, republicans are comfortable with a remarkable degree of paternalistic intervention into citizens’ private lives. The state must consider the interests of citizens, but not necessarily their preferences , and so, on the republican view, the state may continually impose upon citizens what it deems to be in citizens’ best interest ( Brennan and Lomasky, 2006 : 241). For many republicans, it does not matter if a state continuously and actively interferes with its citizens’ lives. So long as citizens are not dominated —because they enjoy regular opportunities to deliberate and contest the laws as equals—these citizens count as free.

The original theoretical motivation for republicanism was supposed to be a defect in the traditional liberal conception of freedom as non-interference. Supposedly, liberals cannot adequately explain just what makes slaves unfree. Recall Pettit’s point: even if a master never interferes with or controls the slave, the master could do so with impunity.

However, to liberals, this seems less like a deep challenge and more like a call for clarification. Perhaps Berlin’s essay is misleading—perhaps it is not really true, pace Berlin, that liberals traditionally hold that a person is free if and only if no one interferes with her. Liberals seem to have a ready explanation for why even slaves with kind, liberal masters are nevertheless unfree. The problem is that slaves lack adequately enforced rights against interference. A liberal could just say that a person is free to the extent that her rights against interference are adequately protected from threats. This formulation of the liberal conception of freedom might sound almost the same as freedom as non-domination, but, as Brennan and Lomasky complained above, republicans are happy to license frequent state interference in ways that liberals would count as rights violations. One way of stating Brennan and Lomasky’s worry about republicanism, then, is that republican “freedom as non-domination,” as far as liberals are concerned, is compatible with the state dominating individuals.

If slavery is legal, the law fails to recognize the slave as a rights-holder, and instead treats her as chattel. If slavery is illegal but the master still enslaves her, then the problem is that no government or agency successfully protects the slave’s liberal rights. So, perhaps Berlin’s definition of liberal freedom is indeed inadequate, but it remains unclear whether, to explain what makes slaves unfree, we must reject liberalism and accept republicanism.

A further problem with republicanism is that its institutional recommendations may be unrealistic. If so, then the institutional recommendations might protect republican freedom in ideal conditions, but not in realistic conditions. If so, then republicanism would do little to justify real-world democracy.

To see why the republican institutional recommendations might be unrealistic, consider the role of democratic deliberation in their theories. Republicans and deliberative democrats imagine deliberation as being like an idealized philosophical discussion. They imagine deliberators as sincere, open-minded, consistent, and rational speakers, who are committed to finding consensus and who avoid manipulating one another. ( Habermas, 2001 : 65). They thus expect deliberation to enlighten and ennoble participants, to lead to consensus, and to generate better political policy.

For instance, Hélène Landemore (2012 : 97) says, “Deliberation is supposed to . . . Enlarge the pools of ideas and information . . . . , Weed out the good arguments from the bad . . ., [and] Lead to a consensus on the ‘better’ or more ‘reasonable’ solution.” Bernard Manin, Elly Stein, and Jane Mansbridge (1987 : 354) say that democratic deliberation is a process of training and education. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson (1996 : 9) claim that even when deliberation fails to produce consensus, it will generally cause citizens to respect one another more.

The problem, though, is that real-world deliberation rarely proceeds the way deliberative democrats want it to proceed, and it (thus?) rarely delivers the results they want it to deliver. Diana Mutz (2006 : 5) remarks, “It is one thing to claim that political conversation has the potential to produce beneficial outcomes if it meets a whole variety of unrealized criteria, and yet another to argue that political conversations, as they actually occur, produce meaningful benefits for citizens.” In a comprehensive survey of the empirical research on democratic deliberation, Tali Mendelberg (2002 : 154) concludes that the “empirical evidence for the benefits that deliberative theorists expect” is “thin or non-existent.” For instance, deliberation generally tends to exacerbate conflict rather then mediate it ( Mendelberg, 2002 : 158). Instead of debating the facts, people try to win positions of influence and power over others ( Mendelberg, 2002 : 159). High-status individuals talk more, are perceived as more accurate and credible, and have more influence, regardless of whether the high-status individuals actually know more ( Mendelberg, 2002 : 165–167). Deliberators use language in biased and manipulative ways ( Mendelberg, 2002 : 170–172). Deliberation tends to cause group polarization; it moves people toward more extreme versions of their ideologies rather than toward more moderate versions ( Sunstein, 2002 ). Deliberation often causes deliberators to choose positions inconsistent with their own views, positions which the deliberators “later regret” ( Ryfe, 2005 : 54). Rather than causing consensus, public deliberation might cause disagreement and the formation of in-groups and out-groups ( Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, 2002 ). It can even lead to violence ( Mutz, 2006 : 89). And so on.

Further, even if republicans are correct that checks and balances, deliberative fora, courts of appeals, and the like would help reduce domination, it is unclear why this requires universal adult suffrage. To illustrate with a simple case, suppose that everyone in the country were allowed to vote and deliberate, except for me . While this might make me a “second-class citizen” and might be objectionable on egalitarian grounds, it seems unlikely that this would cause me to be dominated or would reduce my freedom in any meaningful way. If, despite the rule of law, checks and balances, and widespread deliberation, politicians and others can still interfere arbitrarily with my life, granting me the right to vote or deliberate would not suddenly stop them dominating me. As we discussed above, individuals have vanishingly little effective political power.

Now, if were to disenfranchise an entire race or group of citizens with shared interests—for example, all blacks—this probably would expose them to the threat of domination. But it does not follow that widespread disenfranchisement necessarily exposes citizens to domination.

One of the major debates in contemporary democratic theory is whether we should prefer democracy to epistocracy. An epistocracy is a political system in which, as a matter of law, citizens receive political power in proportion to their political knowledge ( Estlund, 2008 ). The primary motivation behind epistocracy is a concern that most citizens in contemporary democracies are ignorant or misinformed about the relevant facts and social scientific theory needed to form sound political preferences ( Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996 ; Somin, 2013 ). Epistocrats believe that limiting the political power of the ignorant or misinformed might produce better political outcomes for all; it might better serve the common good. For instance, an epistocrat might advocate that the rights to vote or run for office should be conditional upon passing a test of basic political knowledge ( Brennan, 2011 ), or that the highly educated should have extra votes ( Mill, 1861 ).

While there are many important objections against epistocracy, epistocracy appears to be compatible with republican liberty, if not republican concerns for equality. Consider a form of epistocracy in which suffrage is restricted only to citizens who can pass a test of basic political knowledge. Suppose only the top 50 percent of citizens pass the exam. Will this top half of voters thus dominate the other half? It seems unlikely. An epistocracy could retain the other “enhancements” republicans favor—deliberative fora, citizens’ courts of appeal, limits on campaign spending, and so on. If these procedural checks and balances would prevent government officials or special interest groups from dominating citizens when everyone is allowed to participate, it is not clear why they would suddenly fail if ignorant or misinformed citizens were not allowed to vote.

Further, ignorant and misinformed citizens are only contingently excluded. They can acquire rights to vote and participate; they just have not. In both a democracy and an epistocracy, “Elected officials serve, if not at the pleasure of citizens, at least in the absence of gross displeasure.” ( Brennan and Lomasky, 2006 : 234). If an epistocracy starts to mistreat ignorant citizens, they could acquire voting rights by studying harder. And if they are not able to study hard enough to acquire such rights, it is unclear why giving them voting rights would protect them. They are, by hypothesis, badly informed. Even if they could vote, they mostly likely do not have the background social scientific knowledge needed to cast their votes in ways that would protect them.

5. Conclusion

Constitutional democracy is strongly correlated with liberal freedom. Democracies generally have a high degree of respect for civil liberties, and a moderate degree of respect for economic freedom. Democracy might also be valuable for other reasons—for example, perhaps it is essential or useful for realizing the right kinds of equality, or perhaps democracies tend to make good political decisions.

But most people tend to equate freedom with democracy and democracy with freedom. Here, we should be more skeptical. While democracy empowers or grants law-making autonomy to collectives, it does not follow that it empowers or grants autonomy to the individuals who form part of those collectives. Widespread democratic participation might be a good thing, but describing it as constitutive or essential to personal liberty is a stretch.

E.g., Bolivia and Venezuela’s political rights and civil rights scores have been declining gradually at the same rate for the past ten years.

Raaflaub (2003 : 222–223) disagrees—he argues that the ancient Greeks were in fact concerned with modern civil rights as well.

One might object that individual voters can “change the mandate.” But political scientists are almost uniformly skeptical that mandates exist. See, for instance, Dahl, 1990 ; Noel, 2010 ; Grossback, Peterson, and Stimson, 2006 ; Grossback, Peterson, and Stimson, 2007 .

Acemoglu, Daron , and Robinson, James , 2013 . Why nations fail . New York: Crown Business.

Google Scholar

Google Preview

Althaus, Scott , 2003 . Collective preferences in democratic politics: opinion surveys and the will of the people . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Arrow, Kenneth J. , 1950 . A difficulty in the concept of social welfare.   Journal of Political Economy , 50, pp.328–346.

Berlin, Isaiah . 1997 . Two concepts of liberty. In: Henry Hardy , ed. Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. pp. 191-243

Brennan, Geoffrey , and Lomasky, Loren , 1993 . Democracy and decision . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Brennan, Geoffrey , and Lomasky, Loren , 2006 . Against reviving republicanism.   Politics, Philosophy, and Economics , 5, pp.221–252.

Brennan, Jason , 2011 . The right to a competent electorate.   Philosophical Quarterly , 61, pp.700–724.

Caplan, Bryan , 2001 . What makes people think like economists? Evidence on economic cognition from the “Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy. ” Journal of Law and Economics , 44, pp.395–426.

Caplan, Bryan , 2007 . The myth of the rational vote r. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Christiano, Thomas , 2006 . Democracy. In: Edward N. Zalta , ed. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Available at: < http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/democracy/ >.

Cohen, Gerald A. , 1995 . Self-ownership, freedom, and equality . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Constant, Benjamin , 1988 . The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns. In: Constant: Political Writings , trans. Biancamaria Fontana , pp.308-328. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Dahl, R. A. , 1990 . The myth of the presidential mandate.   Political Science Quarterly , 105, pp.355–372.

Delli Carpini, Michael X. , and Keeter, Scott , 1996 . What Americans know about politics and why it matters . New Haven: Yale University Press.

Economist Intelligence Unit, 2012. Democracy Index 2012: democracy at a standstill. Available at: < http://pages.eiu.com/rs/eiu2/images/Democracy-Index-2012.pdf >.

Estlund, David , 2008 . Democratic authority . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Freedom House, 2013. Freedom in the World 2013. Available at: http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2013

Gilens, Martin , 2012 . Affluence and influence . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gutmann, Amy , and Thompson, Dennis , 1996 . Democracy and disagreement . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Grossback, L. J. , Peterson, D. A. M. , and Stimson, J. A. , 2006 . Mandate politics . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Grossback, L. J. , Peterson, D. A. M. , and Stimson, J. A. , 2007 . Electoral mandates in American politics.   British Journal of Political Science , 37, pp.711–730.

Gwartney, James , Lawson, Robert , and Joshua Hall . 2015 . Economic Freedom of the World: 2015 Annual Report. Toronto: Fraser Institute.

Habermas, Jürgen , 2001 . Moral consciousness and communicative action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hibbing, John R. , and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse . 2002 . Stealth Democracy . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lacroix, Justine , 2007 . A liberal defense of compulsory voting.   Politics , 27, pp.190–195.

Landemore, Hélène , 2012 . Democratic reason . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Lovett, Frank , 2014 . Republicanism. In: Edward N. Zalta , ed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/republicanism/ .

Manin, Bernand , Stein, Elly , and Mansbridge, Jane , 1987 . On legitimacy and political deliberation.   Political Theory , 15, pp.333–368.

Mendelberg, Tali , 2002 . The deliberative citizen: theory and evidence. In: Michael X. Delli Carpini , Leonie Huddy , and Robert Y. Shapiro , eds. Political decision-making, deliberation, and participation, vol. 6, Research in micropolitics , pp.151-194. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Mill, John Stuart , 1861. Considerations on representative government. Available at: < http://www.constitution.org/jsm/rep_gov.htm >.

Mueller, Dennis , 2003 . Public choice III . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mutz, Diana , 2006 . Hearing the other side . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Noel, Hans , 2010 . Ten things political scientists know that you don’t.   The Forum , 8(3), article 12.

Nozick, Robert , 1974 . Anarchy, state, and utopia . New York: Basic Books.

Pettit, Philip , 1996 . Freedom as anti-power.   Ethics , 106, pp.576–604.

Pettit, Philip , 2012 . On the people’s terms: a republican theory and model of democracy . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Raaflaub, Kurt , 2003 . The discovery of freedom in ancient Greece . Rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ryfe, David , 2005 . Does deliberative democracy work? Annual Review of Political Science , 8, pp.49–71.

Somin, Ilya , 2013   Democracy and political ignorance . Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Sunstein, Cass , 2002 . “ The law of group polarization, ” Journal of Political Philosophy , 10, pp.175–195.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Democracy Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on democracy.

Democracy is known as the finest form of government. Why so? Because in a democracy, the people of the country choose their government. They enjoy certain rights which are very essential for any human being to live freely and happily. There are various democratic countries in the world , but India is the largest one. Democracy has withstood the test of time, and while other forms have the government has failed, democracy stood strong. It has time and again proved its importance and impact.

Significance of a Democracy

Democracy is very important for human development . When people have free will to live freely, they will be happier. Moreover, we have seen how other forms of government have turned out to be. Citizens are not that happy and prosperous in a monarchy or anarchy.

Furthermore, democracy lets people have equal rights. This ensures that equality prevails all over the country. Subsequently, it also gives them duties. These duties make them better citizens and are also important for their overall development.

Most importantly, in a democracy, the people form the government. So, this selection of the government by the citizens gives everyone a chance to work for their country. It allows the law to prevail efficiently as the rules are made by people whom they have selected.

In addition, democracy allows people of various religions and cultures to exist peacefully. It makes them live in harmony with one another. People of democracy are more tolerant and accepting of each other’s differences. This is very important for any country to be happy and prosper.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

India: A Democratic Country

India is known to be the largest democracy all over the world. After the rule of the British ended in 1947 , India adopted democracy. In India, all the citizens who are above the age of 18 get the right to vote. It does not discriminate on the basis of caste, creed, gender, color, or more.

Although India is the largest democracy it still has a long way to go. The country faces a lot of problems which do not let it efficiently function as a democracy. The caste system is still prevalent which hampers with the socialist principle of democracy. Moreover, communalism is also on the rise. This interferes with the secular aspect of the country. All these differences need to be set aside to ensure the happiness and prosperity of the citizens.

In short, democracy in India is still better than that in most of the countries. Nonetheless, there is a lot of room for improvement which we must focus on. The government must implement stringent laws to ensure no discrimination takes place. In addition, awareness programs must be held to make citizens aware of their rights and duties.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

‘America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy’ Is a Dangerous—And Wrong—Argument

Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our constitutional design, but a perversion of it.

Dependent on a minority of the population to hold national power, Republicans such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah have taken to reminding the public that “we’re not a democracy.” It is quaint that so many Republicans, embracing a president who routinely tramples constitutional norms, have suddenly found their voice in pointing out that, formally, the country is a republic. There is some truth to this insistence. But it is mostly disingenuous. The Constitution was meant to foster a complex form of majority rule, not enable minority rule.

The founding generation was deeply skeptical of what it called “pure” democracy and defended the American experiment as “wholly republican.” To take this as a rejection of democracy misses how the idea of government by the people, including both a democracy and a republic, was understood when the Constitution was drafted and ratified. It misses, too, how we understand the idea of democracy today.

George Packer: Republicans are suddenly afraid of democracy

When founding thinkers such as James Madison spoke of democracy, they were usually referring to direct democracy, what Madison frequently labeled “pure” democracy. Madison made the distinction between a republic and a direct democracy exquisitely clear in “ Federalist No. 14 ”: “In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.” Both a democracy and a republic were popular forms of government: Each drew its legitimacy from the people and depended on rule by the people. The crucial difference was that a republic relied on representation, while in a “pure” democracy, the people represented themselves.

At the time of the founding, a narrow vision of the people prevailed. Black people were largely excluded from the terms of citizenship, and slavery was a reality, even when frowned upon, that existed alongside an insistence on self-government. What this generation considered either a democracy or a republic is troublesome to us insofar as it largely granted only white men the full rights of citizens, albeit with some exceptions. America could not be considered a truly popular government until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which commanded equal citizenship for Black Americans. Yet this triumph was rooted in the founding generation’s insistence on what we would come to call democracy.

The history of democracy as grasped by the Founders, drawn largely from the ancient world, revealed that overbearing majorities could all too easily lend themselves to mob rule, dominating minorities and trampling individual rights. Democracy was also susceptible to demagogues—men of “factious tempers” and “sinister designs,” as Madison put it in “Federalist No. 10”—who relied on “vicious arts” to betray the interests of the people. Madison nevertheless sought to defend popular government—the rule of the many—rather than retreat to the rule of the few.

American constitutional design can best be understood as an effort to establish a sober form of democracy. It did so by embracing representation, the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the protection of individual rights—all concepts that were unknown in the ancient world where democracy had earned its poor reputation.

In “Federalist No. 10” and “Federalist No. 51,” the seminal papers, Madison argued that a large republic with a diversity of interests capped by the separation of powers and checks and balances would help provide the solution to the ills of popular government. In a large and diverse society, populist passions are likely to dissipate, as no single group can easily dominate. If such intemperate passions come from a minority of the population, the “ republican principle ,” by which Madison meant majority rule , will allow the defeat of “ sinister views by regular vote .” More problematic are passionate groups that come together as a majority. The large republic with a diversity of interests makes this unlikely, particularly when its separation of powers works to filter and tame such passions by incentivizing the development of complex democratic majorities : “In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good.” Madison had previewed this argument at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 using the term democracy , arguing that a diversity of interests was “the only defense against the inconveniences of democracy consistent with the democratic form of government.”

Jeffrey Rosen: America is living James Madison’s nightmare

Yet while dependent on the people, the Constitution did not embrace simple majoritarian democracy. The states, with unequal populations, got equal representation in the Senate. The Electoral College also gave the states weight as states in selecting the president. But the centrality of states, a concession to political reality, was balanced by the House of Representatives, where the principle of representation by population prevailed, and which would make up the overwhelming number of electoral votes when selecting a president.

But none of this justified minority rule, which was at odds with the “republican principle.” Madison’s design remained one of popular government precisely because it would require the building of political majorities over time. As Madison argued in “ Federalist No. 63, ” “The cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers.”

Alexander Hamilton, one of Madison’s co-authors of The Federalist Papers , echoed this argument. Hamilton made the case for popular government and even called it democracy: “A representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable.”

The American experiment, as advanced by Hamilton and Madison, sought to redeem the cause of popular government against its checkered history. Given the success of the experiment by the standards of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, we would come to use the term democracy as a stand-in for representative democracy, as distinct from direct democracy.

Consider that President Abraham Lincoln, facing a civil war, which he termed the great test of popular government, used constitutional republic and democracy synonymously, eloquently casting the American experiment as government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And whatever the complexities of American constitutional design, Lincoln insisted , “the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible.” Indeed, Lincoln offered a definition of popular government that can guide our understanding of a democracy—or a republic—today: “A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.”

The greatest shortcoming of the American experiment was its limited vision of the people, which excluded Black people, women, and others from meaningful citizenship, diminishing popular government’s cause. According to Lincoln, extending meaningful citizenship so that “all should have an equal chance” was the basis on which the country could be “saved.” The expansion of we the people was behind the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ratified in the wake of the Civil War. The Fourteenth recognized that all persons born in the U.S. were citizens of the country and entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizenship. The Fifteenth secured the vote for Black men. Subsequent amendments, the Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth, granted women the right to vote, prohibited poll taxes in national elections, and lowered the voting age to 18. Progress has been slow— and s ometimes halted, as is evident from current efforts to limit voting rights —and the country has struggled to become the democratic republic first set in motion two centuries ago. At the same time, it has also sought to find the right republican constraints on the evolving body of citizens, so that majority rule—but not factious tempers—can prevail.

Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court is helping Republicans rig elections

Perhaps the most significant stumbling block has been the states themselves. In the 1790 census, taken shortly after the Constitution was ratified, America’s largest state, Virginia, was roughly 13 times larger than its smallest state, Delaware. Today, California is roughly 78 times larger than Wyoming. This sort of disparity has deeply shaped the Senate, which gives a minority of the population a disproportionate influence on national policy choices. Similarly, in the Electoral College, small states get a disproportionate say on who becomes president. Each of California’s electoral votes is estimated to represent 700,000-plus people, while one of Wyoming’s speaks for just under 200,000 people.

Subsequent to 1988, the Republican presidential candidate has prevailed in the Electoral College in three out of seven elections, but won the popular vote only once (2004). If President Trump is reelected, it will almost certainly be because he once again prevailed in the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. If this were to occur, he would be the only two-term president to never win a plurality of the popular vote. In 2020, Trump is the first candidate in American history to campaign for the presidency without making any effort to win the popular vote, appealing only to the people who will deliver him an Electoral College win. If the polls are any indication, more Americans may vote for Vice President Biden than have ever voted for a presidential candidate, and he could still lose the presidency. In the past, losing the popular vote while winning the Electoral College was rare. Given current trends, minority rule could become routine. Many Republicans are actively embracing this position with the insistence that we are, after all, a republic, not a democracy.

