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Democracy is a political regime form based on the rule of the many, in contrast to the rule of the few (e.g., oligarchy or aristocracy). What exactly the term denotes is the subject of dispute among both scholars and politicians. The multitude of forms that existing democracies take is mirrored by an abundance of theoretical concepts and models of democracy in the social sciences. Essentially, this makes it a contested concept.

Theory

The history of democratic theory can be divided into classic (500 BCE) and modern (since the seventeenth century CE) schools of democratic thought. The same term underlies these schools: The word democracy is of Greek origin and consists of the words demos (often translated as “full citizens”) and kratos (“to rule”). Despite their common terminological base, the two schools are very different with regard to how and by whom popular rule should be exercised. While modern democratic thought stresses that political power must lie in the hand of all adult nationals, the demos in ancient Greece consisted only of the adult, male, and free population of a city (in ancient Athens, the demos formed only about 10 percent of the total population). Here, popular rule was exercised collectively, directly, and in rather small communities. Modern democracies, on the other hand, tend to be nation-states in which popular rule is exercised by representatives selected in competitive elections.

Classic understanding of democracy. Classic democratic thought was nurtured by a specific form of political rule in ancient Greece. Here, democracy (demokratia) denoted the form of government practiced in the city of Athens about 500 BCE. It was a regime form that incorporated the demos in the making of collective political decisions, rendered them equal before the law, and allowed them to run for political office irrespective of wealth or social background.

Political decisions were made following public debates and elections in an assembly consisting of full citizens. While this body fulfilled legislative functions in the Athenian democracy, a 500-member council, whose members were drawn by lot from volunteers from the 139 territorial units, served as a secretariat. From the council, an executive body with rotating membership was also drawn by lot, as were the juries in the popular law courts.

Ancient Greek philosophers such as Thucydides and Plato regarded democracy as a bad form of government, likening it to mob rule. Aristotle, on the other hand, saw much virtue in the rule of the many, provided it was exercised for the common good. He suggested that this could be achieved by drawing up rules that divided and regulated the exercise of power and therefore made the democratic process less prone to abuse by powerful groups or individuals. He called the “good” form of the rule of the many politeia (constitutional government) and its pathological counterpart democratia.

Modern understanding of democracy. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions in the late eighteenth century, democracy as a form of government returned to political life after more than 2,000 years in which nondemocratic forms of rule were prevalent in the world. In political thought, Enlightenment writers such as de Alexis de Tocqueville, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau reflected on equality based state-society relations and thereby contributed to giving democracy a better image than it had had in ancient Greek thought.

Democracy continued to spread with the emergence of nation-states. However, the overwhelming majority of these new democracies were not direct (as in Athens) but were representative democracies in which the rule of the people was exercised by means of elected proxies. In his 1976 book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter, one of the most prominent pioneers in modern democratic thinking, explicitly rejected the “classical doctrine” of direct democracy and advocated a “leadership democracy” based on competitive elitism. Today’s democracies consist of political offices that are filled by means of contestation, with all adult citizens regardless of gender, ethnicity, or religious persuasion participating in the process and deciding the outcome by vote.

As a consequence of this bifurcation into voters and representatives, a dualistic understanding of state and society evolved. Given the only gradual extension of opportunities to formally participate in the political process, often as a result of social struggles to extend suffrage from privileged social classes toward all social strata and finally to women, the relationship between state and society tends to be seen as potentially antagonistic in modern democratic thought. For this reason, it is stressed that individuals should be as free from state interference in their private lives as possible. In a liberal democracy, which today is regarded as normatively superior to a nonliberal democracy and other forms of political rule, individual and minority rights are protected by a constitution and can be asserted against the government. Checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches (horizontal accountability) and federalism (vertical accountability) serve further to prevent democratic governments from abusing their powers.

The precondition for meaningful democratic participation in and beyond elections is a vivid civil society; that is, citizens can form or join parties and interest groups, and they are able to exercise their other democratic rights. Therefore, modern democratic theory views individual freedom, personal responsibility, and the rule of law as cornerstones of a democratic system.

Concepts

Three issues are prevalent in the empirical study of democracy. The first is defining the features that separate democracies from nondemocracies. The second is classifying those regimes that have been identified as democracies. The third issue pertains to the classification of so-called hybrid regimes, which are neither clearly democratic nor clearly nondemocratic.

Democratic procedures. Scholars do not agree on what procedural characteristics a regime needs to display in order to be called a democracy. The minimalist “electoral democracy” concept, for example, demands elections that are free, fair, inclusive, and meaningful. Such elections not only entail a real chance for the opposition to come to power, but they also presuppose a range of civil liberties, such as freedom of organization, speech, and information. Some scholars believe this is not enough and add to these characteristics a wide range of civil rights, the absence of veto players not legitimized by democratic procedures, horizontal accountability, and the rule of law.

