More generally, not all definitions operate at the same level of abstraction, or even if they do, they may define democracy with reference to different sets of other abstract concepts despite an apparent agreement on what empirical phenomena is delineated by the concept. For instance, Kenneth Bollen (1980) submitted that “[democracy] is the extent to which the political power of the elite is minimized and that of the non elite is maximized”, while Robert Dahl (1971: 2) would “reserve the term democracy for a political system one of the characteristics of which is the quality of being completely or almost completely responsive to all its citizens. ... Surely one can conceive a hypothetical system of this kind; such a conception has served as an ideal, or part of an ideal, for many people.
Yet, they would easily come to agree to operationalize the concept through some political rights and civil liberties, which Dahl (1971) summarized as:
1. Freedom to join organizations;
2. Freedom of expression;
3. Right to vote;
4. Eligibility to public office;
5. Right of political leaders to compete for supports and votes;
6. Alternative sources of information;
7. Free and fair elections; and
8. Institutions for making government policies depend on votes and other expressions of preference.
Finally, a fundamental agreement on the definition of democracy is sometimes obscured by conceptual innovations that are merely meant to accommodate some fuzzy edges, i.e. to locate in a particular conceptual arsenal the empirical reality of political systems that display some but not all commonly recognized traits of democracy (cf. Collier and Levitsky 1997; Collier and Mahon 1993).
None of these refinements should, however, let us overlook the fact that there is a mainstream understanding of the concept of democracy that is indeed “schumpeterian” in that it sees democracy as a characteristic of the political system, and defines “the rule of the people” via procedural attributes that are meant to assure (1) the de jure political equality of all citizens, and (2) that directly or indirectly all public office holders and all their activities in their public role are both formally and de facto subjected to regular, institutionalized expressions of the “popular will” via elections, and (3) that there are no de facto limits on what individual citizens’ political will can be, i.e. on the free formation of preferences.
This understanding of the concept prevails in most of the scholarly literature. To what extent preference formation is “free”, office holders ultimately subject to the popular will, and citizens are “politically equal” is, obviously, a matter of degree, hence the concept could be best operationalized through continuous, rather than dichotomous measures. Considerable theoretical disagreement prevails as to what institutional arrangements can best serve these goals, for instance as to what extent particular rules of the game, or some personnel like civil servants or the judiciary, and indeed even some policy outputs should be insulated from the will of a momentary popular or legislative majority, exactly in the name of democracy. For reasons that will shortly be indicated, we do not enter these controversies here. We merely note that these controversies can lead to variation in the details of the theoretical definition of democracy, but these variations remain within the limits of the “schumpeterian” tradition as outlined above.
There certainly are genuine rivals of this “minimalist” concept, such as that of participatory democracy, which define democracy less with reference to particular procedural attributes than via its contribution to the self development of individuals (cf. Bachrach 1980: 24). Yet, these rivals have had virtually no influence on relevant international political agreements and so far proved unable to generate broad political consensus around themselves. Therefore, we believe that the concept of democracy adhered to in the context of the Global Democracy Award project must also remain firmly rooted in the schumpeterian tradition, as otherwise its ability to generate political consensus across the whole democratic political spectrum will be hampered.
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