They have also dispensed with the notion of building democratic majorities to govern, making no effort on health care, immigration, or a crucial second round of economic relief in the face of COVID-19. Instead, revealing contempt for the democratic norms they insisted on when President Barack Obama sought to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat, Republicans in the Senate have brazenly wielded their power to entrench a Republican majority on the Supreme Court by rushing to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The Senate Judiciary Committee vote to approve Barrett also illuminates the disparity in popular representation: The 12 Republican senators who voted to approve of Barrett’s nomination represented 9 million fewer people than the 10 Democratic senators who chose not to vote. Similarly, the 52 Republican senators who voted to confirm Barrett represented 17 million fewer people than the 48 senators who voted against her. And the Court Barrett is joining, made up of six Republican appointees (half of whom were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote) to three Democratic appointees, has been quite skeptical of voting rights—a severe blow to the “democracy” part of a democratic republic.  In 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder , the Court struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that allowed the federal government to preempt changes in voting regulations from states with a history of racial discrimination.

As Adam Serwer recently wrote in these pages , “ Shelby County ushered in a new era of experimentation among Republican politicians in restricting the electorate, often along racial lines.” Republicans are eager to shrink the electorate. Ostensibly seeking to prevent voting fraud, which studies have continually shown is a nonexistent problem, Republicans support efforts to make voting more difficult—especially for minorities, who do not tend to vote Republican. The Republican governor of Texas, in the midst of a pandemic when more people are voting by mail, limited the number of drop-off locations for absentee ballots to one per county. Loving, with a population of 169, has one drop-off location; Harris, with a population of 4.7 million (majority nonwhite), also has one drop-off location. States controlled by Republicans, such as Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, have also closed polling places, making voters in predominantly minority communities stand in line for hours to cast their ballot.

Who counts as a full and equal citizen—as part of we the people —has shrunk in the Republican vision. Arguing against statehood for the District of Columbia, which has 200,000 more people than the state of Wyoming, Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas said Wyoming is entitled to representation because it is “a well-rounded working-class state.” It is also overwhelmingly white. In contrast, D.C. is 50 percent nonwhite.

High-minded claims that we are not a democracy surreptitiously fuse republic with minority rule rather than popular government. Enabling sustained minority rule at the national level is not a feature of our constitutional design, but a perversion of it. Routine minority rule is neither desirable nor sustainable, and makes it difficult to characterize the country as either a democracy or a republic. We should see this as a constitutional failure demanding constitutional reform.

This story is part of the project “ The Battle for the Constitution ,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center .

• How Parliament works
• System of government
• The Australian Constitution
• Three levels of government
• Parliament at work
• Bills and laws

This fact sheet introduces the idea of democracy and explores the key ideas which support Australia’s democratic system of government.

What will I learn?

• Democracy means rule by the people.
• Australia is a democratic country.
• Australian democracy is supported by key features like freedom of speech, fair elections, inclusion, and the rule of law.

Glossary words

representative democracy

Curriculum alignment

Year 5 ACHASSK115 Year 6 ACHASSK143 Year 7 ACHCK048 Year 7 ACHCK050 Year 7 ACHCK052 Year 10 ACHCK090 Year 10 ACHCK094

What is democracy?

Democracy means rule by the people. The word comes from the ancient Greek words ‘demos’ (the people) and ‘kratos’ (to rule). A democratic country has a system of government where people have the power to participate in decision-making.

Each democracy is unique and works in different ways. In some, people help make decisions directly by voting on laws and policy proposals. This is called direct democracy. In others, like Australia, citizens choose representatives to make decisions on their behalf. This is known as representative democracy .

Australian democracy

Democracy key ideas.

Parliamentary Education Office (peo.gov.au)

Description

This diagram illustrates the 4 key ideas of Australian democracy:

• Active and engaged citizens—Citizens have a voice and can make changes in society.
• An inclusive and equitable society—We work towards a society where everyone is respected and free.
• Free and franchised elections—We get to stand for election and choose who makes decision on our behalf.
• The rule of law for both citizens and the government—Everyone is equal before the law and must follow the law.

Copyright information

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

You are free to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work.

Attribution – you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Non-commercial – you may not use this work for commercial purposes.

No derivative works – you may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

Waiver – any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

Active and engaged citizens

• People have a voice and can make changes in society.
• People can participate by getting involved in their community. This might be by joining a charity, a political party or a community group.
• Everyone can get involved in the work of Parliament through contacting members of parliament, the work of committees, protesting and petitioning.

An inclusive and equitable society

• People work towards a society where everyone is respected and free, where everyone is valued and supported to reach their full potential.
• People have freedom of speech, association, movement and belief.
• Our society supports the development and well-being of individuals and their right to make their own choices.
• Opposing ideas are tolerated and respected. People listen to different points of view in Parliament and society.

Free and franchised elections

• People can stand for elections and choose who makes decisions on their behalf.
• Voting is done in secret so people can make their choice without pressure or intimidation.
• Elections are run by an independent organisation­—the Australian Electoral Commission .

The rule of law for both citizens and the government

• Everyone is equal before the law and must follow the law, including the people who make laws.
• Laws should be fair, clearly written and protect people's rights.

What are the benefits of democracy?

Some of the benefits of democracy are:

• There are ways to resolve different views and conflicts peacefully.
• Respect for human dignity.
• People have freedom to act, speak and think freely (as long as it does not stop others doing the same).
• Equality before the law.
• Safe and secure community.
• Government that is transparent, responsive and accountable to the people.
• Ability to hold elected representatives accountable.
• Share on Classroom
• Share on twitter
• Share on facebook
• Share on pinterest

Want to know more?

Australian democracy.

Museum of Australian Democracy

• Welcome to the Parliamentary Education Office
• Understand our Parliament
• Parliament and its people
• Having your say
• Getting involved
• History of Parliament
• History milestones
• Parliament House
• National Symbols in Parliament House
• Teach our Parliament
• Curriculum links
• Classroom activities
• Units of work
• Education resources
• Interactive posters
• Professional learning
• Self-paced online learning
• Book a program
• Parliament House program
• Prepare for your program
• Digital programs
• Outreach program
• Connect with the PEO
• Get to know the PEO
• Our products
• Using our website
• Social Media Acceptable Use Guidelines
• Support for senators and members

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

• Publications
• Our Methods
• Short Reads
• Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

• Many Tech Experts Say Digital Disruption Will Hurt Democracy
• 3. Concerns about democracy in the digital age

Table of Contents

• 1. Themes about the digital disruption of democracy in the next decade
• 2. Broader thoughts from key experts on the future of democracy at a time of digital disruption
• 4. Hopeful themes and suggested solutions
• 5. Tech will have mixed effects that are not possible to guess now
• About this canvassing of experts
• Acknowledgments

About half of the experts responding to this canvassing said people’s uses of technology will mostly weaken core aspects of democracy and democratic representation, but even those who expressed optimism often voiced concerns. This section includes comments about problems that were made by all respondents regardless of their answer to the main question about the impact of technology on democracy by 2030. These worries are organized under seven themes.

Empowering the powerful: Corporate and government agendas generally do not serve democratic goals or achieve democratic outcomes. They serve the goals of those in power

An internet pioneer and technology developer and administrator predicted, “My expectation is that by 2030, as much of 75% of the world’s population will be enslaved by artificial intelligence-based surveillance systems developed in China and exported around the world. These systems will keep every citizen under observation 24 hours a day, seven days a week, monitoring their every action.”

Dan Gillmor, co-founder of the News Co/Lab at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and professor of practice in digital media literacy commented, “Governments (and their corporate partners) are broadly using technology to create a surveillance state, and what amounts to law by unaccountable black-box algorithm, far beyond anything Orwell imagined. But this can only happen in a society that can’t be bothered to protect liberty – or is easily led/stampeded into relinquishing it – and that is happening in more and more of the Western democracies. The re-emergence of public bigotry has nothing to do with technology, except to the extent that bigots use it to promote their malignant goals. Meanwhile, the institutions that are supposed to protect liberty – journalism among them – are mostly failing to do so. In a tiny number of jurisdictions, people have persuaded leaders to push back on the encroachments, such as a partial ban on government use of facial recognition in San Francisco. But the encroachments are overwhelming and accelerating.”

Leah Lievrouw, professor of information studies at the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote, “To date, virtually no democratic state or system has sorted out how to deal with this challenge to the fundamental legitimacy of democratic processes, and my guess is that only a deep and destabilizing crisis (perhaps growing out of the rise of authoritarian, ethnic or cultural nationalism) will prompt a serious response.”

Seth Finkelstein, programmer, consultant and EFF Pioneer of the Electronic Frontier Award winner, wrote, “Warren Buffett has said, ‘There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’ We can examine how this class warfare changes with advances in technology, analogous to how military warfare has been affected by technology. But no weapons technology to date has inevitably produced democracy over dictatorship (or vice-versa). For example, there once was a type of boosterism that talked about how ordinary people could make websites and promoted its very rare cause célèbre success. But that storyline is now going out of fashion. It’s finally getting to be pundit knowledge that there’s a whole system behind which material gets promoted. Paid professional liars can both make websites themselves and work this system better than amateurs. There’s currently a national panic over Russian trolls. But native fiends can do the same thing, with more skill, incentive and opportunities.”

David Bray, executive director for the People-Centered Internet Coalition, commented, “The power of narratives is exactly their ability to shape and institutionalize norms and power distribution in our human communities. … Now, however, our world is much broader than our immediate environment, and this has dangerous side effects, such as challenges in reaching consensus or disputing the relevant facts for a situation. We are seeing increasing polarization in open societies, partly as a result of these questions of where we want to go not being considered in ways that can translate to action. An even larger question is where do different localities want to go in terms of progress in parallel to what values or norms they want to hold dear? This is a question that spans sectors. No one organization or influencer or group with power can either solely answer or execute actions toward that desired future state. In the absence of finding ways to build bridges that span sectors, power – through narratives, laws, or technologies – will be grabbed by whomever aspires to this. An important question for the future is can we build such bridges across sectors? Will our divisions be our undoing as open, pluralistic societies? Can we develop narratives of hope for open, pluralistic societies that bring people together?”

Technology can improve or undermine democracy depending on how it is used and who controls it. Right now, it is controlled by too few. Kevin Gross

Miguel Moreno, professor of philosophy at the University of Granada, Spain, an expert in ethics, epistemology and technology, commented, “There is a clear risk of bias, manipulation, abusive surveillance and authoritarian control over social networks, the internet and any uncensored citizen expression platform, by private or state actors. There are initiatives promoted by state actors to isolate themselves from a common internet and reduce the vulnerability of critical infrastructures to cyberattacks. This has serious democratic and civic implications. In countries with technological capacity and a highly centralized political structure, favorable conditions exist to obtain partisan advantages by limiting social contestation, freedom of expression and eroding civil rights.”

Richard Jones, an entrepreneur based in Europe, said, “Government will lag exploitation of data by state and corporate actors in unforeseen ways. Biased censorship (both well-intentioned and corrupt) and propaganda onslaughts will shape opinions as – combined with an anti-scientific revolution – confidence in the institutions and establishment figures essential to peaceful orderly improvement of societies crumbles further. Hysterical smear attacks will further intensify as attempts to placate minority pressure groups continue. Biased technocratic groupthink will continue its march toward authoritarianism. Charismatic leadership will flourish in truly liberal systems. Authoritarianism will take root elsewhere. Online preference surveys may be developed to guide many choices facing government, but it is not clear that can correct the current democratic deficit in a helpful way. As during the Gutenberg process, accompanying the digestion of ‘free-range’ information will be the reevaluation of secular and religious values and objectives.”

John Sniadowski, a systems architect based in the United Kingdom, wrote, “It is proving very difficult to regulate multinational corporations because of the variety of different national government agendas. A globally enacted set of rules to control multinationals is unlikely to happen because some sovereign states have very illiberal and hierarchical control over agendas and see technology as a way to dominate their citizens with their agendas as well as influence the democratic viewpoints of what they consider to be hostile states. Democracy in technological terms can be weaponized.”

Kevin Gross, an independent technology consultant, commented, “Technology can improve or undermine democracy depending on how it is used and who controls it. Right now, it is controlled by too few. The few are not going to share willingly. I don’t expect this to change significantly by 2030. History knows that when a great deal of power is concentrated in the hands of a few, the outcome is not good for the many, not good for democracy.”

Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, said, “As of 2015, the outcomes of upward of 25 of the national elections in the world were being determined by Google’s search engine. Democracy as originally conceived cannot survive Big Tech as currently empowered. If authorities do not act to curtail the power of Big Tech companies – Google, Facebook and similar companies that might emerge in coming years – in 2030, democracy might look very much as it does now to the average citizen, but citizens will no longer have much say in who wins elections and how democracies are run. My research – dozens of randomized, controlled experiments involving tens of thousands of participants and five national elections – shows that Google search results alone can easily shift more than 20% of undecided voters – up to 80% in some demographic groups – without people knowing and without leaving a paper trail (see my paper on the search engine manipulation effect ). I’ve also shown that search suggestions can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split – again, without people knowing they have been influenced. The content of answer boxes can increase the impact of the search engine manipulation effect by an additional 10% to 30%. I’ve identified about a dozen largely subliminal effects like these and am currently studying and quantifying seven of them. I’ve also shown that the ‘Go Vote’ prompt that Google posted on its home page on Election Day in 2018 gave one political party at least 800,000 more votes than went to the opposing party – possibly far more if the prompt had been targeted to the favored party.”

A longtime internet-rights activist based in South Africa responded, “Whether the powers of states and tech corporations can be reined in effectively is the current struggle. The genie is out of the bottle and it does not bode well for systems of democracy that have already been undermined in Western states. A state of global cyber war now exists and is likely to persist over the next decade. The oligopoly of state-supported tech companies, whether in the U.S. or China, will be difficult to break. It is trite to differentiate between a Google or an Alibaba – both received substantial state support from their respective governments – the Googles by failure to apply antitrust law to prevent monopolization, the Alibabas by state protection against competition in China.”

David P. Reed, a pioneering architect of the internet expert in networking, spectrum and internet policy, wrote, “‘Democracy’ in 2030 will be democracy in name only. The mechanisms of widespread corporate surveillance of user behavior and modification of user behavior are becoming so sophisticated that the citizen interests of democratic-structured countries will no longer be represented in any meaningful way. That is, by collecting vast amounts of information about user preferences and responses, and the use of highly targeted behavior modification techniques, citizens’ choices will be manipulated more and more in the interests of those who can pay to drive that system. The current forms of democracy limit citizen participation to election events every few years, where issues and candidates are structured by political parties into highly targeted single-vote events that do not represent individuals’ interests. Instead, a small set of provocative ‘wedge’ issues are made the entire focus of the citizen’s choice. This is not representation of interests. It is a managed poll that can easily be manipulated by behavior modification of the sort that technology is moving toward.”

A pioneering technology editor and reporter for one of the world’s foremost global news organizations wrote, “I do not have great faith that the institutions tasked with ensuring that online discourse is civil and adheres to standards of truth and fairness will be able to prevail over tendencies of autocratic governments and powerful private sector actors to use cyberspace for narrow political ends. … The internet has never had an effective governing body with any considerable clout to set policy that might guarantee network neutrality on a global scale, inhibit censorship and apply such conventions as the Universal Bill of Human Rights. Further, a handful of platforms whose moral compass has been questioned have come to dominate the online world. Some are dominated by governments. Others owe allegiance only to shareholders.”

Jerry Michalski, founder of REX, the Relationship Economy eXpedition, wrote, “‘Capital G’ Government has devolved into a phony consumer mass-marketing exercise. ‘Small g’ governance could involve active, ongoing collaboration among citizens, but it won’t as long as the major platforms they use have as their business models to addict them to TikTok videos, and to sell off their private data to companies that want to stalk them.”

Jonathan Kolber, author of “A Celebration Society: Solving the Coming Automation Crisis,” said, “Deepfakes will completely muddy the difference between facts and falsehood, a distinction that few citizens are equipped to make even now. This will have devastating effects upon democratic institutions and processes. … We are increasingly seeing George Orwell’s nightmare unfold as governments learn to use internet-enabled smart devices (televisions, smartphones, etc.) for surveillance. When the Internet of Things extends to smart cars, smart homes and so forth, the surveillance will be universal and unending. Governments are also increasingly redefining facts and history.”

A professor of computer science said, “Artificial intelligence technology, especially machine learning, has a feedback loop that strongly advantages first movers. Google’s advantages in being a better search engine have now been baked in by its ability to accumulate more data about user search behavior. This dynamic is inherently monopolistic, even more so than prior technological advances. Persuasive technologies built using these technologies are capable of refining and shaping public opinion with a reach and power that totalitarian governments of the 20th century could only dream of. We can be sure that today’s regulatory mood will either dissipate with nothing done, or more likely, become a driver that entrenches existing monopolies further by creating technical demands that no competitor can surmount. Democratic institutions will have a very difficult time countering this dynamic. Uber’s ‘greyball’ program, intended to defeat regulation and meaningful audit, is a harbinger of the future.”

Jonathan Taplin, author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy,” said, “Social media will continue to enable new and more-sophisticated forms of propaganda and disinformation. Artificial intelligence will enable deepfake videos that the average citizen will be taken in by. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter will continue to enable this content in their unending chase for revenue. Politicians will make noises about regulation, but since these platforms will become their primary source of advertising and publicity, they will never commit to the elimination of Safe Harbor and other rules that protect the social networks.”

Bulbul Gupta, founding adviser, Socos Labs, a think tank designing artificial intelligence to maximize human potential, responded, “Given the current state of tech and artificial intelligence ownership, I expect democracy to be even more unequal between the haves and have-nots by 2030, and a major uprising happening from the masses who are being quickly left behind. Tech and AI are owned by their creators, the top 1%, with decisions made about the 100% in every sector of society that have little to no transparency, human judgment or much recourse, and that may not get made the same if they were being forced to happen face to face. People will need their own personal AIs in their corner to protect their basic civil and human rights.”

Carlos Afonso, an internet pioneer and digital rights leader based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, wrote, “ Thomas Piketty and others demonstrate that inequality is, if anything, rising everywhere. Democracy understood as pluralist participation in political processes involving the electoral (supposedly unbiased) choices of government representatives, and the decision-making processes in building policies, legislation and regulation, cannot survive in these conditions. … One of the greatest achievements of the UN community was the consensus agreement on trying to reach the 17 sustainable development goals by 2030. However, conflicts of all kinds, internal and inter-country, give us no hope that the essential components of those goals will be achieved worldwide. Also, there is (partly in consequence of the various manifestations of a growing economic crisis with the financial speculators at the head of these processes) little chance that resources will increase to cover the essential needs of the majority.”

Even former pillars of democracy, Britain and France, are challenged by forces misusing digital tools. Norton Gusky

James Sigaru Wahu, assistant professor, media, culture and communication, New York University and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, wrote, “As we have seen across the Global North, tech has only worked to make worse offline tension. This has resulted in multiple challenges toward notions of democracy as shown by the Brexit debacle, 2016 presidential elections and violence against immigrant groups. We have also seen states get in the act through the use of technology to expand their surveillance powers, as is the case in China and in the UK (with its large CCTV camera presence). States in the Global South have also gotten into the surveillance game, which does not bode well for organizations and people advocating for human rights. What we have thus seen is countries like Russia and China growing in strength in tech surveillance and misinformation/disinformation while the United States and several police departments across the country rely on companies such as Palantir to expand their surveillance on citizens. Both of these have led to disastrous results.”

Lokman Tsui, professor at the School of Journalism and Communication of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, formerly Google’s Head of Free Expression in Asia and the Pacific, said, “The political economy of new technologies that are on the horizon leaves me with many concerns for how they will impact democracy and its institutions. First, many of the new technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data, are closed and centralized in nature. Unlike the open web before it, these technologies are closed and centralized, both in terms of technical design and also in terms of business model. The technology can indeed be used to improve democratic institutions and processes, but it will be hard and there will be many obstacles to overcome. Second, the new technologies are not only not helping democracies, but they, by their design, are also helping and strengthening non-democracies to further censorship and surveillance. While there are also technologies to counteract these tendencies, the balance tends to tip (heavily) in favor of the other side. Third, I’m concerned there is a global rat race toward the bottom when it comes to the collection of (personal) data, which has the potential to enable the suppression of many other rights.”

Norton Gusky, a futurist and advocate for implementing technology to empower people, commented, “For many years I truly believed that the internet would bring greater access to information that would strengthen democracy. However, in the past four to five years, I’ve witnessed a darker side to the internet. We now see countries like Russia interfering in the elections of not just the United States, but other countries throughout the world. I think there will be a swing, but for the next two to four years, the darker forces will prevail. We’ll see countries like Turkey, China and Egypt limiting the access to the ‘truth.’ Even former pillars of democracy, Britain and France, are challenged by forces misusing digital tools.”

Paola Ricaurte, fellow, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, wrote, “Even after we are aware of the negative implications that technology can have on democratic processes, we have not seen significant actions by the U.S. government to limit the power of tech corporations. The extraterritorial control of technology companies will be further expanded and will continue to have consequences for the democracies of the Global South. The knowledge gap between data-rich countries and data-poor countries will deepen.”

