Some terminology first:
- Democracy Cambridge:
the belief in freedom and equality between people, or a system of government based on this belief, in which power is either held by elected representatives or directly by the people themselves.
- Democracy Merriam-Webster:
government by the people, especially : rule of the majority
a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
- Democracy Wikipedia:
a form of government in which the people have the authority to deliberate and decide legislation ("direct democracy") or to choose governing officials to do so ("representative democracy"). Who is considered part of "the people" and how authority is shared among or delegated by the people has changed over time and at different rates in different countries.
Features of democracy often include
- freedom of assembly,
- association,
- property rights,
- freedom of religion
- speech,
- citizenship,
- consent of the governed,
- voting rights,
- freedom from unwarranted governmental deprivation of the right to life and liberty,
- minority rights.
- Direct Democracy:
a form of democracy in which the electorate decides on policy initiatives without elected representatives as proxies. This differs from the majority of currently established democracies, which are representative democracies.
In direct democracy, the people decide on policies without any intermediary or representative, whereas in a representative democracy people vote for representatives who then enact policy initiatives. Depending on the particular system in use, direct democracy might entail passing executive decisions, the use of sortition, making laws, directly electing or dismissing officials, and conducting trials.
- Representative Democracy:
a type of democracy where elected people represent a group of people, in contrast to direct democracy. Nearly all modern Western-style democracies function as some type of representative democracy
Representative democracy is a form of democracy in which people vote for representatives who then vote on policy initiatives; as opposed to direct democracy, a form of democracy in which people vote on policy initiatives directly.
The American Revolution led to the creation of a new Constitution of the United States in 1787, with a national legislature based partly on direct elections of representatives every two years, and thus responsible to the electorate for continuance in office. Senators were not directly elected by the people until the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. Women, men who owned no property, and Black people, and others not originally given voting rights, in most states eventually gained the vote through changes in state and federal law in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Until it was repealed by the Fourteenth Amendment following the Civil War, the Three-Fifths Compromise gave a disproportionate representation of slave states in the House of Representatives relative to the voters in free states.
- Democratization:
the democratic transition to a more democratic political regime, including substantive political changes moving in a democratic direction.
Whether and to what extent democratization occurs can be influenced by various factors, including economic development, historical legacies, civil society, and international processes. Some accounts of democratization emphasize how elites drove democratization, whereas other accounts emphasize grassroots bottom-up processes. How democratization occurs has also been used to explain other political phenomena, such as whether a country goes to a war or whether its economy grows.
The opposite process is known as democratic backsliding or autocratization.
- Waves of Democratization:
major surges of democracy that have occurred in history.
Democratization waves have been linked to sudden shifts in the distribution of power among the great powers, which created openings and incentives to introduce sweeping domestic reforms.
The first wave of democracy (1828–1926) began in the early 19th century when suffrage was granted to the majority of white males in the United States ("Jacksonian democracy"). This was followed by France, Britain, Canada, Australia, Italy, and Argentina, and a few others, before 1900. At its peak, after the breakup of the Russian, German, Austrian, and Ottoman empires in 1918, the first wave saw 29 democracies in the world. Reversal began in 1922, when Benito Mussolini rose to power in Italy. The collapse primarily hit newly formed democracies, which could not stand against the aggressive rise of expansionist communist, fascist, and militaristic authoritarian or totalitarian movements that systematically rejected democracy. The nadir of the first wave came in 1942, when the number of democracies in the world dropped to a mere twelve.
The second wave began following the Allied victory in World War II, and crested nearly twenty years later, in 1962, with 36 recognised democracies in the world. The second wave ebbed as well at this point, and the total number dropped to thirty democracies between 1962 and the mid-1970s.
The third wave began with the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal and the late-1970s Spanish transition to democracy. This was followed by the historic democratic transitions in Latin America in the 1980s, Asia-Pacific countries (Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan) from 1986 to 1988, Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and sub-Saharan Africa, beginning in 1989. The expansion of democracy in some regions was stunning. In Latin America, only Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela were democratic by 1978, and only Cuba and Haiti remained authoritarian by 1995, when the wave had swept across twenty countries.