Among the many existing concepts of democracy, the most cited procedural one is political scientist Robert Dahl’s polyarchy. In the Dahlian understanding, polyarchy (Greek for “rule by the many”) denotes a “modern representative democracy with universal suffrage” and refers explicitly to modern representative democracy as a historically unique form of government, as opposed to Athenian democracy. Public contestation and participation are the two main polyarchal attributes. Dahl defines eight minimal criteria that a political regime must fulfill to be considered a polyarchy: (1) freedom to form and join organizations, (2) freedom of expression, (3) right to vote, (4) eligibility for public office, (5) right of political leaders to compete for support, (6) alternative sources of information, (7) free and fair elections, and (8) preservation of governmental accountability.

Different as all these concepts may be, they have two features in common that pose considerable difficulties in the process of separating democracies from non-democracies: (1) They are made up of several criteria, which are all necessary elements of a democracy, and (2) more problematically, most of these indicators relate to phenomena that are not either/ or conditions, but matters of degree. In consequence, the researcher must decide on artificial thresholds that separate existence from nonexistence of the elements inherent in this concept. For example, how many persons need to be prevented from voting in order for the condition of universal suffrage to be violated? When exactly do elections cease to be free and fair? Resulting from (1) and (2), further conceptual difficulties emerge: Is the half-fulfillment of two conditions equal to the nonfulfillment of one condition? And is a regime that fails on five of eight conditions less democratic than a regime that fails on only one?

Categorial concepts (classical subtypes). Especially since the 1960s, comparative democracy studies focused on the differences among democracies of member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Researchers created categorical subtypes by adding certain attributes to the procedural core concept of democracy to arrive at semantically dichotomous pairs. In the wake of what political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called the “third wave of democratization,” which began with Portugal’s democratization in 1974, the application of these concepts was extended to young democracies in southern Europe, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia.

One influential categorization, the distinction between presidential and parliamentarian democracy, builds on different relations between the executive (head of state and government) and legislative (parliament) powers in a democratic system of government. In a parliamentarian democracy, the parliament selects and can recall a government. It is also characterized by a double-headed executive (head of government and head of state), strong factions of political parties, and party coalitions. In contrast, a strong executive who cannot be dissolved by parliament (only by impeachment) and who is legitimized through popular elections characterizes presidential democracies. As opposed to parliamentarian systems, in presidential systems parliament and government are legally separated, and the simultaneous holding of a government post and a legislative mandate is not possible. Moreover, the head of state and the head of government are the same person. For a long time, scholars assumed that parliamentarian democracies provided more stability and were more conducive to democratic consolidation. However, the successful democratizations in Latin American after the 1980s provided empirical evidence that there is no best system and that the correlation between democratic success and institutional arrangements depends on the contexts of these regimes.

Another influential categorization, consensus/consociational versus majoritarian democracy, distinguishes modes of political conflict resolution and decision making. In consensus democracies such as Switzerland and Mali, political conflict is resolved through negotiations, compromise, and proportional rule (by means of a proportional electoral system). Diffusion of power and the institutionalized integration of all social and political forces in the political process (e.g., protection and representation of minorities) are conceived as the main features of consensus democracies. In contrast, majoritarian or competitive democracies, such as the United States and Great Britain, are characterized by elections that give power to the strongest party (for instance, by means of a majoritarian electoral system often resulting in a two-party system) and by a political process in which power is concentrated. The enforcement of majoritarian interests, as opposed to the equal representation of all societal and political forces, characterizes this democratic subtype.

Gradual concepts (diminished subtypes). Arguably the most prolific reaction to the conceptual difficulties of distinguishing democracies from nondemocracies is the creation of ad hoc concepts to characterize regimes that share most, but not all, attributes associated with a liberal democracy. In most cases, the deficiency is expressed with an adjective, resulting in terms such as tutelary democracy, illiberal democracy, neopatrimonial democracy, and delegative democracy. In their famous treatise on conceptual innovations in comparative politics, David Collier and Steven Levitsky call these concepts diminished subtypes of democracy.

In contrast to classic subtypes, diminished subtypes are characterized by the lack of one or more of the defining attributes of a liberal democracy. This results in the root concept being diminished to increasingly resemble the minimalist concept of an electoral democracy. For example, a regime in which horizontal accountability is absent is no liberal democracy anymore, but might still be more democratic than an electoral democracy. Hence, a fluid conceptual boundary encompassing both the minimalist and maximalist concepts is imposed between democracies and authoritarian regimes, and various “defects” or “deficits” mark the difference between electoral and liberal democracy.

The advantage of creating diminished subtypes is that the perceived deficiencies of individual regimes are highlighted and that democracy can continue to serve as the root concept where a regime is perceived to verge closer to democracy than to authoritarianism. However, there are several notable disadvantages in this strategy. First, some scholars argue that it is unethical to classify one-third of the countries in the world by what political scientists perceive to be their deficits. The more serious disadvantage, however, is the conceptual dilemma this strategy poses. In terms of the strict demands of a typology, since these diminished subtypes do not possess all the necessary attributes of a liberal democracy, they should not be called democratic if liberal democracy is the root concept. In this case, it might be better to take electoral democracy as the root concept and create categorial concepts. Finally, the proliferation of such “democracies with adjectives” (according to one count, the number reached the hundreds) has created confusion and makes systematization difficult.