Ian O’Byrne, assistant professor of education at the College of Charleston, wrote, “Power and money ultimately influence decisions made by democratic bodies. With growing unrest, citizens can use social media and current/new digital tools to make themselves heard. Ultimately this will be pushed back again by existing powerholders and nothing may ultimately change. The existing powerholders will continue to exert their influence, and citizens will be left to continue to voice their opinions by shouting into the cyberverse.”

Jeffrey Alexander, senior manager for innovation policy at RTI International, said, “In societies where people are accustomed to power being centralized in a few institutions, and where central governments already exert power through surveillance and state authority, digital technology will facilitate intimidation, disinformation and other mechanisms for reducing individual liberty, suppressing minority opinion and enforcing authoritarian control. This will enable such governments to enhance the appearance of following democratic norms, such as offering ‘free and open’ elections, but use those mechanisms to reinforce their power by suppressing dissent well before voters reach the polls. In societies with strong individual education and a tradition of liberty and citizen-driven initiatives, digital technology could help thwart the rise of authoritarian rule, improve oversight and governance of law enforcement and policy processes, and enhance citizen involvement in government and politics.”

John Pike, director and founder of GlobalSecurity.org, said, “Democracy in 2030 will face the best of times and the worst of times. All the optimistic predictions about social media and other online implementations strengthening citizen participation will be realized. All the pessimistic predictions about the ease with which the surveillance state can manipulate public opinion will also be realized. Autocratic regimes such as Russia and China are skilled at such dark arts at home and will practice them globally. In the old days it was pretty obvious that the Communist Party USA member hawking the Daily Worker was working for Moscow, but now attribution is difficult and contested.”

Shane Kerr, an engineer for an internet security firm, said, “Those with resources will be able to harness technology more effectively to influence opinion and policies, ultimately working against democratic ideals. We already see this in a nascent form today, but it will likely evolve into such a pervasive narrative that the average citizen will not even be aware of it, unless they study history (assuming that ‘1984’-style revisionist history does not become the norm).”

[the fact that they]

Sasha Costanza-Chock, associate professor of civic media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote, “Core aspects of the democratic process are deeply stressed or broken. In the United States, we need significant reforms to enable broader and more meaningful participation in democratic decision-making, such as instant runoff or rank-order voting, expansion of voting days and times, expanded voting rights for formerly incarcerated people, campaign finance reform, rethinking the electoral college and much more. Unfortunately, most of these are extremely unlikely. Instead, we seem locked into an elitist and extremely expensive electoral system where the players with the most money and connection to wealthy backers rig the system to their advantage. In this context, many technological tools primarily advance those who can develop and customize them for their own ends – again, the biggest players. There are some countervailing forces such as the ability of insurgent candidates to leverage social media.”

Denise N. Rall, academic researcher of popular culture, Southern Cross University, New South Wales, Australia, said, “I believe technology will help the dictators that we now have stay on top and control more aspects of all of our lives, worsening the prospects for democracy as has already happened in most economic powerhouses of the world (U.S., Russia, China, and right-wing elections in Europe, the absurdity of Brexit in the UK, North Korea, etc.). I think environmental degradation will increase exponentially and people will be fighting over resources like energy, water and food quite soon. I do not think technology will have the power to change these outcomes without real desire by governments to reduce resource consumption and a global birth control program of some kind.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “China has the potential to stall trends toward democracy and regime change through increased monitoring of their citizenry and refinement of their ‘social credit’ legislation/monetization of following the whims of their single party. There is a potential for China to help prop up regimes in developing countries where they have vested interests by distributing such technologies to undemocratic regimes that want to remain in power. I think that India could go either way depending on whether or not widespread corruptions in their political environment exploit or are thwarted by increased access to technology and information by their citizenry.”

Technologies of identification and surveillance will expand in usage, eating away at the private sphere of social life. Retired professor

Richard Lachmann, professor of political sociology at the State University of New York-Albany, said, “Democracy will continue to weaken but technology is only a secondary factor. More important in the decline of democracy are the disappearance or weakening of labor unions, the growing power of corporations in all sectors due to mergers, extreme levels of inequality and the ability of the rich and of political actors to manipulate ‘veto points’ to paralyze government initiatives, which then increases citizens’ cynicism about politicians and lessens their participation. All of these preceded the expansion of the internet and will not be significantly lessened by citizens’ online activities.”

Vince Carducci, researcher of new uses of communication to mobilize civil society and dean at the College of Creative Studies, wrote, “Institutional changes are occurring more as a function of power and money rather than technology, particularly in the selection of candidates and in the judicial system. Those are more of threat than technology.”

A cofounder of one of the internet’s first and best-known online communities wrote, “Democracy is under threat. The blame can’t ultimately go to the internet or to computer-aided automation or to artificial intelligence. The vast power of personal and corporate wealth to wield these technologies in support of their selfish interests will increasingly suppress egalitarian and democratic values.”

 A research scientist for a U.S. federal agency wrote, “We are in a period of growing isolationism, nativism and backlash that will weaken democracies around the world, and it will probably have reached a peak by 2030. Although technology and online dissemination of information will be a tool of information and disinformation, and it will be a tool of policing populations, the underlying economic and environmental shifts are mostly responsible for changes resulting in weaker democracies.”

A retired professor commented, “Corporations will have more power over employees and customers. This will be achieved as part of the ongoing corporate takeover of democratic institutions, which U.S. President Eisenhower warned of long ago. Technologies of identification and surveillance will expand in usage, eating away at the private sphere of social life. Social media will continue to reinforce strong social ties among family and friends while reducing the formation of the weak social ties among acquaintances that support intergroup cooperation necessary in a diverse society. Worsening climate and its consequences for health, agriculture and infrastructure will create increasing irrational forms of blame and global conflict. Global conflicts will include electronic and biological forms of aggression against the militarily powerful countries. More citizen backlash is to be expected, but will likely be directed against inappropriate targets. Societies as we know them will stumble from disaster to disaster, toward a massive die-off of our species. I hope I’m wrong. I would like to see our species survive with its democratic values intact. I have grandchildren. I would like their grandchildren to inherit a better world than the one that our present technocratic capitalist economy is racing toward.”

Anonymous respondents commented:

• “The internet under capitalism will only serve the few, not the many, and democracy will weaken as a result. The problem is about competitive economic imperatives rather than technological affordances.”
• “It’s not the technology that will cause the changes, but the systems and structures that create various tech.”
• “The loudest voices will continue to be those that are heard. While the media may change, the elite will still run everything.”
• “Technology companies and governments have incentives to avoid doing things to address the damaging ways in which internet platforms damage democratic institutions.”
• “Power corrupts. Look at the tech giants today – manipulation and propaganda. They are elitists who think they know best.”
• “The combination of big data and supercomputing power seems to be having a negative effect on democracy, and I see no signs that that can be effectively policed or regulated, particularly given the power (and data troves) of very large internet companies and of governments.”
• “I do not believe that governments understand the tools, and they will fail repeatedly to regulate or organize them properly; I also do not have faith the private companies are democratic, and therefore they are apt to reinforce capitalism alone, not democracy.”

Diminishing the governed: Digitally networked surveillance capitalism creates an undemocratic class system pitting the controllers against the controlled

Charles Ess, professor of digital ethics, at the University of Oslo, said, “Democracy – its foundational norms and principles, including basic rights to privacy, freedom of expression and rights to contest and conscientiously disobey – may survive in some form and in some places by 2030; but there are many strong reasons, alas, to think that it will be pushed to the margins in even traditionally democratic countries by the forces of surveillance capitalism, coupled with increasing citizen feelings of powerlessness against these forces, along with manipulation of information and elections, etc. Not to mention China’s increasingly extensive exports of the technologies of ‘digital authoritarianism’ modelled on their emerging Social Credit System.”

There is simply no reason to believe that technology can strengthen democracy. Gina Neff

Rob Frieden, a professor of telecommunications law at Penn State who previously worked with Motorola and has held senior policy positions at the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said, “Technological innovations appear better suited for expanding government power versus improving the ability of individuals to evade surveillance. Across the entire spectrum of political ideology, national governments can justify increased budgets for ever-more-sophisticated surveillance technologies based on noble-sounding rationales, such as national security. Governments have little incentives and incur even fewer penalties when they fail to calibrate surveillance technology for lawful reasons. Innocent people will have reasonable privacy expectations eroded, particularly with technologies that have massive processing power and range coupled with an ambiguous mandate. Unless and until citizens push back, governments will use surveillance technologies to achieve goals beyond promoting national security. We risk becoming inured and numbed by ubiquitous surveillance, so much so that pushback seems too difficult and unproductive.”

Gina Neff, senior research fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, studying innovation and digital transformation, wrote, “There is simply no reason to believe that technology can strengthen democracy. Western democracies are grappling with the power from the increased concentration of financial capital and its response in the form of the rise of populism. Without attention to strengthening our core technology and communications infrastructure, those forces will continue to damage how people participate in – and indeed make – democracy.”

Zizi Papacharissi, professor of communication and political science, University of Illinois-Chicago, responded, “Our present system of governance supports strong capitalism/soft democracy. Until this balance is reorganized, to support soft capitalism/strong democracy, any technology we create will continue to underserve democracy. In short, the technology we have created was designed to generate profit, not to support democracy. It is possible to do both. We just have not designed it that way, however. By 2030, we will see a weakening of democratic and political processes facilitated by technology. This will happen not because there is something inherently bad or undemocratic about technology. It is because most technology is designed, implemented and/or deployed through mechanisms that support a strong capitalist model that was created centuries ago and needs to be updated in order to be compatible with contemporary societies, democratic and non.”

John Harlow, smart-city research specialist in the Engagement Lab at Emerson College, said, “Although there is rising anti-monopoly sentiment, 2030 is soon, and the dominant digital commons for speech (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) are likely to draw out (in the courts) any regulatory action to change their business models and/or practices. Currently, they are governed by algorithms designed to maximize ‘engagement’ time and thereby advertising revenue, and those algorithms have prioritized extreme content over accurate content (among other problems). This has enabled and supported the rise of the authoritarian far right the world over, and has destabilized faith and participation in democratic institutions and processes.”

An expert on online trust and identity active in the multistakeholder organizations that build and maintain the internet said, “Uses are shaped by social and economic factors that drive toward consolidation and control. Having created a prefect panopticon that maps every endpoint and every device on the network, and with the rise of middle-box collectors that use massive computing power to correlate identifiers, the end result will tilt toward command and control.”

An expert in socio-technical systems wrote, “Social media tech firms will continue to resist control and meaningful regulation in order to preserve their core business, aptly described by Shoshana Zuboff as ‘surveillance capitalism.’ The oligarchs, perhaps still aided by foreign interests, will continue to manipulate public opinion for their own benefit. Economic inequality will continue to increase, as will resentment, misdirected toward immigrants and the ‘elites.’”

An expert in human-computer design wrote, “The decay of democracy should be attributed foremost to capitalism itself, and thus only in a secondary way to technology. Capitalism seems overdue for major shock, enough so that predicting much of anything so far ahead as 2030 seems foolish. The present moment witnesses the close of a decade of ever-intensified distraction engineering.”

An expert in the law who previously worked for a U.S. government agency wrote, “Increasingly sophisticated marketing based on data and inferred data on every individual threatens to cross the line between persuasion and manipulation and coercion, and the First Amendment restraints on government will require a substantial degree of proof of coercion before the government will be able to intervene to safeguard individuals from clear overreaching. The threat of manipulation – and we saw the first signs of that in 2018 with the Cambridge Analytica fiasco – is real and growing. Whether industry or government can curb it is an open question. Industry of course has a conflict of interest – the more successful its manipulation is, the more money industry makes. And government has the restraints of the First Amendment that limit its role.”

[cyberspace as a venue for war, along with land, sea, air, space]

The problem with everyone having a megaphone is that we get drowned in more noise than useful information. Sam Adams

Emilio Velis, executive director, Appropedia Foundation, said, “The way user participation has been shaped by technological platforms for the past 10 years turned the power of decentralized information back to the big corporations, platforms and stakeholders. Or, even worse, it has weakened the capacity of individuals of action while maintaining a false perception that they have control.”

Peter Lunenfeld, professor of design, media arts and digital humanities, University of California-Los Angeles, and author of “Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine,” wrote, “Commercial platform-driven communication technologies like Facebook, Twitter and their eventual successors are unlikely to strengthen representative democracy in the coming decades of the 21st century. They may add ‘voices’ to the conversation, but they will be unlikely to support and sustain the 20th century’s dominant forms of successful democracies – those that designated representatives to debate and legislate on their behalf, from coherent parties that had established ideologies and platforms. What we are starting to see is the development of dialoguing ‘communities’ that mimic the give and take of true democratic action without offering actual power to its participants, like the Italian Five Star Movement, or the emergence of personality-driven, single-issue pop-ups like Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. Like Five Star and the Brexit Party, future political movements will use social media to offer the affordances of democratic dialogue without actually empowering participants to control or direct the movements. Social media technologies are creating skeuomorphs of democracies; they will have design attributes that look and feel democratic, but they will be authoritarian to the core.”

An anonymous responden t commented, “The degree of tracking of comments by individuals will increase dramatically in the future as DeepMind-style algorithms are applied to internet-based material. It will become much harder for people to make comments without knowing that their attitudes are being logged and accumulated by organisations of all manner, so there will be a reluctance to speak one’s mind. Hence ‘free speech’ will be constrained and thus the democratic process hindered.”

A distinguished professor of electrical engineering and computer science who is an expert in the future of communications networks at a U.S. university wrote, “Social media makes it possible to reach voters in targeted ways and deliver information from a distance that is tailored to specific goals, rather than fostering local community discussion and participation. The lack of privacy in internet service platforms, along with artificial intelligence and big data, now make it possible for candidates to identify and influence voters in ways that could not have been imagined only a few years ago. Without corrective action (such as new election rules limiting the use of private citizen information), these new capabilities could lead to increased political instability and possibly the breakdown of entire democratic systems. The U.S. appears to be the first such casualty in the Western world.”

Sam Adams, a 24-year veteran of IBM now working as a senior research scientist in artificial intelligence for RTI International, architecting national-scale knowledge graphs for global good, said, “The internet provides a global megaphone to everyone in that anyone can publish their opinions and views instantly and essentially for free. The problem with everyone having a megaphone is that we get drowned in more noise than useful information. This is even more problematic since interest groups from all sides have used their power and resources to amplify their own voices far above the average citizen, even to the point of effectively silencing the average citizen by burying their smaller voice under a landslide of blaring voices controlled by wealthy interest groups. Given the interest-driven news cycles and echo chambers of social media, only the loudest or most extreme voices get repeated. This further exacerbates the level of emotion in the public discussion and drives listeners to the extremes instead of more common ground. A democracy must fairly represent its people’s views if it is to succeed. And part of that fairness in this technology-dominant world must include balancing the volume of the voices.”

Philip Rhoades, a business futurist and consultant based in Australia, wrote, “The neoliberal, developed Western world is sliding into fascism as the world’s sixth mass extinction reaches its inevitable conclusion. As this ecological collapse and political regression proceeds, modern technology will mostly be used for suppression of the great majority of people/citizens. Some technology may help defend the populations against state suppression and terror, but its effectiveness will be minor in the greater scheme of things.”

David Noelle, professor and researcher into computational cognitive neuroscience, University of California-Merced, wrote, “In the U.S., policy and public opinion have been increasingly shaped so as to support powered interests rather than the interests of the people. Regulation is dismissed as a threat to our troubled economy, encouraging corporate powers to pursue dangerous short-sighted strategies for producing return for investors. The unrepresented have been all but muted by electoral processes designed to sustain those in power. The most influential technologies of our times have been designed to depend on large centralized infrastructure. Data drives many new innovations, and few are in a position to collect and aggregate extensive data on the people. The focus on technologies that depend on controllable infrastructure, whether privately held or manipulated by political powers, will strengthen the positions of those currently in power, increasingly limiting the ability of the people to demand democratic representation. Note that this opinion is not intended as a call to limit technology but as a cry to radically alter political and economic institutions so as to provide representation to all of the people. A more democratic system will produce more democratic technologies.”

Deirdre Williams, an independent internet activist based in the Caribbean, commented, “We are being taught that convenience is the most important priority. ‘Innovation’ is killing ingenuity. I would expect that over the next 10 years the pendulum will swing in the opposite direction, but it will take a while to repair the divide that has been (deliberately?) introduced between citizen and government, and to remind governments of their duty of care to all of the citizens.”

Giacomo Mazzone, head of institutional relations, European Broadcasting Union and Eurovision, wrote, “I don’t believe that internet platforms will be able to self-reform, despite all announcements and efforts shown. And so only a break-up solution or ‘publicization’ of the internet giants could change the future. The amount of power that has been transferred by citizens and by states to these actors that are not accountable to anybody (even to the U.S. government) is too big to think that they could renounce voluntarily. Do you remember ‘Sliding Doors’ – the 1998 movie with Gwyneth Paltrow as leading actor? The future could (in a 50/50 chance) go totally wrong or fantastically well. A digital interconnected society based on trust and respect of individual and human rights could be the next arcadia. A digital interconnected and mass-surveillance-oriented society based on exploitation of human weakness and on polarization of society could be the perfect implementation of the Orwell dystopia of ‘1984.’ The two futures are equally possible. It’s up to government and civil society to decide in which direction we shall go.”

Scott B. MacDonald, an experienced chief economist and international economic adviser, said, “The future has a very real potential to be a dark Orwellian place, transfixed between strong technology under the control of a few wealthy and powerful and the great unwashed masses made economically redundant by machines and waiting for their daily dose of Soylent Green. One big change is that people may no longer have to go and vote but vote from hand-held or implanted communications devices. If we are not careful technology will be a device for greater control, not democracy, much as in China. Facial recognition anyone?”

Estee Beck, author of “A Theory of Persuasive Computer Algorithms for Rhetorical Code Studies,” commented, “Unless Congress takes action and passes protective consumer legislation to limit private industry powers with technological growth, i.e., surveillance and privacy erosion, democratic institutions will face greater dangers from domestic and foreign threats, loss of trust among the American public and devaluation of private technological companies among the marketplace. The infrastructure of technology, with faulty programming that allows for penetration and deep hacks, the decisions made now with select leaders in technology companies driving pro-China surveillance growth, anti-U.S. and Mexico relations via border surveillance, marketing of biosecurity technologies and the eventual promotion of artificial intelligence consumer goods and services will divide the faith of the nation and leave the American public ill-trusting of Congress to take action for the public good.”

Matt Colborn, a freelance writer and futurist based in Europe, said, “I do not deny the potential for technology to strengthen or even revolutionise democracy. In fact, this is what I hoped for at the beginning of the revolution in the 1990s. However, from a citizen perspective, the new technology seems to me to have already reduced mental autonomy and the capacity for intelligent choice. Why? 1) Platforms like YouTube seem to be more appropriate for distributing propaganda and for involuntary brainwashing because of the algorithms used. 2) Extreme tribalism has also increased because of the ‘echo chamber’ nature of personalised media. 3) Government and corporations are demolishing any kind of privacy. Neurotech, where thoughts are read, is the ‘final frontier’ of this. The problem, too, is the toxic interaction between archaic authoritarian institutions, right-wing populism and new tech. These effects mean that democracy is diluted whilst a ‘surveillance’ state is strengthened and while deep tribal divisions are exacerbated. Although there are certainly counter movements to this, economic inequality is such that basically the rich and powerful are in a position to cash in on these developments and the rest of us are not. Those who want political innovation will find it tough in this environment.”

Democratic regimes could become less democratic from the misuse of surveillance systems with the justification of national security. Anonymous respondent

An artificial intelligence expert predicted, “‘Democracy’ is likely to be even more of an elitist endeavor by 2030 than it is now. Life is good if you’re a big corporation, but not if you’re an ordinary working-class citizen. Who has a voice in this world will depend even more on money and power. Civic technologists will first promise to save democracy with technology but then start charging for it after five years because ‘someone has to pay for maintenance.’ And they will get away with it, because no one will remember that political rights are a basic right and not a commodity.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “Recently Hong Kong protesters had to buy single-trip transit cards with cash to be able to exercise democratic power; this will be impossible when mass face-recognition technology is implemented. Essentially, it is becoming almost impossible to behave democratically.”

• “Technology is going to aggregate people’s individual voices and remove individual democracy.”
• “Democratic regimes could become less democratic from the misuse of surveillance systems with the justification of national security.”
• “I am sadly confident that democratic institutions will not be affected in any positive way in future by citizen’s perspectives; instead, technology will continue to create disenfranchised, disempowered citizens.”

Exploiting digital illiteracy: Citizens’ lack of digital fluency and their apathy produce an ill-informed and/or dispassionate public, weakening democracy and the fabric of society

James S. O’Rourke IV, a University of Notre Dame professor whose research specialty is reputation management, said, “As Neil Postman wrote in 1985, ‘We no longer engage in civil public discourse. We are simply amusing ourselves to death.’ Among the more insidious effects of digital life has been a reduction in tolerance for long-form text. People, particularly the young, will read, but not if it involves more than a few paragraphs. Few among them will buy and read a book. News sites have discovered that more people will click on the video than scroll through the text of a story. Given how easy it now is to manipulate digital video images, given how easy it is to play to people’s preconceptions and prejudice, and given how indolent most in our society have become in seeking out news, opinion and analysis, those who seek to deceive, distract or bully now have the upper hand. Jesuits have long cautioned that ‘No man can understand his own argument until he has visited the position of a man who disagrees.’ Such visits are increasingly rare. The long-predicted ‘filter bubble’ effect is increasingly visible. People will simply not seek out, read or take time to understand positions they do not understand or do not agree with. A sizeable majority now live with a thin collection of facts, distorted information and an insufficient cognitive base from which to make a thoughtful decision. Accurate information is no longer driving out false ideas, propaganda, innuendo or deceit.”

