Abogada

Table of Contents
Article
Fundamental questions
Democratic institutions
Prehistoric forms of democracy
Classical Greece
The Roman Republic
The Italian republics from the 12th century to the Renaissance
“Constitutional oligarchies”
A democratic dilemma
Toward representative democracy: Europe and North America to the 19th century
Regional developments
Continental Europe
England
TheUnited States
Democracy or republic?
Solving the dilemma
New answers to old questions
Suffrage
Factions and parties
Majority rule, minority rights, majority tyranny
The spread of democracy in the 20th century
Failures of nondemocratic systems
Market economies
Economic well-being
Political culture
Contemporary democratic systems
Presidential and parliamentary systems
Unitary and federalsystems
Proportional and winner-take-all systems
Two-party and multiparty systems
Majoritarian and consensual systems
The theory of democracy
Democratic ideas from Pericles to Rawls
Pericles
Aristotle
Locke
The legitimacy of government
Answers to fundamental questions
Montesquieu
Hume
Rousseau
Mill
Dewey
Habermas
Rawls
“Ideal democracy”
Features of ideal democracy
Ideal andrepresentative democracy
Actual democracies
The value of democracy
Problems and challenges
Inequality of resources
Immigration
Terrorism
International systems
Transition, consolidation, breakdown
Additional Reading
Classic texts
Democratic institutions
The theory of democracy
Problems and challenges
Year in Review Links
Citations

ARTICLE

from the
Encyclopædia Britannicademocracy, literally, rule by the people. The term is derived from the Greek dēmokratiā, which was coined from dēmos (“people”) and kratos (“rule”) in the middle of the 5th century bc to denote the political systems then existing in some Greek city-states, notably Athens.

Fundamental questions
The etymological origins of the term democracy hint at a number of urgent problems that go far beyondsemantic issues. If a government of or by the people—a “popular” government—is to be established, at least five fundamental questions must be confronted at the outset, and two more are almost certain to be posed if the democracy continues to exist for long.

(1) What is the appropriate unit or association within which a democratic government should be established? A town or city? A country? Abusiness corporation? A university? An international organization? All of these?

(2) Given an appropriate association—a city, for example—who among its members should enjoy full citizenship? Which persons, in other words, should constitute the dēmos? Is every member of the association entitled to participate in governing it? Assuming that children should not be allowed to participate (as most adultswould agree), should the dēmos include all adults? If it includes only a subset of the adult population, how small can the subset be before the association ceases to be a democracy and becomes something else, such as an aristocracy (government by the best, aristos) or an oligarchy (government by the few, oligos)?

(3) Assuming a proper association and a proper dēmos, how are citizens to govern?What political organizations or institutions will they need? Will these institutions differ between different kinds of associations—for example, a small town and a large country?

(4) When citizens are divided on an issue, as they often will be, whose views should prevail, and in what circumstances? Should a majority always prevail, or should minorities sometimes be empowered to block orovercome majority rule?

(5) If a majority is ordinarily to prevail, what is to constitute a proper majority? A majority of all citizens? A majority of voters? Should a proper majority comprise not individual citizens but certain groups or associations of citizens, such as hereditary groups or territorial associations?

(6) The preceding questions presuppose an adequate answer to a sixth and even...