Assessment And Measurement

In the 1970s, comparative democracy research turned to the quantification of attributes of political rule and created indices that aim at measuring democracy. They are an additional source of political regime assessment, but they cannot substitute qualitative classifications. Indices are easier and quicker to read than qualitative analysis, and cross-time analysis is more efficient, because changes over time can be easily detected.

At first glance, they seem more impartial and correct and less corruptible than qualitative analysis. But critics have provided evidence that they are less reliable than they appear. There are three common pitfalls in the building of indices. First, there are methodological problems in the conceptualization, measurement, and aggregation of data. For instance, indices are often subject to measurement error due to a lack of equal access to data over time. Moreover, the high aggregation levels of data often result in loss of information. Second, country cases are frequently miscoded because of limited knowledge of cases. Third, indices measure only certain elements of concepts of democracy, rather than democracy as a whole.

Three frequently updated and often-cited indices measure democratic attributes: the Freedom House (FH) index, the Polity IV dataset on political regime change, and the Bertelsmann transformation index (BTI). (Although the World Bank’s governance data set comprises democratic features, it is more often referred to when measuring corruption or efficiency.) The correlation between the three scales is high despite their differences in conceptualization, operationalization, and aggregation. However, scales based on highly aggregated scores easily blur the existing differences between the political regimes under scrutiny. This deficit is partly addressed by the individual country reports that come with each dataset.

Freedom House (FH) index. This international watchdog organization has worked to promote freedom throughout the world since 1941. In 1972, FH began measuring freedom, an integral element of democracy. Using twenty-five indicators, FH annually classifies the status of political rights and civil liberties in all countries and some disputed and related territories around the world (all are referred to as “countries,” a total of 194 in 2009) on a scale of 1 (free) to 7 (unfree). FH considers countries “free” that rate 1.0 to 2.5 on scales that measure political rights and civil liberties (eighty-nine countries in 2009); those that rate 3.0 to 5.0 are considered “partly free” (fifty-eight countries in 2009); and those that rate 5.5 to 7.0 are “not free” (forty-seven countries in 2009).

These ratings are based on the operationalization of seven attributes of political rights (electoral process, political pluralism, and functioning of government) and civil rights (freedom of expression and belief, associational and organizational rights, rule of law, and personal autonomy and individual rights). Although FH is well known for its parsimony, a closer look shows that the underlying concept of democracy entails not only procedural but also substantial features, such as economic rights, property rights, and social rights. Scholars frequently criticize the lack of transparency of FH’s disaggregated data and measurement process. Whereas such indices as Polity IV and BTI provide a codebook, FH’s standards of measurement are not made public. This is especially noteworthy since critics report that the organization has adjusted ratings according to political considerations of respective U.S. administrations. Thus, FH must be accepted largely on faith.

Polity IV dataset. The Polity IV index of political scientists Monty G. Marshall and Keith Jaggers of the Center of Systemic Peace leads back to University of Maryland distinguished professor Ted Robert Gurr’s Polity I conceptualizations of 1975. Polity IV captures the degree of contestation and transparency of 163 political systems on an annual basis and provides a time series that dates back to 1800. It codes five dimensions of political rule (competitiveness of participation, regulation of participation, competitiveness of executive recruitment, openness of executive recruitment, and constraints on executive). Polity IV classifies countries on a scale of -10 to +10. Countries with a score from -10 to -6 (twenty-three countries in 2009) are generally considered to be autocratic; -5 to +5 are called anocracies, regimes that are considered neither full democracies nor full autocracies (forty eight countries in 2009); and a score between +6 and +10 indicates a democracy (ninety-two countries in 2009). Critics of Polity IV contend that the index fails to include participation in its various facets. Polity IV does not measure the right to vote, which is normally an uncontested constitutive factor of democracy.
Bertelsmann transformation index (BTI). In 2003, the Bertelsmann Foundation launched the BTI, which is based on the concept of a market-economic democracy. It began a biannual publication schedule in 2006. The complex index examines and assesses political and economic transformation processes as well as political management in 125 nations in two sets of rankings, the status index and the management index. The third index, the BTI status of democracy, measures the progress toward democracy along five criteria (stateness, political participation, rule of law, stability of democratic institutions, and political and social integration) and seventeen indicators (subdivided into fifty-two questions) in international comparison. Scores given along each of the seventeen indicators range from a minimum of 1 to a maximum of 10.The BTI does not explicitly mark a cut-off point between democracy and nondemocracy. Nevertheless, in its 2010 summary, the BTI stated that in 2009, seventy-six of the 128 countries under scrutiny were democracies, while fifty-two were autocracies. The BTI builds no extra category (as the FH index and Polity IV dataset do) for so-called hybrid regimes. Instead, it identifies defective democracies, or democracies with flaws (fifty-three in 2009). In doing so, the BTI blurs the conceptual border between democracy and nondemocracy. BTI critics further emphasize that the underlying concept of market-economic democracy induces a high degree of normativity that lowers the analytical value of the BTI. In addition, the BTI cannot be used for cross-time analysis, and it studies fewer countries than the other indices. In 2009, the Bertelsmann Foundation launched the sustainable governance indicators. They include thirty OECD member nations and aim at capturing the differences between established democracies.

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