Bernie Hogan, senior research fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, said, “Technology without civics is capitalism with crystallised logic and unbounded scope. Democratic institutions and civic societies are premised on boundaries and intelligible scales, like the ‘local paper’ or the ‘provincial radio.’ Technology is allowing for the transcendence of scale, which we might think is great. Certainly, from a logistics and delivery side it is very impressive. But social cohesion requires levels of understanding that there’s a coherent bounded population to care about and define one’s identity through and against. It requires people seeing and doing things as more than consumers and occasional partisan voters.”

People don’t know what to believe, so they often choose either to believe nothing or to believe whatever their gut tells them. Research scientist

Larry Rosen, a professor emeritus of psychology at California State University-Dominguez Hills, known as an international expert on the psychology of technology, wrote, “I worry that many in the public will and do not have the skills to determine truth from fiction, and twisted truth can and does lead to misunderstanding the content.”

Carolyn Heinrich, professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University, said, “As internet content is increasingly customized for us by who we know and where we click, the range of information and perspectives we are exposed to will narrow unless we make the effort to read more widely ourselves. To minimize the negative effects, we have to proactively make the effort to broaden our circles of communication and sources of information/knowledge. As technology increasingly pervades our K-12 school curricula, we also need to examine exactly what technology vendors are conveying in their content, and who is the ‘face’ of that content in instructional videos. That is something we are currently investigating in our research .”

Cliff Zukin, professor of public policy and political science, Rutgers University, responded, “In the U.S. anyway, increasing political apathy has accompanied increasing use of technology. It has, on the one hand, been diversional from attention to matters of governance and citizenship. On the other, the centrifugal forces of interests made more available by increasing technology has eroded the core knowledge base of citizens, as well as the norms of citizenship. It does allow for mass movements to organize more quickly and put pressure on leaders, but the right-wing, post-recession populism and withdrawal from globalism is not, in my judgment, a good thing.”

An anonymous respondent said, “Unfortunately, fundamentally undemocratic processes in the United States, like the electoral college, will continue to be undermined by fake news and technology-backed manipulation of rural states, which have outsized electoral college voting power but typically lack education and will likely remain vulnerable to such exploits.”

A fellow at a major university’s center for internet and society wrote, “I am worried that the ease with which hostile powers and trolls can manipulate public opinion will only increase and become more sophisticated, leading to voters having increasingly lower levels of factual information at their disposal or, worse yet, increasing apathy toward or cynicism about voting and the democratic process entirely.”

Eric Royer, assistant professor of political science, Saint Louis University, said, “The breakdown of norms creates an environment of false truths that is directly tied to political polarization, especially among the fringes, and citizen mistrust and apathy with anything ‘government.’ Technology, especially in social media platforms, holds unlimited potential to make the world less of an unfamiliar place, however, its manipulation and influence in our daily lives is truly misunderstood at the current expense of democratic processes and institutions globally and domestically.”

A research scientist focused on fairness, transparency and accountability in artificial intelligence said, “The rise of fake news and manipulated media like deepfakes has sown a greater distrust of media and institutions that is undermining democracy, leading to a less-informed and less civically engaged population. People don’t know what to believe, so they often choose either to believe nothing or to believe whatever their gut tells them. Moreover, foreign actors that use social media manipulation tactics to sway elections further undermine democracy’s legitimacy.”

Continuous media weakens people’s ability to seek information and form their own opinion. Gretchen Steenstra

Mark Andrejevic, associate professor of communications, University of Iowa, wrote, “Much of my career has been built around my profound concerns about the impact that technology is having on democratic processes of deliberation, public accountability and representation. This is because technology needs to be understood within the context of the social relations within which it is deployed, and these have been conducive to privileging an abstract consumerist individualism that suppresses the underlying commitment to a sense of common, shared or overlapping interests necessary to participation in democratic society. I see the forms of hyper-customization and targeting that characterize our contemporary information environment (and our devices and mode of information ‘consumption’) as fitting within a broader pattern of the systematic dismantling of social and political institutions (including public education, labor unions and social services) that build upon and help reproduce an understanding of interdependence that make the individual freedoms we treasure possible. Like many, I share concerns about rising political polarization and the way this feeds upon the weaponization of false and misleading information via automated curation systems that privilege commercial over civic imperatives. These trends predate the rise of social media and would not have the purchase they do without the underlying forms of social and civic de-skilling that result from the offloading of inherently social functions and practices onto automated systems in ways that allow us to suppress and misrecognize underlying forms of interdependence, commonality and public good. I am not optimistic that anything short of a social/political/economic disaster will divert our course.”

Carlos Afonso, an internet pioneer and digital rights leader based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, wrote, “Thinking here of a planet with 7 billion-plus persons, most of them (including many of the supposedly ‘connected’) are unable to discern the many aspects of disinformation that reaches them through traditional (entrepreneurial) media, social networking apps and local political influences.”

A longtime CEO and internet and telecommunications expert commented, “Citizens will increasingly act absent of any understanding of critical analysis and reasoning, fact-checking or even rule of law. Under the guise of ‘acting out against injustice’ we will continue to see cyber vigilantism, whereby social media firestorms effectively ‘try and convict’ anyone accused of word or deed not supportive of their values.”

Gretchen Steenstra , a technology consultant for associations and nonprofit organizations, wrote, “I am concerned about higher velocity of information that does not include all critical and supporting information. Data is used to inform one view without context. Consumers do not fact-check (on many issues regardless of party). Americans are not focused on social responsibility or downstream impacts – they only want instant results. Continuous media weakens people’s ability to seek information and form their own opinion. Constant connectedness prevents reflection and allows your brain to relax. No one can argue with the desire for understanding.”

A fellow at a think tank’s center for technology and innovation wrote, “Democracy will be driven by more artificial intelligence systems, which will automate a range of decisions. Consequently, individuals may have limited input into their own decisions because data will be extrapolated from machines. What this will mean is a looser connection to democratic processes or connections driven by what one sees, hears and senses through dominant platforms. Without some level of policy restraint when it comes to specific use cases, such as voting, technology may serve to erode public trust, while simultaneously relying less on actual public input due to the level of sophistication that emerging technologies offer.”

Ayden Férdeline, technology policy fellow, Mozilla Foundation, responded, “Technology will continue to be exploited by those who seek to increase political apathy and undermine our trust in established institutions. This may happen more subtly than in the past, but the corrosive effect on democracy will be just the same.”

The internet amplifies trends that have been with us for a while – extremism and apathy. Pamela McCorduck

Philip J. Salem, professor emeritus, Texas State University, expert in complexity of organizational change, said, “People will become increasingly more careful about how they use the internet. Each person must be more mindful of use. My concern is that reflexive, non-mindful reactions can spread so fast and have more tragic consequences with the speed of the internet.”

Jeff Johnson, a professor of computer science, University of San Francisco, who previously worked at Xerox, HP Labs and Sun Microsystems, said, “Today’s social media encourages the spread of unverified information, which can skew policymaking and elections. People tend to be lazy and do not even read most of the articles they comment on, much less check the truth of the articles. In the TV era, before social media, putting out false information about a political opponent or ballot measure was expensive and subject to laws against ‘false advertising.’ Political hit pieces had to be well-funded, vaguely worded and carefully timed (to just before the election) in order to sway elections. That is no longer true. Strong regulation of social media could perhaps mitigate this, but such regulation seems unlikely in the foreseeable future.”

Pamela McCorduck, writer, consultant and author of several books, including “Machines Who Think,” said, “I am not sanguine about democracy right now. The internet amplifies trends that have been with us for a while – extremism and apathy. Our proportion of potential voters who actually vote only rose once or twice in the past few elections. Mostly it is dismal. Partly this is a result of voter suppression (not just removing voters from the rolls, but also making the process of voting far more cumbersome than it needs to be). Partly this is the realization by voters that elected officials are more beholden to dark money than to the people who elected them. I hope I am wrong about the future of this country I love.”

Luis German Rodriguez, researcher and consultant on knowledge society and sociotechnical impact based at Universidad Central de Venezuela, commented, “Democracy is likely to be weakened by 2030. … Authoritarian rule seems to be growing stronger wherever you look, supported by the emerging technologies.”

• “People will not use the internet to research the issue, rather, they will simply go with whatever biased opinion is put in front of them.”
• “The problem is that with the erosion of critical-thinking skills, true journalism versus opinion journalism (and the prevalence of ‘sound bites’ in lieu of serious debate based on facts) lack of proper policy and governance principles, these tools are being used to spread false information.”
• “The public made more gullible by a short attention spans, eroding reasoning skills, becomes a malleable target for those who seek to erode the fundamental institutions of our democracy.”
• “I’m less concerned about technology than I am the ability and willingness of my fellow citizens to educate themselves about the sources of information they consult.”
• “The biggest threat to democracy is people’s lack of critical-thinking skills to be able to distinguish between information and misinformation.”

Waging info-wars: Technology can be weaponized by anyone, anywhere, anytime to target vulnerable populations and engineer elections

Richard Bennett, founder of the High-Tech Forum and ethernet and Wi-Fi standards co-creator, wrote, “The economic model of social media platforms makes it inevitable that these tools will do more harm than good. As long as spreading outrage and false information generates more profits than dealing in facts, reason, science and evidence, the bad guys will continue to win. Until we devise a model where doing the right thing is more profitable than exploiting the public’s ignorance, the good guys will keep losing. … One hypothetical change that I would like to see would be the emergence of social media platforms that moderate less for tone and emotion and more for adherence to standards of truthfulness and evidence. Making this approach succeed financially is the major obstacle.”

Mutale Nkonde, adviser on artificial intelligence at Data & Society and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, wrote, “Without significant regulation, our future elections will be ruled by the parties that can optimize social media recommendation algorithms most effectively. In the present moment, those are parties like Cambridge Analytica who used fear, racism and xenophobia to influence elections across the world.”

Eduardo Villanueva-Mansilla, associate professor of communications at Pontificia Universidad Catolica, Peru, and editor of the Journal of Community Informatics, said, “The lack of agreement about how to deal with these issues among governments is a serious threat to democracy, as much as the potential for misuse of technological innovations. In the next decade, the complete control by a few multinational firms will be completely outside of regulatory and policy reach of developing countries’ governments. This will increase the instability that has been normalized as a feature of governance in these countries.”

This is not like armed revolution; this is small numbers of employees able to affect what thousands, if not millions, see. Rich Salz

An expert in the ethics of autonomous systems based in Europe said, “Digital devices provide more and more new means to enhance the power of leaders to control people and to manipulate an inferior substitute for democracy to their benefit. They simulate and broadcast false flavours of democratic representations to the population. Decisions that restrict people’s rights, autonomy and freedom are promoted as necessary for enhancing the security, care and well-being of the population, while in fact the purpose is to protect the interests of those who seek power and influence. New digital means (biometrics, facial recognition, big data, deep learning, artificial intelligence) allow those in power to recognize and to profile people (position, behavior, location, ways of thinking, ideas, political opinions, level of life, health, origins, money, social relationships and so on). Stakeholders can use these devices to make appropriate decisions concerning what they consider subversive people and moreover to fight them if necessary. Robots and autonomous AI systems will be very efficient slaves to help to educate people who will not fit the requirements and rules imposed by the dominant class. This model will be developed in more and more states in the world and will progressively narrow freedom and decrease the quality of life of ordinary people belonging to medium and low social classes. At the same time, the field of available jobs will be more and more narrow because AI and robots will replace human beings in most areas and lead the majority of people to be unable to find means to work to support and fulfill themselves.”

Larry Masinter, internet pioneer, formerly with Adobe, ATT Labs, Xerox PARC, who helped create internet and web standards with IETF and W3C, said, “Traditional democracy and democratic institutions rely on geographically defined boundaries for constituencies. Enabling technology will accelerate the rise of cross-jurisdictional malfeasance, whether it’s called collusion or something else.”

An anonymous respondent warned, “Authoritarians will weaken checks and balances, turn courts into extensions of those in power and thus undermine representative democracy – enabled by the manipulation of digital media to stoke fear and mask inconvenient truths. … Extreme partisanship is putting all of our democratic institutions at risk to the point that shared power and orderly transitions may not exist in 10 years. Civil unrest seems inevitable.”

Rich Salz, senior architect, Akamai Technologies, wrote, “Individual citizens cannot stand up to the organized ‘power’ of other countries. This is not like armed revolution; this is small numbers of employees able to affect what thousands, if not millions, see.”

Heywood Sloane, entrepreneur and banking and securities consultant, said, “The current U.S. administration is leading the way to misuse technology. It permeates the public air with disinformation and lies, while putting a heavy hand on the scale in the background. It welcomes trolls to conferences in the White House and encourages them. Even if the administration changes it will take time and work to undo the damage. Media technology corporations have lost control of their platforms and marketing staffs – witness Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Already we have rogue state sponsors altering our dialogues, yet we ignore them and chortle away with their leaders.”

An associate dean of research for science and engineering said, “Over the next 10 years, we will see an increase in the current trend of using technology to further engineer elections (including gerrymandering) and to target those most vulnerable to manipulation (on all political sides). A result is overrepresentation in elected government of self-interested minority points of view (extremes on many sides), increased obstacles to ousting parties from power (especially in two-party systems like the U.S.), and, for a while at least, the continued divisiveness of political discourse.”

A consultant who works for U.S. government agencies said, “The biggest fear of technology will be the use of artificial intelligence. While at present we have control of AI, in time we will lose that control. As systems are augmented with AI, it will remove the human element over time. We can say what we like about technology and our control of technology, but in time external forces will replace the human element. This will happen in all areas of technology, including the governmental technology world. At some point it will go beyond its own programing doing what it believes is in our best interest.”

Sowing confusion: Tech-borne reality distortion is crushing the already-shaky public trust in the institutions of democracy

The leader of a technology innovation group at one of the world’s top five technology organizations wrote, “Technology has already and will continue to place huge strains on democracy. First, digital technology makes it immensely easy for a small number of leveraged actors to exercise great control over our public discourse. We see this as they exercise control over the information made available and presented to citizens. Second, digital technology makes it immensely easy for actors to hide or obscure their involvement and their intent. Third, digital technology makes it immensely easy to erode truth through fabrications or amplifications.”

Hate, polarization, oversimplification and lack of well-considered thought are and will be on the increase. Alejandro Pisanty

Nigel Cameron, president emeritus, Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, said, “I fear deepening distortions in public perception by the leveraging of digital media on the part of governments (our own and foreign), tech corporations and other actors – as new technologies like fake video make it even easier to shape opinion. It will be some time before (assuming it happens) we have the will and the tech to rein in these abuses. As things stand, partisanship by politicians and the ‘sorry, not sorry’ approach of Mark Zuckerberg and the other tech leaders portend deepening problems.”

[Technology]

Alejandro Pisanty, professor at UNAM, the National University of Mexico, and an activist in multistakeholder internet governance, wrote, “Hate, polarization, oversimplification and lack of well-considered thought are and will be on the increase. They are orders of magnitude easier to construct and propagate than the ways of countering them (the ‘bullshit asymmetry’ principle, on steroids). Manipulation of elections and other processes will continue to be rife as long as there exist those who want to do it and those susceptible to manipulation. Among the hardest hit will be the U.S., which has a gullible population unable to see the meta-layers of attack they are subjected to. There is hope for improvement in a smaller, smarter, more-democratic sector of society fighting the acritical reactions of the naive and uneducated. Better information, resilient systems (by design) and deliberations nested at all levels from the ultra-local to the global, an architecture of multistakeholder deliberations and decisions, and a lot of luck, may lead to improvement. Otherwise splintering and other forms of dark days loom.”

Rich Ling, professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; expert on the social consequences of mobile communication, said, “The forces that want to confuse/undercut legitimate information are learning how to best use these systems. They are also learning how to calibrate the messages they send so as to enhance their divisiveness. This division plays on confirmation bias and, in turn, undercuts the common ground that is needed for effective governing and democracy.”

Karl Auerbach, chief technology officer, InterWorking Labs, active in internet design since the early 1970s, had less faith in multistakeholder organizations, writing, “Democracy is dying at the hands of a concept called ‘stakeholder.’ This has little to do with technology except that people are being led to believe that they are not skilled enough or smart enough to decide for themselves, that technological experts ought to decide on their behalf. We are moving toward not improved democracy (direct or indirect) but closer to an oligarchy of ‘stakeholders.’”

Glyn Moody, a prolific technology journalist, blogger and speaker based in Europe, said, “Lies propagate more easily than truth. It is proving far easier to use the latest technology to undermine the things we thought were safe and stable. It is proving very hard to counter that abuse of technology.”

A computing science professor emeritus from a top U.S. technological university wrote, “As artificial intelligence technologies are employed to create ever-more-realistic disinformation videos and as multiplication of software AI disinformation bots can be replicated and spread easily by individuals or small groups, more and more people will be fooled by disinformation, thus weakening our democracy.”

A professor of sociology at a major California university said, “Powerful governments and their allies are using technology to destroy the concept of a single, accepted truth. While not always succeeding in implanting particular beliefs in the minds of citizens and residents, the constant assault on truth leads to fatigue and resignation, that the actual truth cannot be known, or that all political actors are equally bad. This resignation, moving into apathy, allows those in power to behave badly and centralize their power. The wild card is whether new technologies can detect bots and fake video/audio, and whether mainstream media and social media companies behave responsibly to bring an accepted truth back to life.” Alan Honick, project director for PROSOCIAL, said, “My work is focused on the need to make the internet and associated information technologies trustworthy and reliable. … The most important variable for the question at hand is whether or not information technology can move in the direction of becoming a trusted and reliable source of information, and at present the trend seems to indicate not.”

Annemarie Bridy, professor of law specializing in the impact of new technologies on existing legal frameworks, said, “Social media platforms have a steep hill to climb over the coming years when it comes to dealing effectively with disinformation and coordinated inauthentic behavior aimed at manipulating voters and electoral outcomes. Viral disinformation online will continue to be a serious threat to democratic institutions and the integrity of elections.”

Garth Graham, a longtime leader of Telecommunities Canada, said, “The digital age is characterised by a disintermediation of authority. Authority as a principle for structural organization is disappearing. Democracy is predicated by the agreement to accept authority to represent. Most people are no longer willing to accept that anyone else can represent them.”

Stephanie Fierman, partner, Futureproof Strategies, said, “Many parties have an incentive to issue false and damaging statements and content that people believe. Until we return to a world in which a fact is a fact is a fact, we will see a continuing degradation of truth and the existence of checks and balances, both of which being so vital to the presence of democracy.”

Stuart Umpleby, retired professor of management and director of research at George Washington University, commented, “The operators of social media platforms, such as Facebook, need to take responsibility for content. Otherwise they benefit by distributing falsehoods.”

Viral disinformation online will continue to be a serious threat to democratic institutions and the integrity of elections. Annemarie Bridy

Satish Babu, founding director of the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software, said, “If the world does not recognize the pitfalls and take corrective action, technology is likely to adversely impact the quality and practice of democracy. In particular, the pragmatics of democracy will deteriorate into an ‘anything goes,’ free-for-all fight where artificial intelligence will be used to dig up or magnify or even create antecedents of candidates from historical records and social media will be used to push such ‘facts’ to every citizen.”

A professor of sociology and public policy wrote, “Bot armies and databases of persuadable people that include information on what sets them off empower the worst nationalistic and international actors to tear down democracies. Via technology, people can enter alternate realities where others reinforce their fantasies and strengthen them – flat earthers, those who believe in vaccine and climate conspiracies, moon landing hoaxers and so forth. These are problematic in their own right, but also lend themselves to further manipulation, destruction of trust in institutions, scapegoat seeking, and the rejection of science.”

Filippo Menczer, a grantee in the Knight Foundation’s Democracy Project and professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University, said, “Technology … mediates our access to information and opinions. This will in part strengthen democracy, for example making it easier to check facts. It will also weaken democracy, as vulnerabilities due to the interplay of cognitive, social and algorithmic biases continue to be exploited and new ones are discovered. On balance, my prediction is that things will get worse before they get better. We are only just beginning discussions about the legal implications of countermeasures, for example the issues related to social bots, disinformation campaigns, suppression of speech and the First Amendment in the U.S.”

Nancy Heltman , manager of a state agency based in the U.S., wrote, “The negative aspects of bots and influencers driving opinions are likely to outweigh the positive aspects of increasing involvement in the political process.”

David Gans, musician, songwriter and journalist, said, “I fear that deliberate falsehoods will continue to crowd objective reality out of the discourse. The social networks seem neither able nor particularly willing to intervene on behalf of the truth, and there are powerful and well-funded entities with a strong interest in misinforming the public.”

A research leader for a U.S. federal agency said, “Working to be respectful of First Amendment rights while not allowing the perpetuation of mis- or disinformation is of critical concern. I don’t expect that to be resolved within the next 10 years. We are living in the times of 50 shades of gray. In many cases, the determination is not black and white. The headline may be misleading, but not entirely untrue. I think that’s appealing to the media right now.”

Kenneth R. Fleischmann, associate professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas-Austin, wrote, “Technology will have complex effects on society that will be difficult to predict, that depend on the decisions of tech companies, governments, the press and citizens. … Trust will be key, not just blind trust, but trust based on transparent provenance of information that can help users exercise their autonomy and agency.”

• “Technology will weaken our ability to come to consensus; by nurturing smaller communities and fringe ideas, it will make compromise and finding a modus vivendi much more difficult.”
• “Social media will continue to erode faith in facts and reason; echo chambers and emotion-driven communications plus security problems in voting will undermine public discourse and faith in elections.”
• “There seems to be no realistic way to check the effects of IT on polarization and misinformation. The true beliefs and actions of political leaders will continue to have decreasing influence on voting.”
• “Foreign countries and hate groups will grow more sophisticated in their ability to infiltrate the web with biased stories and ads designed to suppress or sway voters and negatively impact public opinion.”
• “While it enables voices to be heard, tech has already weakened democracy by enabling governments and corporations to erode privacy and silence those who might otherwise speak out.”
• “We don’t need mass armies anymore. New technology enables centralized control to a degree never imagined before.”
• “In 2030, there will still be splintering and increased political polarization as individuals are able to challenge democratic ideals and influence political processes through anonymous activities.”
• “Democracy is, and will always be, filled with fake news and preposterous bloviation.”

Weakening journalism: There seems to be no solution for problems caused by the rise of social media-abetted tribalism and the decline of trusted, independent journalism

Christopher Mondini, vice president of business engagement for ICANN, commented, “The decline of independent journalism and critical thinking and research skills resulting from easy reliance on the internet make citizens more susceptible to manipulation and demagoguery. A growing proportion of politically active citizens are digital natives with no recollection of life before social media became the primary medium for debate and influence. The pursuit of clicks, retweets and page views encourages extremist or provocative rhetoric. Viral memes and soundbites distract from thoughtful analysis, deliberation and debate. Of course, the vast majority of citizens are not politically active, but they increasingly consume news and adopt a worldview shaped by their online communities. Participation in political processes may rise because of newly inflamed passions brought about by online discourse, but they may crowd out more measured voices.”

Yaakov J. Stein, CTO, RAD Data Communications, based in Israel, responded, “Social media as they are at present have a polarizing effect that destabilizes democracy. The reason is that advertising (and disinformation) is targeted at and tailored to people according to their preexisting views (as predicted based on their social media behavior). This strengthens these preexisting views, reinforces disparagement of those with opposing views and weakens the possibility of being exposed to opposing views. The result is that free press no longer encourages democracy by enabling people to select from a marketplace of ideas. Instead the right to free press is being used to protect the distribution of disinformation and being manipulated to ensure that people are not exposed to the full spectrum of viewpoints. Perhaps an even more insidious result is that people attempting to keep open minds can no longer trust information being offered online, but that free information online has led to the bankruptcy of traditional news outlets that spend resources on fact-checking.”

The decline of independent journalism and critical thinking and research skills resulting from easy reliance on the internet make citizens more susceptible to manipulation and demagoguery. Christopher Mondini

Rey Junco, director of research at CIRCLE in the Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts University, said, “We can expect that attempts to influence public perceptions of candidates and elections are not only ongoing, but that they will continue to be successful. Technology use by citizens, civil society and governments will first weaken core aspects of democracy and democratic representation before there is a restructuring of technological systems and processes that will then help strengthen core aspects of democracy. There are two issues at play: 1) Ideological self-sorting in online spaces that is bolstered by algorithmic polarization and 2) The relative unwillingness of technology companies to address misinformation on their platforms. Individuals who get their news online (a larger proportion who are young – Pew Research ) choose media outlets that are ideologically similar and rarely read news from the opposing side (Flaxman, Goel, & Rao, 2018). In fact, these individuals are rarely exposed to moderate viewpoints (Flaxman, Goel, & Rao, 2018). Social media, in turn, allow for not just informational self-sorting as with online news, but such self-sorting is bolstered through algorithmic curation of feeds that promotes ideological separation. … Although major technology companies are aware of how misinformation was promoted and propagated through their networks during the 2016 elections and resultant congressional hearings on the topic, little has been done to mitigate the impact of such deliberate spreading of misinformation. Analyses from the security and intelligence communities show that state actors continue their attempts to manipulate public sentiment in social spaces, while the increased polarization of traditional outlets has minimized the impact of these reports. State actors are emboldened by the fact that the United States has not addressed the spread of misinformation through technological change or through public education.”

An associate professor of computer science who previously worked with Microsoft, said, “I worry about three related trends: 1) the increasing decentralization of news generation, 2) the lack of easy-to-use, citizen-facing mechanisms for determining the validity of digital media objects like videos and 3) personalization ecosystems that increase the tendency toward confirmation bias and intellectual narrowing. All three trends decrease the number of informed voters and increase social division. Governments will eventually become less averse to regulating platforms for news generation and news dissemination, but a key challenge for the government will be attracting top tech talent; currently, that talent is mostly lured to industry due to higher salaries and the perception of more interesting work. Increasing the number of technologists in government (both as civil servants and as politicians) is crucial for enabling the government to proactively address the negative societal impacts of technology.”

Kenneth Sherrill, professor emeritus of political science, Hunter College, said, “When I’m pessimistic, I believe that the fragmentation of information sources will interact with selective attention – the tendency only to follow news sources that one expects to agree with. This will generate even greater polarization without any of the moderating effects and respect for democratic processes that come from genuine participation. This can lead to the collapse of democratic processes. Right now, I’m pessimistic. The 2020 election may be the test.”

Eric Keller, lecturer in international relations and U.S. foreign policy, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, wrote, “Social media will heighten the current strong polarization that we already have. This is mainly from ‘information stovepipes’ and mutually reinforcing narratives that demonize the opposition. This creates the danger of democratic institutions being degraded in the name of ‘saving’ them from the opposing political party.”

A Europe-based internet governance advocate and activist said, “If current trends continue, there won’t be a real democracy in most countries by 2030. The internet’s funding model based on targeted advertising is destroying investigative journalism and serious reporting. More and more of what is published is fake news. Citizens cannot make informed decisions in the absence of reliable information.”

The coordinator of a public-good program in Bulgaria wrote, “By 2030 we will still see fighting between small groups and communities that leads to extremes. This will give ground to governments to become more authoritative and build up even stronger control via the internet.”

Bill D. Herman, researcher working at the intersection of human rights and technology said, “The combination of news fragmentation, systematic disinformation and motivated reasoning will continue to spiral outward. We’re headed for a civil war, and the hydra-headed right-wing hate machine is the root of the problem.”

An internet pioneer and technology developer and administrator said, “The foundation of democracy is an informed public. By undermining the economic foundation of journalism and enabling the distribution of disinformation on a mass scale, social media has unleashed an unprecedented assault on the foundation of democracy. The decline of newspapers, to just highlight one downside, has had a quantifiable effect (as measured in bond prices) on governmental oversight and investor trust.”

A professor and expert in learning in 3D environments said, “The explosion in the volume of information has led to the majority of people tending to rely on or trust the major platforms to filter and distribute information rather than managing their own personal learning environments with feeds from trusted independent sources. … As the filtering mechanisms become more sophisticated and more personalized to the individual, the opportunities for the wealthy to manipulate opinion will become even greater. The democratic system depends fundamentally on free access to reliable information, and once this is gone the system will effectively become less and less democratic.”

Mike Douglass, an independent developer, wrote, “Facebook sold people on the idea that a race to accumulate ‘friends’ was a good thing – then people paid attention to what those ‘friends’ said. As we now know, many of those ‘friends’ were bots or malicious actors. If we continue in this manner, then things can only get worse. We need to reestablish the real-life approach to gaining friends and acquaintances. Why should we pay any attention to people we don’t know? Unfortunately, technology allows mis/disinformation to spread at an alarming rate.”

Eric Goldman, professor and director of the High-Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara University School of Law, commented, “Our politicians have embraced internet communications as a direct channel to lie to their constituents without the fact-checking of traditional media gatekeepers. So long as technology helps politicians lie without accountability, we have little hope of good governance.”

Janet Salmons, consultant with Vision2Lead, said, “The internet, with unregulated power in the hands of commercial entities that have little sense of social responsibility, will continue to unravel Western-style democracies and civic institutions. Companies profiting from sales of personal data or on risky practices have little self-interest in promoting the kinds of digital and advanced literacy people need to discern between fact and fiction. In the U.S., the free press and educational systems that can potentially illuminate this distinction are under siege. As a result, even when presented with the opportunity to vote or otherwise inveigh on decision-making, they do so from weak and uninformed positions. The lowest common denominator, the mass views based on big data, win.”

A researcher and teacher of digital literacies and technologies said, “In the early internet days, there was a claim it would bring a democratization of power. What we’re seeing now is the powerful having larger and more overwhelming voices, taking up more of the space rather than less. This leads to polarization, rather than a free-flowing exchange of ideas. Anyone falling within the middle of a hot issue is declared a traitor by both sides of that issue and is shamed and/or pushed aside.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “Increased engagement is largely a product of the media environment, and – in places where the press is absent, restricted or has become blatantly politicized – that engagement will bear the marks of a distorted information environment.”

Responding too slowly: The speed, scope and impact of the technologies of manipulation may be difficult to overcome as the pace of change accelerates

The core concepts of democracy, representation, elections and tenure of government will be greatly undermined by artificial intelligence. Emmanuel Edet

Kathleen M. Carley, director of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University, said, “Disinformation and deepfakes in social media as well as the ability of individuals and media-propaganda teams to manipulate both who is and can communicate with whom and who and what they are talking about are undermining democratic principles and practice. Technological assistants such as bots, and information tools such as memes, are being used in ways that exploit features of the social media and web platforms, such as their prioritization rules, to get certain actors and information in front of people. Human cognitive biases, and our cognitive tendencies to view the world from a social or group perspective, are exploited by social media-based information maneuvers. The upshot is that traditional methods for recognizing disinformation no longer work. Strategies for mitigating disinformation campaigns as they play out across multiple media are not well understood. Global policies for 1) responding to disinformation and its creators, and 2) technical infrastructure that forces information to carry its provenance and robust scalable tools for detecting that an information campaign is underway, who is conducting it and why do not exist.”

Jason Hong, professor of Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University, said, “Basically, it’s 1) easier for small groups of people to cause lots of damage (e.g., disinformation, deepfakes), and 2) easier for those already in power to use these technologies than those who need to organize. In the early days of the internet, new technologies empowered new voices, which led to a lot of utopian views. However, we’ve seen in recent years that these same technologies are now being used to entrench those already in power. We see this in the form of targeted advertising (being used for highly targeted political campaigns), analytics (being used for gerrymandering), disinformation and fake news (being used both domestically and by foreign powers, both unintentionally and intentionally) and filter bubbles where people can seek out just the information that they want to hear. All of this was possible before the internet, but it was harder because of natural barriers. We also haven’t seen the political effects of deepfakes and are just starting to see the effects of widespread surveillance by police forces.”

Mark Raymond, assistant professor of international security, University of Oklahoma, wrote, “Over the next 30 years, democracy faces at least three kinds of technology-based risks. First, actual or apparent manipulation of voting data and systems by state actors will likely undermine trust in democratic processes. Second, social media manipulation (by states and by political campaigns and other nonstate actors) will compound echo chamber effects and increase societal polarization. Decreased trust will heighten social conflict, including, but not limited to, conflict over elections. Third, ‘deepfakes’ will undermine confidence even in video-based media reports. Taken together, there is the risk that these trends could increase the willingness of voters to accept fundamentally authoritarian shifts in their politics. Absent that, it is still likely that increased polarization will make the operation of democratic systems (which are heavily dependent on mutual acceptance of informal norms) incredibly difficult.”

Emmanuel Edet, legal adviser, National Information Technology Development Agency, Nigeria, said, “The core concepts of democracy, representation, elections and tenure of government will be greatly undermined by artificial intelligence. The use of social media coupled with faceless artificial intelligence-driven opinions can manipulate popular opinion that will deny people the right to express their choice for fear of going against the crowd.”

Matt Moore, innovation manager at Disruptor’s Handbook, Sydney, Australia, said, “The issue is not that essential democratic institutions will change, it is that they will not change enough. Elections, voting, representatives, parties – none of these things will go away. They may mean more or less (likely less) than they used to. The number of democracies in the world is likely to decrease as weak or destabilised states fall into authoritarian populism. Western democracies will continue to age and grow more economically unequal. States like China will continue to grow in power, often using new technologies to control their populations. Everyone is talking up the potential of blockchain for democracy. This is mostly nonsense. The issue is not that people do not have the opportunity to vote enough. It is that no one really knows what that vote means. Many of those who vote – or rather, who do not vote – have no sense of what their vote means. Many of those who are voted for, also do not know what that vote means – which is why they rely on polling and focus groups. Deliberative democracy offers a potential new form of political engagement and decision-making – if (and this is a big ‘if’) it can be made to work beyond isolated experiments.”

Mike O’Connor, retired, a former member of the ICANN policy development community, said, “There is cause for hope – but it’s such a fragile flower compared to the relative ease with which the negative forces prevail. ‘A lie can get around the world while truth is getting its boots on’ – pick your attribution.”

A longtime technology journalist for a major U.S. news organization commented, “Our laws and Constitution are largely designed for a world that existed before the industrial age, not to mention the information age. These technologies have made the nation-state obsolete and we have not yet grasped the ways they facilitate antidemocratic forces.”

Hume Winzar, associate professor and director of the business analytics undergraduate program at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, said, “Corporations and government have the information and the technology to create highly targeted messages designed to favour their own agendas. We, as citizens, have demonstrated that we rarely look beyond our regular news sources, and often use easily digested surrogates for news (comedy shows, social media). We also seem to have very short memories, so what was presented as a scandal only a year ago is usual, even laudable, now. … None of this is new. The British and the U.S. have been manipulating foreign news and propaganda for many decades with great success, and the church before them. But now the scale and the speed of that manipulation is perhaps too great to combat.”

Ian Fish, ICT professional and specialist in information security based in Europe, said, “I expect the imbalance of power between the major global corporations and democratic national governments will increase to the detriment of democracy. I also expect non-democratic governments’ disruption of democratic norms to increase faster than the democracies can react.”

Puruesh Chaudhary, a futurist based in Pakistan, said, “Democracy needs to develop the capacity to negotiate in the interest of an ordinary citizen, who may not have direct influence on how key decisions play out in geopolitics but is invariably affected by it. The democratic institutions have to have systems that operate at the pace of technological advancements that have an impact on the society.”

Trust suffers when people’s infatuation with technology entices them away from human-to-human encounters

Several respondents argued there were circumstances when humans’ “slowness” was an advantage, but that technology was thwarting that side of life. They believe that a major cause of the loss of trust is the fact that many people are spending more time online in often-toxic environments than they spend in face-t0-face, empathy-enabling non-digital social situations.

Angela Campbell, professor of law and co-director, Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown University, said, “We are just seeing the beginning of how technology is undercutting democracy and social relations necessary to a democratic society. We don’t have good ways of telling what is true and what is false, what is opinion and what is fact. Most people do not yet understand how power technologies (especially combined with a lack of privacy protections) allow them to be manipulated. In addition, as people spend more time using technology, they spend less time interacting with other people (in person) and learning important social skills like respect and empathy.”

Yves Mathieu, co-director at Missions Publiques, Paris, France, responded, “Technology creates new forms of communications and messaging that can be very rough and divisive. Some contributors are rude, violent, expressing very poor comments, insulting or threatening elected citizens. There will be a strong need for face-to-face format, as the technologies will not allow process of deliberation. There will be need for regular meetings with voters, in meetings where people will have the time and the possibility to exchange arguments and increase their understanding of each other’s position. Being associated with media, this will reduce the divide that we know today, as it will increase mutual understanding.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “The expanded use of technology with respect to the democratic processes will tend to weaken one of the most important aspects of democracy and the democratic processes – the use of technology instead of person-to-person dialogue seriously degrades (or removes altogether) meaningful dialogue and exchange of ideas between individuals. When individuals use technology to express their political views/opinions instead of having direct human interactions, these views tend to be more extremely stated than if that person is speaking a view/opinion to another person. Also, in many cases, if someone else expresses a different view from what the original individual expressed, the first person is much less likely to pay any attention to a view expressed using technology than if that view were expressed in a person-to-person discussion. Additionally, the increased use of technology for analyzing segments of society to ‘shape’ delivery of messages for particular segments will result in an increase of messages that distort the reality of the message or distort the results of what the message is describing.”

The future will include a complex interplay of increased online activity but also increased skepticism of those virtual interactions and an enhanced appreciation of offline information and conversations. Melissa Michelson

A futurist and consultant said, “Democracy currently has a crisis in global leadership. Without significant change in 2020, for which I am hopeful, I can’t hold a lot of hope for democracy in 2030. I’m afraid the question is not what will change, but what must change. Without changes in democratic institutions, the future of democracy itself is in question. There is an urban/rural split at work in tandem with a severe disparity in the distribution of wealth – with climate change overshadowing it all. Technology will have a hand in providing as well as impeding solutions.”

Arthur Asa Berger, professor emeritus of communications, San Francisco State University, commented, “People who use Facebook are affected in negative ways by a ‘net effect,’ in which they exhibit impulsivity, grandiosity, etc., as explained in my book, ‘Media and Communication Research Methods’ (Sage). Some young people text 100 times a day and never talk on the phone with others, leading to a radical estrangement from others and themselves. The internet is used by hate groups, neofascists, right-wing ideologues, terrorist organizations and so on.”

An anonymous U.S. policy and strategy professional said, “Technology allows the creation of a bullying environment that polarizes people to the point at which they do not attempt to understand other opinions or views, weakening public discourse and driving outrage and attacks on minority views.”

Japheth Cleaver, a systems engineer, commented, “At the moment, the major social media networks function not by neutrally and dispassionately connecting disparate communicators (like the phone system), but are designed reinforce engagement to sell as many targeted ads as possible. This reinforcement creates resonant effects throughout a society’s culture, and in-person contextual interaction drops away in favor of the efficiencies that electronic communication offers, but without any of the risk of the ‘bubble’ of the like-minded being dropped, as that would hurt engagement. Internet as communications overlay is fine. Internet as a replacement for public space seems detrimental.”

Melissa Michelson, professor of political science, Menlo College, and author, “Mobilizing Inclusion: Redefining Citizenship Through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns,” said, “The future will include a complex interplay of increased online activity but also increased skepticism of those virtual interactions and an enhanced appreciation of offline information and conversations. As more adults are digital natives and the role of technology in society expands and becomes more interconnected, more and more aspects of democracy and political participation will take place online. At the same time, the increasing sophistication of deepfakes, including fake video, will enhance the value of face-to-face interactions as unfiltered and trustworthy sources of information.”

• “Unless there is transparency, tech will be the new digital atomic bomb – it has moved faster than individuals’ or the law’s understanding of its unintended consequences and nefarious uses.”
• “At the current rate of disregard and lack of responsibility by those who own and run large tech companies, we are headed toward a complete lack of trust in what is factual information and what is not.”
• “Public institutions move slowly and thoughtfully. People doing nefarious things move more quickly, and with the internet, this will continue to challenge us.”
• “It is the personal and social norms that we’re losing, not the technology itself, that is at the heart of much of our problems. People are a lot less civil to each other in person now than they were just a few decades ago.”
• “More access to data and records more quickly can help citizens be informed and engaged, however more information can flood the market, and people have limited capacity/time/energy to digest information.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter

Fresh data delivery Saturday mornings

Sign up for The Briefing

Weekly updates on the world of news & information

Most Popular

Report materials.

1615 L St. NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 |  Media Inquiries

Research Topics

• Age & Generations
• Coronavirus (COVID-19)
• Economy & Work
• Family & Relationships
• Gender & LGBTQ
• Immigration & Migration
• International Affairs
• Internet & Technology
• Methodological Research
• News Habits & Media
• Non-U.S. Governments
• Other Topics
• Politics & Policy
• Race & Ethnicity
• Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Copyright 2024 Pew Research Center

Terms & Conditions

Privacy Policy

Cookie Settings

Reprints, Permissions & Use Policy

Democracy Essay

Democracy is derived from the Greek word demos or people. It is defined as a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people. Democracy is exercised directly by the people; in large societies, it is by the people through their elected agents. In the phrase of President Abraham Lincoln, democracy is the “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” There are various democratic countries, but India has the largest democracy in the world. This Democracy Essay will help you know all about India’s democracy. Students can also get a list of CBSE Essays on different topics to boost their essay-writing skills.

500+ Words Democracy Essay

India is a very large country full of diversities – linguistically, culturally and religiously. At the time of independence, it was economically underdeveloped. There were enormous regional disparities, widespread poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and a shortage of almost all public welfare means. Since independence, India has been functioning as a responsible democracy. The same has been appreciated by the international community. It has successfully adapted to challenging situations. There have been free and fair periodic elections for all political offices, from the panchayats to the President. There has been a smooth transfer of political power from one political party or set of political parties to others, both at national and state levels, on many occasions.

India: A Democratic Country

Democracy is of two, i.e. direct and representative. In a direct democracy, all citizens, without the intermediary of elected or appointed officials, can participate in making public decisions. Such a system is only practical with relatively small numbers of people in a community organisation or tribal council. Whereas in representative democracy, every citizen has the right to vote for their representative. People elect their representatives to all levels, from Panchayats, Municipal Boards, State Assemblies and Parliament. In India, we have a representative democracy.

Democracy is a form of government in which rulers elected by the people take all the major decisions. Elections offer a choice and fair opportunity to the people to change the current rulers. This choice and opportunity are available to all people on an equal basis. The exercise of this choice leads to a government limited by basic rules of the constitution and citizens’ rights.

Democracy is the Best Form of Government

A democratic government is a better government because it is a more accountable form of government. Democracy provides a method to deal with differences and conflicts. Thus, democracy improves the quality of decision-making. The advantage of a democracy is that mistakes cannot be hidden for long. There is a space for public discussion, and there is room for correction. Either the rulers have to change their decisions, or the rulers can be changed. Democracy offers better chances of a good decision. It respects people’s own wishes and allows different kinds of people to live together. Even when it fails to do some of these things, it allows a way of correcting its mistakes and offers more dignity to all citizens. That is why democracy is considered the best form of government.

Students must have found this “Democracy Essay” useful for improving their essay writing skills. They can get the study material and the latest update on CBSE/ICSE/State Board/Competitive Exams, at BYJU’S.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Your Mobile number and Email id will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Request OTP on Voice Call

Post My Comment

• Share Share

Register with BYJU'S & Download Free PDFs

Register with byju's & watch live videos.

Counselling

SOCIALSTUDIESHELP.COM

Understanding the US Congress: Structure, Functions, and Impact

The us congress: an in-depth analysis of its structure, functions, and impact on american democracy, introduction.

The United States Congress, often referred to simply as “Congress,” is a cornerstone of American democracy. As one of the three branches of the federal government, Congress plays a vital role in shaping the nation’s laws, policies, and governance. This essay provides a comprehensive examination of the US Congress, delving into its historical evolution, intricate structure, legislative processes, and the significant impact it has on American democracy.

Congress is more than just a legislative body; it serves as a representation of the diverse interests and opinions of the American people. Through this analysis, we will explore how Congress operates, the challenges it faces, and its essential functions in safeguarding the principles of democracy that our nation was founded upon.

Throughout the following sections, we will journey through the annals of American history to understand the roots of Congress, explore its structure and functions, dissect the legislative process, examine the powers vested in Congress, and discuss the critical role it plays in the democratic system. Furthermore, we will delve into the complexities of congressional elections, the challenges and controversies that Congress encounters, and the lasting impact it leaves on American society and governance.

Join us on this exploration of the United States Congress, a key player in the intricate web of American politics, as we unravel its significance in the nation’s past, present, and future.

Historical Evolution of the US Congress

The origins of the United States Congress can be traced back to the founding principles and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution in the late 18th century. The framers of the Constitution envisioned a central legislative body that would represent the interests of the states and serve as a check on the powers of the executive and judicial branches.

As the Constitutional Convention of 1787 convened in Philadelphia, delegates from the thirteen states grappled with the complexities of creating a federal government that would balance the need for a strong central authority with the preservation of individual state sovereignty. The result of their deliberations was the United States Constitution, which established the framework for the federal government and included provisions for the creation of a bicameral legislature.

The bicameral nature of Congress, consisting of two chambers, the House of Representatives and the Senate, was a deliberate choice made by the framers. The House of Representatives was designed to be the “People’s House,” with representation based on the population of each state. On the other hand, the Senate provided equal representation for each state, regardless of size, ensuring that both small and large states had a voice in the legislative process.

Early Congresses faced significant challenges in establishing their authority and defining their roles. The First Congress, which convened in 1789, had the monumental task of not only passing laws but also interpreting and implementing the newly ratified Constitution. This Congress set important precedents, including the establishment of key executive departments and the Bill of Rights, which protected individual liberties.

Over time, the powers and responsibilities of Congress evolved, often in response to historical events and societal changes. The expansion of Congress’s authority was influenced by constitutional amendments, such as the Reconstruction Amendments following the Civil War, which granted Congress the power to enforce civil rights and protect voting rights.

Throughout the 20th century, Congress continued to adapt and address the needs of a changing nation. Major legislative initiatives, such as the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, reshaped the role of the federal government in American society and highlighted Congress’s capacity for addressing pressing national issues.

As we delve deeper into the historical evolution of the US Congress, we will explore the milestones, challenges, and amendments that have shaped this vital institution. Understanding its historical context is crucial to appreciating the complexities of Congress’s structure and functions in the modern era.

The Structure of the US Congress

The United States Congress is a complex institution with a carefully designed structure that reflects the principles of federalism and representation. It is composed of two distinct chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate, each with its unique characteristics and roles.

Bicameral Nature

Congress’s bicameral nature, consisting of two houses, was a deliberate choice by the framers of the Constitution. This design aimed to strike a balance between the interests of the states and the needs of the national government.

The House of Representatives is often referred to as the “People’s House” because its members are directly elected by the people of each state. The number of representatives for each state is determined by its population, ensuring that larger states have more representatives than smaller ones. This proportional representation aligns with the democratic principle of one person, one vote.

On the other hand, the Senate provides equal representation for each state, with two senators representing each state regardless of its size or population. This equal representation was a compromise to ensure that smaller states had a voice in the legislative process and to prevent larger states from dominating the Senate.

Representation and Constituencies

The House of Representatives, with its larger membership, represents a broader cross-section of the American population. Members of the House, commonly referred to as “Congressmen” or “Congresswomen,” serve two-year terms, which allows for more frequent turnover and responsiveness to the changing needs and sentiments of their constituencies.

In contrast, the Senate, with its six-year terms, provides stability and continuity. Senators are often seen as statesmen or women who deliberate on long-term national interests. This structural difference between the House and Senate contributes to the diversity of perspectives within Congress.

Leadership Roles

Leadership within Congress plays a pivotal role in shaping legislative agendas and guiding the legislative process. In the House of Representatives, the Speaker of the House is the presiding officer and the most powerful figure. The Speaker is usually a member of the majority party and wields considerable influence in committee assignments and floor proceedings.

In the Senate, the Senate Majority Leader is a key figure responsible for setting the agenda and managing legislative priorities. Additionally, the Vice President of the United States serves as the President of the Senate, with the authority to cast tie-breaking votes when needed.

Committee System

The heart of legislative work in Congress is its committee system. Committees are where bills are thoroughly examined, debated, and shaped before they reach the full chambers for a vote. There are various committees, each specializing in specific policy areas, such as finance, foreign affairs, or judiciary.

The committee system allows Congress to function efficiently by dividing the workload and expertise across members. It also provides opportunities for members to develop expertise in their areas of interest and to influence the legislative process significantly.

Understanding the intricate structure of the US Congress, with its bicameral design, representation methods, leadership roles, and committee system, is essential for comprehending how laws are crafted and how the institution operates in the American political landscape.

The Legislative Process in Congress

The legislative process in the United States Congress is a complex journey that transforms ideas into laws. Understanding this process is fundamental to comprehending how Congress operates and how it shapes the laws that govern the nation. Let’s explore the key stages of the legislative process:

Bill Introduction and Committee Referral

The legislative process begins when a member of Congress introduces a bill. Bills can originate in either the House of Representatives or the Senate. They address a wide range of issues, from healthcare reform to taxation and national defense.

Once introduced, bills are referred to specific committees based on their subject matter. Committees serve as the engines of legislative work, where bills are scrutinized, amended, and debated. The committee to which a bill is referred plays a crucial role in shaping its content and determining its fate.

Committee Hearings and Markups

Committee hearings provide a platform for lawmakers to gather information, solicit expert testimony, and engage in public debate about the bill. During these hearings, members of the committee can question witnesses, express their views, and propose amendments to the bill.

Following hearings, committees convene markups to deliberate on proposed changes to the bill. This stage allows committee members to fine-tune the legislation and make revisions before it advances to the full chamber.

Floor Debate and Voting

Once a bill receives committee approval, it moves to the floor of the respective chamber for debate and voting. Here, all members have the opportunity to express their views, argue for or against the bill, and propose further amendments.

The legislative process in both the House and Senate involves rigorous debate, often characterized by impassioned speeches and negotiations. Ultimately, the bill is put to a vote, and it must garner a majority of votes to pass. If it passes one chamber, it proceeds to the other for a similar process.

Conference Committees and Presidential Approval

Occasionally, the House and Senate pass different versions of the same bill. In such cases, a conference committee, composed of members from both chambers, is formed to reconcile the differences and produce a single, unified bill. This compromise version is then presented for final approval in both chambers.

If the bill successfully navigates through both the House and Senate, it is sent to the President of the United States for approval. The President can either sign the bill into law or veto it. A veto can be overridden by a two-thirds majority vote in both chambers, demonstrating the system of checks and balances between Congress and the executive branch.

The legislative process in Congress is a dynamic and often contentious journey. It requires collaboration, negotiation, and compromise among lawmakers, as well as responsiveness to the ever-changing needs of the American people. Understanding this process is essential for assessing how Congress translates policy ideas into actionable laws that impact the lives of citizens across the nation.

The Powers and Functions of Congress

Congress is endowed with a wide range of powers and functions that are essential to the functioning of the United States government. These powers are enumerated in the Constitution and provide Congress with the authority to enact laws, oversee the executive branch, manage the nation’s finances, and more. Let’s delve into the key powers and functions of Congress:

Lawmaking Authority

Perhaps the most fundamental role of Congress is its lawmaking authority. Article I of the Constitution grants Congress the power to make laws on various subjects, including commerce, taxation, defense, and more. Bills passed by Congress become federal laws when signed by the President or overridden by a congressional supermajority.

This legislative authority allows Congress to address pressing national issues, from healthcare reform to environmental protection, and to adapt to the evolving needs of the American people.

Oversight of the Executive Branch

Congress serves as a critical check on the powers of the executive branch, including the President. It exercises oversight by conducting hearings, investigations, and inquiries to ensure that federal agencies and officials are adhering to the law and serving the best interests of the nation.

Oversight can lead to the discovery of executive misconduct, as witnessed in cases such as the Watergate scandal and the Iran-Contra affair. Through its investigative powers, Congress plays a vital role in holding the executive branch accountable.

Budget and Financial Control

Another essential function of Congress is its control over the federal budget. Congress has the power to appropriate funds, allocate resources, and set spending priorities through the annual budgetary process. This power allows Congress to influence government spending and ensure that taxpayer dollars are used efficiently and effectively.

The power of the purse also gives Congress leverage in shaping national policy, as it can use budgetary decisions to advance or hinder various initiatives.

Foreign Policy and Treaties

Congress plays a pivotal role in shaping the nation’s foreign policy. While the President is the chief architect of foreign policy, Congress can influence it through its authority to declare war, ratify international treaties, and fund diplomatic efforts. This shared responsibility ensures that major foreign policy decisions have broad support and oversight.

Congress’s role in foreign affairs has been exemplified in decisions regarding major conflicts, international agreements, and funding for diplomatic missions.

Impeachment and Removal of Officials

One of Congress’s gravest powers is the authority to impeach and remove federal officials, including the President and judges. Impeachment is a constitutional mechanism to hold officials accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors.

The impeachment process involves the House of Representatives drafting and passing articles of impeachment, followed by a trial in the Senate. A two-thirds majority vote in the Senate is required for removal from office.

The history of impeachment proceedings, including those against Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon (resigned before impeachment), and Bill Clinton, underscores Congress’s power to check and balance the executive and judicial branches.

These powers and functions underscore the crucial role that Congress plays in the American system of government. As a co-equal branch of government, Congress ensures that no single branch becomes too powerful, safeguards individual rights, and translates the will of the people into meaningful legislation.

Congressional Elections

Congressional elections are a fundamental aspect of American democracy, serving as the mechanism through which citizens choose their representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate. These elections play a critical role in shaping the composition and dynamics of Congress, and they are governed by specific rules and processes.

Congressional Districts and Redistricting

The United States is divided into congressional districts, each represented by a member of the House of Representatives. The number of districts in each state is determined by its population, as measured by the decennial census. The process of redrawing congressional district boundaries, known as redistricting, occurs after each census to ensure that districts have roughly equal populations.

Redistricting can be a contentious process, as it often involves political gerrymandering, where district boundaries are manipulated to favor one political party over another. This practice has raised concerns about the fairness of congressional elections and the representation of diverse voices.

Campaign Finance and Elections

Campaigning for Congress requires significant financial resources. Candidates must raise funds for advertising, staff, and other campaign expenses. Campaign finance regulations, set by federal and state laws, govern the sources and limits of campaign contributions.

The influence of money in politics has led to debates about the role of special interest groups , Super PACs, and dark money in congressional elections. Critics argue that excessive campaign spending can distort the democratic process and give disproportionate power to wealthy individuals and organizations.

Incumbency Advantage and Term Limits

Incumbent members of Congress often have a substantial advantage in elections. Incumbents benefit from name recognition, a record of past accomplishments, and established campaign networks. As a result, they tend to be reelected at higher rates than challengers.

Debates surrounding term limits for members of Congress have emerged periodically. Some argue that term limits can promote fresh perspectives and reduce the power of entrenched incumbents, while others believe that they undermine the will of the voters by limiting their choices.

Congressional elections are an essential component of the democratic process in the United States. They provide citizens with the opportunity to express their preferences and hold their representatives accountable. The outcomes of these elections have a direct impact on the composition of Congress and, by extension, the direction of national policy and governance.

Challenges and Controversies in Congress

Congress, like any complex institution, faces a multitude of challenges and controversies that impact its functioning and effectiveness in American governance. These issues range from partisan polarization to ethics scandals, and they shape the way Congress operates. In this section, we’ll explore some of the most pressing challenges and controversies:

Partisan Polarization and Gridlock

One of the most prominent challenges facing Congress is the increasing level of partisan polarization. Over the years, political parties have become more ideologically distinct, leading to greater political polarization. This polarization has resulted in legislative gridlock, making it difficult for Congress to pass meaningful legislation.

Divided government, where one party controls the White House and the other controls one or both chambers of Congress, often exacerbates gridlock. This political climate has made it challenging for Congress to address critical issues, such as healthcare reform and immigration reform.

Lobbying and Special Interest Influence

The influence of lobbying and special interest groups is a perennial controversy in Congress. Lobbyists represent a wide range of interests, from corporations to advocacy organizations, and they engage in efforts to shape legislation and influence lawmakers. Critics argue that this influence can lead to policies that favor the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the broader public interest.

Efforts to reform lobbying practices and campaign finance laws have been met with mixed success, highlighting the enduring challenge of balancing the right to petition the government with the need for transparency and accountability.

Ethics and Corruption Scandals

Congress has not been immune to ethics and corruption scandals. Instances of bribery, embezzlement, and other unethical behavior among lawmakers have garnered significant public attention. Such scandals erode public trust in Congress and raise questions about the integrity of elected officials.

The House and Senate have established ethics committees to investigate and address allegations of misconduct. These committees play a crucial role in upholding ethical standards and ensuring that lawmakers are held accountable for their actions.

Congressional Reform Proposals

Amid the challenges and controversies, various proposals for congressional reform have emerged over the years. These proposals seek to address issues such as campaign finance reform, gerrymandering, and congressional term limits. While some reforms have been implemented at the state level, achieving comprehensive reform at the federal level remains a complex and contentious endeavor.

Challenges and controversies are inherent in any democratic system, and Congress continually grapples with these issues as it seeks to fulfill its role in representing the American people and legislating on their behalf.

The Impact of Congress on American Democracy

Congress is often regarded as the cornerstone of American democracy, playing a pivotal role in shaping the nation’s governance and ensuring that the principles of democracy are upheld. Its impact on American democracy can be observed through various lenses:

Representation of Diverse Interests

Congress serves as a reflection of the diverse interests and opinions of the American people. With members elected from all corners of the country, Congress embodies the rich tapestry of American society. Representatives and senators bring their constituents’ concerns to the national stage, advocating for policies that align with their constituents’ needs and beliefs.

Through its diverse membership, Congress ensures that the interests of different states, regions, and demographics are considered in the legislative process. This representation is fundamental to the democratic principle of government by and for the people.

Checks and Balances in the US Government

Congress plays a crucial role in the system of checks and balances that underpins the U.S. government. It serves as a check on the powers of the executive and judicial branches, ensuring that no single branch becomes too powerful. Congress’s oversight authority allows it to hold the executive branch accountable for its actions, investigate potential abuses of power, and maintain the rule of law.

The power of Congress to approve or reject presidential nominations, ratify treaties, and control the budget exemplifies its role in balancing the distribution of power in the federal government.

Role in Policy-Making and National Priorities

Congress is responsible for crafting and passing legislation that addresses the most pressing national issues. It has the power to shape the nation’s policies on healthcare, education, immigration, national security, and more. Congress’s deliberative process allows for thorough examination and debate, ensuring that policies are carefully considered before becoming law.

Moreover, Congress reflects changing societal priorities and values. For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, landmark environmental legislation, and healthcare reform bills are all indicative of Congress’s role in responding to the evolving needs and aspirations of the American people.

In conclusion, the United States Congress stands as a linchpin of American democracy. Its role in representing diverse interests, maintaining checks and balances, and shaping national policy is essential to the functioning of the U.S. government. Congress’s impact on American democracy extends far beyond legislative chambers; it shapes the very essence of the nation’s democratic ideals.

Case Studies and Examples

To gain a deeper understanding of the United States Congress’s historical significance and its impact on American governance, let’s explore a selection of case studies and examples that highlight pivotal moments and legislation:

Case Study 1: The New Deal

The New Deal, initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, involved a series of legislative measures aimed at addressing economic hardships. Congress played a central role in passing laws such as the Social Security Act, the Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall Act), and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Act.

These measures transformed the role of the federal government in providing economic security, regulating financial institutions, and creating jobs during a time of crisis. The New Deal exemplifies Congress’s capacity to respond to extraordinary challenges and shape the nation’s social and economic landscape.

Case Study 2: The Civil Rights Act of 1964

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 stands as a landmark piece of legislation that aimed to dismantle racial segregation and discrimination in the United States. Congress played a pivotal role in its passage, with extensive debate and negotiations in both the House and Senate.

Through the efforts of lawmakers like Senator Everett Dirksen and civil rights leaders, Congress passed the bill, which was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a testament to Congress’s ability to address issues of social justice and equality and to transform American society.

Case Study 3: The Affordable Care Act (ACA)

The Affordable Care Act, often referred to as Obamacare, represents a significant legislative achievement in the realm of healthcare reform. Congress passed the ACA in 2010, after a contentious and protracted legislative process.

The law aimed to increase access to healthcare coverage, regulate insurance practices, and implement healthcare exchanges. The ACA showcases the complexities of legislating on issues as critical as healthcare and highlights the role of Congress in shaping the nation’s healthcare system.

These case studies and examples underscore the diverse and far-reaching impact of Congress on American governance. From addressing economic crises and advancing civil rights to reforming healthcare, Congress’s legislative actions have shaped the nation’s history and continue to influence its trajectory.

In this comprehensive exploration of the United States Congress, we have delved into its historical evolution, intricate structure, legislative processes, powers, and functions. We have examined its role in representing diverse interests, maintaining checks and balances, and shaping national policy. Furthermore, we’ve addressed the challenges and controversies that Congress faces and explored case studies that highlight its impact on American governance.

Congress stands as a vital pillar of American democracy, reflecting the principles of representative government, accountability, and the separation of powers. Its complex yet essential functions ensure that the interests of the American people are addressed and that the nation’s laws align with its evolving needs and values.

While Congress has faced challenges, including partisan polarization and ethical dilemmas, it remains a dynamic and adaptive institution. The ability of Congress to respond to crises, enact major reforms, and uphold democratic values is a testament to the resilience of American governance.

As we conclude this exploration, we are reminded that the United States Congress, with its historical legacy and ongoing impact, remains at the heart of American democracy, shaping the nation’s past, present, and future.

Frequently Asked Questions about the US Congress

The United States Congress is the legislative branch of the federal government, consisting of two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate. Its primary function is to make and pass laws for the United States. Congress is a central pillar of the American system of government, as outlined in the Constitution.

The House of Representatives, often referred to as the “People’s House,” represents the population of each state, with the number of representatives from each state based on its population. The Senate, on the other hand, provides equal representation for all states, with two senators per state.

Congress also plays a crucial role in the system of checks and balances, serving as a check on the powers of the executive and judicial branches. It exercises oversight over the executive branch, controls the federal budget, and has the authority to declare war and ratify treaties.

In essence, Congress is the central legislative body in the United States, responsible for crafting and passing laws that govern the nation, representing the interests of the people, and ensuring that the government operates within the framework of the Constitution.

Members of Congress are elected through a system of representative democracy. Members of the House of Representatives are elected by the citizens of individual congressional districts within each state. The number of districts in a state is determined by its population, and representatives serve two-year terms. This frequent turnover allows for more responsive representation in response to changing needs and sentiments.

Senators, on the other hand, are elected to represent their entire state. Each state has two senators, and they serve six-year terms. Senate elections are staggered, with approximately one-third of the Senate seats up for election every two years. This system provides stability and continuity in the Senate.

To be eligible to run for the House of Representatives, a candidate must be at least 25 years old, a U.S. citizen for at least seven years, and a resident of the state they wish to represent. Senators must be at least 30 years old, a U.S. citizen for at least nine years, and a resident of the state they seek to represent.

These election and eligibility requirements are specified in the United States Constitution to ensure that members of Congress are accountable to the people they serve.

The United States Congress is bicameral, consisting of two separate chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate. These two chambers have distinct characteristics and roles within the legislative process:

House of Representatives:

• Often called the “People’s House.”
• Members are elected to represent specific congressional districts within their state.
• The number of representatives per state is determined by its population.
• Each representative serves a two-year term, with elections held every even-numbered year.
• The House has the power to initiate revenue bills (tax-related legislation).
• The Speaker of the House is the presiding officer and a prominent leadership figure.
• Provides equal representation for all states, with each state having two senators.
• Senators are elected to represent the entire state, not specific districts.
• Each senator serves a six-year term, with staggered elections (approximately one-third of the Senate is up for election every two years).
• The Senate has the authority to approve or reject treaties and presidential nominations.
• The Vice President of the United States serves as the President of the Senate but can only vote to break ties.

The distinct representation methods, term lengths, and constitutional powers of the two chambers are designed to ensure a balance between the interests of states and the population while providing stability and continuity in legislative processes.

The legislative process in Congress is a multi-step journey through which bills (proposed laws) become federal law. Here’s an overview of the key stages in the process:

Bill Introduction: Any member of Congress can introduce a bill in either the House of Representatives or the Senate. Bills can address a wide range of issues, from healthcare reform to environmental regulations.

Committee Review: Bills are referred to specific committees based on their subject matter. Committees are where bills are thoroughly examined, debated, and amended. They provide expertise and allow for in-depth consideration of legislation.

Floor Debate and Vote: If a bill passes through committee, it moves to the floor of the respective chamber for debate and voting. Here, all members can express their views, propose amendments, and ultimately vote on the bill. A majority vote is required for the bill to pass.

Conference Committee: If the House and Senate pass different versions of the same bill, a conference committee may be formed to reconcile the differences and produce a unified version.

Presidential Approval: Once a bill is approved by both chambers, it is sent to the President for approval. The President can either sign the bill into law or veto it. Congress can override a veto with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House and the Senate.

Throughout this process, bills may be amended, debated, and undergo significant changes before becoming law. The legislative process is designed to allow for careful consideration and input from elected representatives before a bill is enacted.

Congressional committees are essential components of the legislative process. They are specialized groups of members from both the House of Representatives and the Senate responsible for reviewing, amending, and fine-tuning bills. Committees focus on specific policy areas, such as finance, foreign affairs, or healthcare, allowing them to develop expertise in those areas.

The importance of committees lies in their ability to perform in-depth examinations of bills, hold hearings to gather expert testimony, and deliberate on potential changes. Committees play a crucial role in shaping legislation before it reaches the full chambers for a vote. They help ensure that bills are well-crafted and thoroughly vetted, contributing to the efficiency and effectiveness of Congress.

Congress exercises oversight over the executive branch to ensure that it operates within the bounds of the law and in the best interests of the nation. Oversight takes several forms, including hearings, investigations, and inquiries conducted by congressional committees.

Committees may call executive branch officials to testify, request documents, and conduct investigations into matters of public concern. Oversight activities aim to shed light on potential abuses of power, misconduct, or inefficiencies within the executive branch.

Oversight plays a crucial role in maintaining the system of checks and balances, as it holds the President and executive agencies accountable for their actions. It helps ensure that government agencies operate transparently, efficiently, and in accordance with the law.

The United States Constitution enumerates several significant powers granted to Congress, including:

• The power to make laws, which is its primary function (Article I, Section 8).
• The power to tax and spend (Article I, Section 8).
• The power to declare war (Article I, Section 8).
• The power to regulate commerce (Article I, Section 8).
• The power to establish federal courts (Article I, Section 8).
• The power to impeach and remove federal officials (Article I, Section 2 and Article II, Section 4).

These enumerated powers are central to Congress’s role in the federal government. They empower Congress to shape national policy, maintain checks and balances, and ensure that the government operates in accordance with the Constitution.

Citizens can actively participate in the democratic process and influence Congress in several ways:

• Voting in congressional elections to choose representatives and senators who align with their values.
• Contacting their elected officials to express opinions, concerns, and support for specific legislation.
• Attending town hall meetings, public forums, and legislative hearings to voice their views.
• Joining advocacy groups and organizations that work to influence policy and legislation.
• Writing letters, sending emails, or making phone calls to congressional offices to make their voices heard.
• Staying informed about legislative developments through reputable news sources and government websites.

Engagement with Congress allows citizens to play an active role in shaping the laws and policies that affect their lives and communities. It is a fundamental aspect of a participatory democracy and ensures that Congress represents the interests and concerns of the American people.

Party leadership in Congress plays a pivotal role in guiding legislative priorities, promoting party unity, and managing the legislative agenda. Each major political party in Congress, both in the House of Representatives and the Senate, has its own set of leaders. These leaders include the Speaker of the House, the House Majority and Minority Leaders, and the Senate Majority and Minority Leaders.

Party leadership is responsible for:

• Setting the legislative agenda: Leaders decide which bills and issues the party will prioritize for consideration.
• Promoting party unity: They work to ensure that members of their party vote in line with the party’s platform and goals.
• Facilitating communication: Leaders serve as spokespeople for their party, conveying party positions to the media and the public.
• Managing committees: They have influence over committee assignments, which helps shape the direction of legislation.

Party leaders are essential in the coordination and functioning of Congress, as they help navigate the complexities of lawmaking in a politically diverse environment.

A congressional caucus is a group of members of Congress who share a common interest, ideology, or policy goal. Caucuses can be bipartisan or partisan and focus on a wide range of issues, from civil rights and healthcare to foreign relations and veterans’ affairs.

Caucuses influence Congress in several ways:

• They provide a forum for like-minded members to collaborate and advocate for specific policy objectives.
• Caucuses can raise awareness about important issues and build support for legislation through collective action.
• They can also influence the legislative agenda by pushing for hearings, bills, or amendments related to their priorities.
• Caucuses may engage in outreach to constituents and other stakeholders to build grassroots support for their causes.

Caucuses contribute to the diversity of perspectives in Congress and often play a crucial role in advancing legislation on specific issues.

The filibuster is a Senate procedural tactic used by senators to delay or block the passage of legislation. Traditionally, a senator could filibuster by speaking for an extended period, effectively preventing a vote on a bill unless a supermajority of 60 senators agreed to end the filibuster through a process known as cloture.

The filibuster has the potential to impact legislation significantly by requiring a higher threshold for passage. It can promote debate and deliberation but can also lead to legislative gridlock and the inability to pass certain bills with a simple majority.

In recent years, there have been debates about reforming or eliminating the filibuster, as it has been used to block or delay many pieces of legislation. Changes to Senate rules and filibuster procedures can affect the legislative process and the ability of senators to pass bills.

Congressional staff members play essential roles in supporting lawmakers in their legislative, constituent, and administrative responsibilities. These roles include legislative assistants who specialize in policy areas, caseworkers who assist constituents with issues related to federal agencies, and administrative staff who manage office operations.

The roles of congressional staff include:

• Researching and drafting legislation.
• Analyzing policy issues and providing recommendations.
• Assisting constituents with federal agencies and navigating bureaucracy .
• Managing office logistics and communication with constituents and stakeholders.
• Coordinating schedules and managing outreach efforts.

Congressional staff members are vital to the efficient functioning of Congress, as they help lawmakers address complex policy issues, serve their constituents, and fulfill their duties as public servants.

Congressional caucuses are informal groups of members of Congress who share common interests, goals, or ideologies. These caucuses can be bipartisan or partisan and are typically organized around specific policy areas, demographics, or regional interests. Their impact on policy and legislation is significant:

Influence on Legislation: Caucuses can influence the legislative agenda by advocating for bills and policies aligned with their priorities. They often work together to build support for specific proposals and can play a crucial role in advancing or blocking legislation.

Policy Expertise: Caucuses serve as hubs for members with expertise in particular areas. They provide opportunities for members to collaborate, share knowledge, and develop comprehensive policy solutions.

Constituent Engagement: Many caucuses engage with constituents and advocacy groups who share their interests. This outreach helps build grassroots support for their policy goals and keeps members informed about the needs and concerns of their constituents.

Awareness and Education: Caucuses raise awareness about important issues by hosting events, hearings, and briefings. They contribute to public discourse and educate both lawmakers and the public about key topics.

Bipartisanship: Some caucuses bridge political divides by bringing together members from different parties to work on common goals. These bipartisan efforts can lead to consensus-driven legislation.

In summary, congressional caucuses are influential bodies within Congress, shaping policy debates, promoting legislation, and connecting lawmakers with constituents and stakeholders who share their interests.

Who Gets to Congress? An Essay

Members of the House and Senate are predominantly middle-aged, white, Protestant, male lawyers. If people with these characteristics all held similar opinions, Congress would be radically unrepresentative on policy matters, but they do not. Of late, the number of blacks and women in the House has been slowly increasing. More important is the proportions of representatives serving several terms and occupying safe rather than marginal districts.

In 1869 the average representative had served only one term in Congress; by the 1950s over half the representatives had served four or more terms. In the nineteenth century the federal government was not very important, Washington was not a pleasant place in which to live, and being a member of Congress did not pay well. Because the job is more attractive today, one would expect more serious challenges; by 1970, however, over three-fourths of running incumbents won with 60 percent or more of the vote. A degree of competition re-emerged in House elections during the 1990s. This development has been attributed to re-districting changes and to voters’ anti-incumbency attitudes. Still, the vast majority of House incumbents seeking reelection are successful. Senators are somewhat less secure; in fewer than half of their races does the winner get 60 percent or more of the vote.

Why this is the case is a subject of controversy among scholars. One theory stresses that voters are voting their party identification less and less and may therefore be voting for the candidate whose name they recognize. Incumbents have extensive means of getting their names known. Also, incumbents can use their powers to get (or may simply take credit for) federal grants, projects, and protection for local interest groups.

Representatives are more likely to be not merely white, male, and senior in terms of years of service, but also Democrats. This is because more voters consider themselves Democrats than Republicans (though this is changing) and because the advantages of incumbency (whatever they are) began to take effect after the Democrats gained control of Congress. In only seven Congresses since the New Deal have the Democrats failed to control both houses (1947-1948, 1953-1954, 1981-1982, 1983-1984, 1985-1986, 1995-1996, and 1997-1998). Whether the Republicans will sustain their control of Congress is uncertain. The 1998 election is a midterm election, and so one would ordinarily expect the president’s party to lose seats, further helping the Republicans. However, Speaker Gingrich’s 1997 ethics charges and his controversial leadership may have alienated voters. If 1998 is unpredictable, though, 2000 is impossible to forecast.

Why Congressional Incumbents Win

Congressional incumbents do have certain advantages over their challengers. In Marjorie Randon Hershey’s Running for Office (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1984, pp. 103-107, 166), these advantages are explored in some depth. First, the experience of winning elections gives an incumbent a set of developed “strategies that seemed to work at least once, in the sense of having ended in victory. They may not know exactly why; indeed, they may have won in spite of the choices they made. But they do know that the whole package of strategies apparently brought voter approval” (p. 104). In short, in future electoral contests, “tradition” serves as an important guide for the incumbent. Alas, for the challenger, that reservoir of experience is simply not there.

Second, incumbents “also have the great advantage of more time to learn, since they receive campaign-related stimuli between elections as well as during campaigns” (p. 104). In other words, incumbents are constantly contacting their constituents and powerful groups, whereas the challenger has only limited contact prior to the campaign. (Casework also builds good relationships for the incumbent.) Hershey summarizes these advantages as follows: [incumbency] is a resource for learning-for gaining information, for developing more finely tuned expectations about the links between actions and their consequences. Thus it is not only the lack of money or name recognition that puts so many challengers at a disadvantage in campaigns; it is their relative inexperience with the difficult learning situation that campaigns provide. Without an already successful strategy, and with fewer opportunities to learn from experience and assess the usefulness of possible models, challengers start out with a learning deficit compared with most incumbents. It is a deficit from which most challengers never recover. (p. 105)

Does this mean that the challenger’s quest is hopeless? Far from it. Incumbent members of Congress can be defeated. Hershey asserts that incumbency can lead to stagnation; existing strategies may become so fixed that the incumbent fails to adapt in time to a changing political environment. In short, “incumbents can become victims of victory” (p. 105). An innovative challenger who senses shifts in the district’s mood, population, and policy preferences before the ossified incumbent does can emerge victorious.

Regarding the patterns of incumbency and victory in the House versus the Senate, Hershey specifies that senators “have been more electorally vulnerable than House members. . .” (P. 166). The reason rests with the greater media exposure given to Senate races. just as U.S. senators gain a great deal of media attention, “so do their challengers-and that gives challengers a boost in gaining name recognition among voters.” By contrast, reporters “frequently treat House challengers like surprise packages at rummage sales: potentially interesting, but not worth the effort or the cost to investigate” (p. 166).

Congressional Organization

Congress is not a single organization but a vast collection of organizations.

Party Organization

In the Senate, real leadership is in the hands of a majority leader, chosen from among the majority party, and a minority leader, chosen from the other party. The whip takes a nose count of how votes are lining up on controversial issues, keeps the party leader informed, and rounds up members for important votes. The Democratic Steering Committee and the Republican Committee on Committees assign senators to standing committees. Such assignments are extremely important to a senator’s career prospects.

The party structure is essentially the same in the House as in the Senate, with two important exceptions. The leadership in general has more power in the House, because the House is a very large body that must restrict debate and schedule its business with great care. In the House, the position of Speaker carries considerable power. The Speaker may decide whom to recognize in debate, whether a motion is relevant and germane, and (within certain guidelines) to which committees new bills are assigned. The Speaker also influences which bills are brought up for a vote, appoints members of special and select committees, and nominates majority-party members of the Rules Committee.

The effect of this party machinery can be seen in the party vote in Congress. Party is a very important determinant of a member’s vote-more important than any other single thing. However, party voting in Congress does not approach the levels that prevail in a parliamentary system. As parties in Congress have weakened over the last century, party voting has generally been declining, although it has resurged under Speaker Newt Gingrich. And much party voting is probably actually ideological voting: Republicans in both houses are predominantly conservative and Democrats liberal.

Congressional Caucuses

These associations of congressional members advocate an ideology or act on behalf of constituency concerns. As of January 1996, there were 129 caucuses in the Congress. They are of six types. Two types of caucuses are ideologically or interest based: (a) intraparty caucuses have members which share a common ideology (e.g., the Democratic Study Group); and (b) personal interest caucuses form around a shared interest in a particular issue (e.g., Congressional Family Caucus). The four remaining types of caucuses are constituency based: (c) national constituency concerns (e.g., Congressional Black Caucus), (d) regional constituency concerns (e.g., Western Caucus), (e) state or district constituency concerns (e.g., Rural Caucus), and (f) industrial constituency concerns (e.g., Steel Caucus).

Congressional Committees

Here is where the real work of Congress is done and where most of the power is found. Standing committees are the most important, because they are (with a few exceptions) the only ones that can propose legislation by reporting a bill out to the full House or Senate. Select committees last for only a few Congresses and have a specific purpose. Joint committees are those on which both senators and representatives serve. A conference committee, which tries to resolve differences between House and Senate versions of the same legislation, is a special kind of joint committee.

Traditionally, committees have been dominated by their chairs, who (throughout most of this century) were chosen by seniority. In the early 1970s a series of reforms, voted by the Democratic Caucus, decentralized and democratized committee operations. The election of committee chairs by secret ballot allowed the seniority system to be breached, meetings were opened to the public, and the prerogatives of subcommittees and individual members were enhanced at the expense of committee chairs. Many of these reforms have been reversed by the 104th and 105th Congresses.

Different committees attract different kinds of Congress members. Some, such as the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, attract policy-oriented members; others, such as the House Post Office and Civil Service Committees, provide means of servicing a constituency and bolstering reelection prospects.

Congressional Staff

Congress has produced the most rapidly growing bureaucracy in Washington. In 1935 the typical representative had two aides; by 1979 the average had increased to sixteen but has held fairly steady since then, with the average standing at fifteen in 1996. Some staff members (increasingly located in district offices) service requests from constituents. Other staff members do legislative work, helping the Congress members keep abreast of a vast workload. The vast increase in staff has reduced contact among members of Congress, making the institution less collegial, more individualistic, and less of a deliberative body.

Congressional Staff Agencies

These provide specialized knowledge and expertise and are an important congressional counter to the resources the president can muster as chief of the executive branch. Examples include the CRS, GAO, and CBO.

How Bills Pass Through Congress

Crucial to the process of how a bill becomes a law is the number of points at which it may be blocked. A majority coalition must be assembled slowly and painstakingly.

Introduction of the Bill into Congress

In the House, a bill is introduced by dropping it into the hopper or handing it to a clerk; in the Senate, by announcing the bill’s introduction on the floor. Bills may be public (pertaining to affairs generally) or private (pertaining to a particular individual). It is often said that legislation is initiated by the president and enacted by Congress.

Actually Congress often initiates legislation; the consumer and environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s are good examples.

Study by Congressional Committee

The bill is referred to a committee by either the Speaker of the House or the presiding officer of the Senate. There are rules that govern which bills go to which committees, but sometimes a choice is possible and the bill can be sent to a receptive (or unreceptive) committee. Most bills die in committee. Important bills are generally referred to a subcommittee for hearings. Then the subcommittee (and/or committee) will mark up the bill-make revisions and additions. If a majority of the committee votes to report out the bill, it goes to the full House or Senate. Otherwise the bill dies, unless a discharge petition (a maneuver that is rarely successful) brings it to the full House. In the Senate any bill can be proposed on the floor as an amendment to another measure, so discharge petitions are not needed.

At this point the bill goes on a calendar, a fact that still does not guarantee consideration. In the Senate the majority leader, in consultation with the minority leader, schedules bills for consideration. In the House, the Rules Committee reviews major bills and may block action or send them to the floor under a closed rule, which limits debate and forbids amendments, or under a less favorable open rule, which permits amendments from the floor.

Floor Debate (Congress)

In the House, major bills are discussed by the Committee of the Whole under rather tight restrictions. The committee sponsoring the bill guides the debate, amendments (if they are allowed at all) must be germane, and the time allowed for debate is limited. The sponsoring committee usually gets its version passed by the House. Four voting procedures in the House are the voice, division, teller, and roll-call votes.

In the Senate, there is no limit on debate (except for cloture). Nongermane amendments may be offered, producing a Christmas tree bill (with goodies for lots of groups) or forcing the Senate to deal with an important policy issue in connection with a trivial bill. In general, the guidelines for Senate debate are negotiated by the majority leader and listed in an unanimous consent agreement.

Conference Committee (US House and Senate)

If a bill passes the House and Senate in different forms, the differences must be reconciled before the bill can become law. If the differences are minor, one house may simply accede to the changes made by the other. If differences are major, a conference committee must iron them out. In most cases, conference votes tend to favor, slightly, the Senate version of the bill.

The President’s Signature

If both houses accept the conference report, the bill goes to the president for signature or veto. If the president vetoes the bill, the veto can be overridden by a two-thirds vote of those present in each of the two houses.

Does Congress Represent Constituents’ Opinions?

There are at least three theories on why members of Congress vote the way they do:

1. Representational. This view holds that members want to get reelected and therefore vote to please their constituents. It seems to be true when the issue is highly visible and the constituency is fairly united in its stance, as was the case on civil-rights bills in the 1950s and 1960s.

2. Organizational. This view holds that members of Congress respond to cues provided by their fellow members. Party is the single most important of these cues, but ideological and intra-party caucuses, such as the Democratic Study Group, may also be important. Members also tend to go along with their party’s representatives on the sponsoring committee and with their state delegations.

3. Attitudinal. Members of Congress, like other political elites, are more ideological in their thinking than the public at large. Democratic members tend to be strongly liberal, and Republicans conservative. Moreover, because there are so many conflicting pressures, members are left free to vote their ideologies.

Congressional Ethics (or not)

The system of checks and balances is designed to fragment political power and thus prevent any single branch from becoming tyrannical. The problem is that this system also provides multiple points of access to influence government officials and in the process enhances the potential for corruption. Congress has been especially prone to instances of corruption and the abuse of power in recent years. This fact has contributed to the public’s low opinion of Congress, with only 17 percent approving of its performance in 1992. The series of scandals can be lumped into three categories: financial, sexual, and political.

The financial improprieties of members of Congress generally involve use of their political office to obtain some monetary benefit they would ordinarily not receive. Representative Tony Coehlo, for example, took a loan from a political fund-raiser and resigned over the apparent conflict of interest; Senator David Durenburger was “denounced” by the Senate for requiring groups to purchase numerous copies of his book as payment for speaking. In 1989, the powerful Speaker of the House, Jim Wright of Texas, was compelled to resign; and in 1997, Newt Gingrich became the first Speaker in House history to be reprimanded.

The sexual escapades of members of Congress have resulted in much media coverage. The problems have ranged from Representative Barney Frank’s homosexual relationship with a male prostitute to Representative Donald Luken’s 1989 conviction for a sexual encounter with a sixteen-year-old female. Recently attention has focused on sexual harassment on Capitol Hill; Senator Robert Packwood was forced to resign in 1995, after the Ethics Committee recommended that he be expelled for having sexually harassed several women and for refusing to be completely cooperative with the ethics investigation. The incidence of such harassment is probably more widespread than this isolated case. A 1993 poll by the Washington Post discovered that one of every nine female staffers reports having been a victim of sexual harassment by a member of Congress.

The political abuse of power is usually difficult to prove. The Keating Five illustrates the complexity of this issue. Charles Keating, head of Lincoln Savings and Loan (S&L), contributed an estimated $1.3 million to the campaigns of five senators. These senators in turn intervened on Keating’s behalf during a government investigation into the mismanagement of his S&L, an intervention that delayed government action and eventually cost taxpayers $2 billion to bail out the institution when it failed. The senators responded that they were acting only to represent a constituent, a key function of their job. Only one senator, Alan Cranston (who was about to retire), received a formal censure for his activities in this episode. In other words the line between “politics as usual” and the “abuse of political power” is sometimes blurred.

Both houses have enacted codes of ethics which suffer from the same defect they assume that corruption is mainly a monetary concern. But money is only one way in which an official can be improperly influenced. Even the monetary controls imposed by the codes are problematic because they inherently favor wealthy members of Congress who have no need to supplement their incomes. It is quite clear that political corruption in Congress has no easy resolution.

The Vote to Reprimand Speaker Newt Gingrich

Throughout the 104th Congress, House Democrats claimed that the new Speaker, Newt Gingrich (R, Georgia), had previously engaged in questionable activities. On December 6, 1995, the House Ethics Committee announced the results of its investigations of those charges. The committee found Gingrich guilty of violating House rules in publicizing his college course and a GOPAC seminar in his floor speeches, and in allowing one of his political consultants to interview candidates for congressional staff positions. The committee dismissed two other charges: It concluded that free cable broadcasting of the college course did not have to be reported as a financial donation from the cable company, and it only criticized the acceptance of a book advance from HarperCollins, saying that the action had created the impression of ,exploiting one’s office for personal gain.” (The deal had originally involved a $4.5 million advance, which Gingrich returned after a week of intense controversy in December 1994. Instead, he agreed to write one book and edit another, for a $1 advance and a share of sales royalties. HarperCollins was owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose media interests stood to be affected by pending legislation.) The committee then announced that it had decided to employ independent counsel to investigate whether fund-raising for the college course, which had been conducted through GOPAC and taxexempt foundations, had violated federal tax law. An investigator was duly appointed by the Department of justice.

Almost immediately after this ruling, House Democrats filed a new set of ethics complaints. Basing their allegations on a Federal Election Commission investigation of GOPAC, Gingrich’s leadership PAC, these charges alleged numerous improprieties in fund-raising and finances. Charges continued to be filed throughout 1996. In March 1996, the committee scolded Gingrich for violating House rules in allowing a telecommunications executive to volunteer in the Speaker’s office but recommended no punishment.

The special investigator submitted his report (over 100 pages long) to the Ethics Committee in August. On September 26, the Ethics Committee surprised observers by announcing that it was expanding its investigation to consider whether Gingrich gave “accurate, reliable and complete information” concerning his college course. At the same time, the committee gave the special counsel greater authority to investigate Gingrich’s finances, expanding the list of organizations and activities to be reviewed.

On December 21, with publicity and concern over the investigations having grown, the Speaker signed a formal admission that he had violated House rules. In an additional statement, Gingrich acknowledged that he had forwarded “inaccurate, incomplete, and unreliable statements” to the committee, but insisted that his actions had not been intentionally misleading. At the same time, a twenty-two page “Statement of Alleged Violations” was issued by the committee.

Following these admissions, House Republicans rallied behind the Speaker. Several pressed for a conclusion to the investigations before the January 7, 1997, vote for the Speaker. On December 31, however, the Ethics Committee announced that its disciplinary hearing would begin on January 8,1997.

Gingrich was returned to the Speaker’s office on January 7. Ten days later, the special counsel’s report was made public. Many House Republicans, whose leaders had insisted that the report would be comparatively mild, felt betrayed. On January 21, the House voted in favor of the disciplinary actions recommended by the Ethics Committee. Newt Gingrich became the first Speaker to be reprimanded by the House of Representatives.

The vote to reprimand was 395-28, with five members voting present. Additionally, the Speaker was fined $300,000 to reimburse costs associated with correcting his misleading information. Among Republicans, 196 voted in favor of the reprimand, 26 voted against; among Democrats, 198 voted in favor, 2 voted against. The Independent member voted for the reprimand. Even after this vote, there were pending investigations of the financial arrangements for the college course and for several televised town meetings. Gingrich was also awaiting investigations of his financial management of GOPAC and of several tax-exempt foundations.

As almost every political commentator observed, no one knew whether the Speaker would be able to recover his credibility and leadership strength following the reprimand. At the very least, the time consumed by the ethics investigation was time not devoted to setting the legislative agenda. And Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R, Mississippi) was well positioned to become the legislative leader of the Republican party.

A short time later, in the midst of the Clinton Lewinsky scandal, Gingrich was calling for the impeachment of the President. In barrage after barrage he assailed the character of the President. Then Larry Flynt’s “Hustler Magazine” offered money for those with information about the extramarital affairs of the Republican members of Congress. Evidence was obtained that Gingrich had also had an extramarital affair and he stepped down from the speakership and announced he would not run for reelection. After the Republican caucus chose Bob Livingston as speaker it was found out that he too had an affair. Finally the Republicans settled on Dennis Hastert as Speaker of the House.

Law Day Essay Contest 2024

Voices of democracy.

The CBA congratulates this year’s Law Day Essay Contest winner, Luisa Villasenor! For the second year, the CBA recognized Law Day with a civics education essay contest for students across Colorado. Villasenor, an 11th grader at Cherry Creek High School in Greenwood, was awarded the top prize in the high school category. Her essay, reprinted below, responds to the prompt, “What is freedom of speech? Write about a specific speech in US history when a person used their voice to effect change.”

How “I Have a Dream” Changed Everything

Freedom of speech is a fundamental right that is valued in the United States and protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. It allows people to express their opinions and beliefs without fear of censorship or government reprisals. This right enables an open exchange of ideas, empowers individuals to challenge the status quo, and contributes to social progress. Throughout history, many people have used their voice to bring about change and promote a more just and equal society.

In the United States, freedom of speech is a cornerstone of democracy, and it is essential for the functioning of a free and open society. Without the ability to freely express opinions and ideas, progress and social change would be severely hindered. It is through the open exchange of ideas that societies are able to grow, evolve, and address issues of inequality and injustice.

One of the most influential figures in American history is undoubtedly Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a renowned civil rights leader who delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech for jobs and freedom in Washington, DC on August 28, 1963. Dr. King was a champion for racial equality and an end to segregation in the United States, using his powerful voice to inspire hope, ignite change, and galvanize individuals into action. With more than 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial (census.gov), his speech resonated deeply with the nation, as he passionately articulated a vision of a future where individuals would be judged by their character, not their skin color. In calling for an eradication of racism, discrimination, and inequality, Dr. King urged Americans to unite in the pursuit of a more equitable and inclusive society. This speech united individuals from all backgrounds in the pursuit of a more equitable society, showcasing his ability to inspire hope and ignite change through his unwavering commitment to racial equality and justice.

The enduring impact of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech lies in its universal appeal and demonstrates a profound resonance across diverse audiences. King’s iconic speech exemplifies the power of words to inspire and ignite change. Through the masterful use of imagery, such as his vision of children “not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” King illustrates a vivid picture of a future founded on equality and unity. His words, like a symphony of justice, echo in the hearts of individuals from all backgrounds, transcending racial divides and awakening a shared desire for a better world. With each repetition of “I have a dream,” King’s message gains momentum, fueling the flames of a movement toward freedom, justice, and equality for all. By harnessing the universal values of dignity and fairness, Dr. King galvanizes a nation to join hands in pursuit of a society where every individual is judged not by their outward appearance, but by the richness of their humanity. In another example King says, “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.” This phrase is an invitation to freedom and equality everywhere, and a clarion call to combat segregation in the United States. The resonating power of Dr. King’s speech lies in its ability to unite individuals from diverse backgrounds behind a shared vision of a more equitable and inclusive society, showcasing his unwavering commitment to inspire hope and ignite change in the pursuit of racial equality and justice.

The iconic speech of King’s “I Have a Dream” stands as a powerful illustration of the transformative influence of free speech within a democratic society. By asserting his right to speak out against racial injustice and oppression, King shines a spotlight on the deep-rooted racism and discrimination that pervaded American society. His impassioned words serve as a rallying cry, urging individuals to confront their biases, resist institutional discrimination, and actively contribute to the creation of a more inclusive and equitable social order. King’s speech reverberates throughout a generation, galvanizing activists, leaders, and ordinary citizens to unite in the struggle against racism and advocate for civil rights and social justice. King’s iconic speech not only highlights the transformative power of speech in a democratic society by shedding light on racial injustice, but also underscores the crucial role of freedom of expression in driving positive societal change and advancing principles of justice and equality.

The unmistakable honesty and clarity of King’s word choice in his speech reinforces the critical role of free speech in fostering a healthy democratic environment. The freedom to voice opinions, challenge authority, and effect positive transformation is fundamental to the essence of democracy. King’s adept use of rhetoric ignited activity that brought about substantial advancements in the civil rights movement within the United States.

His enduring legacy serves as a poignant testament to the dynamic impact of free speech and the necessity of utilizing one’s voice to champion principles of justice, equality, and human rights, thereby inspiring future generations to pursue social change through the power of expression. King articulates his resounding belief in the power of free speech to drive positive social change through the acknowledgment of the challenges that come with safeguarding this fundamental right, particularly in contentious issues like hate speech and misinformation that can harm marginalized communities.

It is equally important to recognize that freedom of speech is not without its challenges. There are often debates and discussions about the boundaries of free speech, especially when it comes to hate speech, which incites violence, and spreads misinformation. Examples of hate speech during King’s time are that of Bull O’Connor, Alabama Governor George Wallace, and others who publicly sided with the Ku Klux Klan in antagonistic rallies against King and other civil rights’ demonstrators. While it is crucial to protect the right to express opinions, it is also important to consider the impact that certain forms of speech can have on marginalized communities and the potential harm that it can cause, as seen in the archived footage of civil right marchers being arrested and beaten or bitten by police dogs. While freedom of speech is a fundamental right essential for the functioning of a democratic society, it is imperative to address the challenges it poses, especially in regard to hate speech and its potential harm to marginalized communities.

Freedom of speech is a vital right that is fundamental to the functioning of a democratic society. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech serves as a powerful example of the impact that free speech can have in inspiring, uniting, and mobilizing people toward a common goal. It is through the exercise of this right that individuals are able to challenge the status quo, advocate for change, and contribute to the betterment of society. As we continue to navigate the complexities of free speech, it is important to uphold this fundamental right while also being mindful of the responsibilities that come with it.

Thank you for your interest in Colorado Lawyer!

You have reached your maximum number of free articles.

For unlimited access to Colorado Lawyer articles, log in to your CBA account or join the Colorado Bar Association. For technical support, email [email protected] .

Explore This Issue

Embracing the Inevitable

Alternative dispute resolution by ryan searson.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and Reverse Discrimination

Labor and employment law by john m. husband.

Navigating Colorado’s New Abandoned Wills Depository

Trust and estate law by charles e. rounds.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

The Freedom Caucus Started Believing in the Myth of Its Own Power

By Brendan Buck

Mr. Buck worked for two Republican speakers of the House.

On Saturday the House of Representatives approved the most consequential legislation of this Congress, a foreign aid package for American allies. More Democrats than Republicans voted in favor of the measure that allowed the package to pass. And once again the speaker’s job is at risk.

This is just the latest example of how this House of Representatives has become unmoored from the normal practices of a body that has long relied on party unity to function. The speaker, Mike Johnson, holds his role only because a few hard-line Republicans ousted the previous speaker for being too dismissive of their demands. But since the moment they threw their support behind Mr. Johnson, these hard-liners have encountered the reality that they’re irrelevant to the governance of the House of Representatives.

For all its rank partisanship, the House right now is functionally and uneasily governed by a group of Republicans and Democrats. The House is led by a conservative speaker, but for any matter of lawmaking, he cannot count on a Republican majority. Instead, a coalition has emerged that is willing to do what is necessary to save the House from itself. But still we must wonder how long a G.O.P. speaker can sustain a position he owes to Democrats. It is no small thing for any speaker to rely on the opposition party to govern.

In the past year, the House has averted a catastrophic debt default, passed foreign military aid when it seemed hopeless and funded the government when a shutdown seemed all but inevitable. Should we expect more from Congress? Of course. But the critical items are getting done in a more bipartisan manner than would seem possible in this era of negative partisanship.

The most conservative voices are getting shut out, and the House Freedom Caucus, ironically, has made sure of it. The sustainability of it all will be decided by whether Mr. Johnson continues down a path of realistic policymaking or feels the urge to now appease the discontents who have worked to stymie him from the start.

To understand how broken down the normal power structures have become — and how, in the process, the hard-liners have removed themselves from lawmaking — consider the basic procedures with which the business of the House is done.

The job of the Rules Committee, often referred to as the speaker’s committee, is to bring the agenda of the majority to the floor and set terms of debate on legislation. It is not a high-profile panel, but its work is critical to the operation of the House. It has long been the responsibility of the majority party to carry the votes on these agenda-setting rules. One of the few things stressed to new members of the House is to never vote against their party on a rule.

Members of the Freedom Caucus, however, now see themselves as watchmen of the floor. They set conservative policy demands that are impossible to achieve with Democrats controlling the Senate and White House. And when these demands are inevitably not met, they routinely hijack the process to stop legislation before it can even get an up-or-down vote, no matter if a measure has the overwhelming support of the Republican conference or the House.

Seven times in the past year an effort to bring a bill up for a vote through the rules process has failed, primarily defeated by conservatives. Before this Congress, it had been more than two decades since a rule had been voted down. A party unable to bring its agenda to the floor for a vote is no longer a functional majority.

But the business of the House must go on somehow, and Mr. Johnson has been forced to go around the blockades. When he reached a bipartisan agreement for funding the government this year, he took the extraordinary step of considering the bill under fast-track procedures that limit floor debate , bar amendments and require a two-thirds vote for passage. This process, typically reserved for noncontroversial measures, is how we’re funding the entire government.

Another procedural abnormality was necessary for last week’s foreign aid package. Despite it being obvious that the House overwhelmingly supports aid for Ukraine, the Freedom Caucus vowed to block consideration of the bill. Democrats were forced to carry the rule teeing up the vote, providing more votes than Republicans.

As a result, Mr. Johnson now waits for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the anti-Ukraine Freedom Caucus member from Georgia, to follow through on threats to force a vote to remove him from the speakership. She claims it is he who has betrayed Republicans, not the conservatives who continually undermine their own colleagues.

Some Democrats have expressed at least an openness to helping Mr. Johnson retain his speakership if it is threatened for doing what they viewed as the right thing in passing Ukraine assistance. An overwhelming bipartisan repudiation of Ms. Greene’s speaker-removal tactic would be the single best thing the House could do to regain its credibility as a deliberative body.

The Freedom Caucus’s power stems from its willingness to take out the speaker. When that tool is removed, its threats quickly become more bark than bite.

The potential for a bipartisan rejection of the effort to oust Mr. Johnson has spawned hope for a new era of comity in the House. But this is not fairy-tale politics. There will be no sweeping compromise on immigration or the federal deficit.

A coalition works only as long as both sides are getting something from the deal. Mr. Johnson’s survival as speaker for the remainder of this Congress is aided by the fact there is very little that the House must do before the elections. But he will no doubt feel extraordinary pressure to take actions to get back in the good graces of conservatives.

Kevin McCarthy, the previous speaker, lost his job because Democrats had lost faith in him as an honest broker. Mr. Johnson is not immune from a similar erosion of trust. It could happen if he were to abandon the spending agreement put in place last year by President Biden and Mr. McCarthy. He similarly may not be able to count on Democrats again if he tries to impeach the president.

The speakership seems to have given Mr. Johnson, who himself rose to the job from the ranks of the discontented conservatives, a new perspective on the hard-liners, who simply cannot be counted on. And the past week has demonstrated that governance is still possible in the House if, as the speaker said last week, you “ do the right thing .”

Whether it’s Mr. Johnson or Mr. McCarthy or the two previous Republican speakers for whom I worked, it has not been the Republican leadership that cut out the Freedom Caucus. The Freedom Caucus, by believing in the myth of its own power, made itself irrelevant to legislative outcomes.

Brendan Buck is a communications consultant who previously worked for the Republican speakers of the House Paul D. Ryan and John Boehner.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Opinion Dogs are our greatest creation. And we might be theirs.

Tommy Tomlinson is the author of “ Dogland .” He lives in Charlotte with his wife, her mother and a cat named Jack Reacher.

The dog is humankind’s greatest invention. The wheel, the lightbulb, concrete — all amazing. Top of the line. But nothing in human creation has been as essential and adaptable as the countless descendants of the ancient gray wolf.

How did we do it? I spent three years following the traveling carnival of American dog shows — like a Grateful Dead tour with Milk-Bones — in search of the answer. My journey culminated in the dog world’s most prestigious event: the Westminster Dog Show. Show dogs are bred from the purest stock, culled from litters at just a few weeks old, trained with the dedication of Olympic gymnasts — and groomed like supermodels. They’d be unrecognizable to their ancient kin — and to ours.

The American Kennel Club, arbiter of bloodlines, now recognizes about 200 breeds, while tracking crossbreeds like goldendoodles, and even mutts. From the most massive mastiff to the tiniest teacup chihuahua, all dogs trace back to the same common ancestors.

Scientists think this weird and powerful companionship of humans and dogs might have started somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. Humans of that era were mainly hunters traveling in camps. They ate meat by the fire. The cooking meat attracted wolves who were drawn to the aroma but stayed safely out of range of the flames. Every so often, a human would fling a bone into the darkness. The wolves gnawed on the bones. They trailed the humans to the next campsite, still keeping their distance. There was an unspoken arrangement. The wolves alerted the humans to intruders, and the humans fed the wolves well.

Over time the wolves crept closer. One fateful night a curious wolf came all the way into the firelight. The humans didn’t chase it off.

Slowly, the humans mingled with the wolves. After days or months or generations or centuries, a wolf curled up at a human’s feet. Maybe got its belly rubbed. That was the first dog.

As far as we can tell, dogs are the first animals that humans ever tamed. The wolves that hung out with humans found themselves changing inside and out. They developed shorter muzzles and smaller teeth. Their instinct to run became a desire to stay close. With time, dogs were manufactured through breeding to meet different human needs. We made huskies to pull sleds and Newfoundlands to pull fish nets and dachshunds to catch badgers.

Dogs taught humans the early science of designer genes. In the mid-19th century, as we moved off the farm and into the factory, we created dogs we could bring indoors at the end of a workday. And we created dogs we could bring to work: French bulldogs (now the most popular breed in America ) started out as literal lap dogs for lace-makers in France. We molded dogs to be friends, companions, playmates and unofficial therapists.

So dogs are not just humanity’s greatest invention but also its longest-running experiment.

That’s one way to look at it.

Now switch out the frame. Swap the subject and the object. Change the verbs.

Here’s another view:

Around the time early humans evolved, Neanderthals also walked the planet. At some point — roughly 40,000 years ago — humans started to thrive while Neanderthals died off. And this is about the time when those first curious wolves began to evolve into dogs. Some scientists believe the timing is not a coincidence. Maybe the dog was the key advantage in the triumph of humankind.

Dogs enabled humans to settle down and stop their endless wandering. Dogs protected humans at this vulnerable transition from nomadic to settled life. Dogs did work that humans did not have the strength or stamina to do: guarding, herding, hunting, pulling sleds. They created time for humans to build and think and create without having to focus every moment on the next meal or the next threat.

We domesticated dogs, and they domesticated us.

Today, dogs provide not just companionship but also an uncomplicated kind of love in an ever more complicated world. And for those restless souls wandering from town to town, chasing job after job — nomads again — a dog can be an anchor, something to hold on to on a lonely night.

From the gray wolf by the ancient fire to a coifed Pomeranian prancing around the show ring, dogs have been with us nearly as long as we have been human.

They might be our greatest creation. And we might be theirs.

About guest opinion submissions

The Washington Post accepts opinion articles on any topic. We welcome submissions on local, national and international issues. We publish work that varies in length and format, including multimedia. Submit a guest opinion or read our guide to writing an opinion article .

• Opinion | Why campus protests against Israel probably won’t be effective April 25, 2024 Opinion | Why campus protests against Israel probably won’t be effective April 25, 2024
• Opinion | Why Trump’s vice-presidential search may have taken a new turn April 23, 2024 Opinion | Why Trump’s vice-presidential search may have taken a new turn April 23, 2024
• Opinion | How to fix college finances? Eliminate faculty, then students. April 23, 2024 Opinion | How to fix college finances? Eliminate faculty, then students. April 23, 2024