“Democracy” is nearly universally cherished in the contemporary world: hence the inherently contested nature of the concept. This contested nature means that different political forces try to attach somewhat different meanings to the word. Yet, while it is almost banal to state that there is no universally accepted definition of democracy, the seeming variety of definitions does, in fact, hide a good deal of agreement among expert users of the concept. As Samuel Huntington (1989: 15) once put it emphatically: “Schumpeter has won. His concept of democracy is the established and the Establishment concept of democracy.
This reference is, of course, less to the somewhat outdated verbatim form of Schumpeter’s (1943: 269) definition – “ the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people s vote – than to his insistence that modern democracy can only be defined in terms of a procedural minimum that de facto prevails in regulating access to sovereign political power in some, though not all societies. Thus, one key element of “schumpeterian” – i.e. “minimalist”, “formal” or “procedural” definition of democracy is that they conceive democracy as a characteristics of that part of the political process that regulates law making and the succession of governments – i.e. directly or indirectly the activity of every office holders of a sovereign state. Including specific outputs of the democratic process that are not directly related to the democratic attributes of the process itself – like the degree of gender equality or the structure of press ownership in a country – in the definition of democracy would blatantly contradict this procedural definition of democracy. Such outputs can, however, still be considered as proxy measures of those aspects of the political process that are the essential attributes of democracy even in the minimalist definitions: namely that at one critically important juncture, i.e. at the general elections that are the chief source of legitimacy for office holders at the national level, (nearly) all subjects of a sovereign state can have (theoretically) equal influence on the selection of law makers and government, and the choices that they make there are their own sovereign, genuine choices, which really express their “will”.
This fundamental idea is precisely echoed in nearly all definitions of democracy offered by leading scholars of democratization in the recent decades. Most of the differences between their wordings appear to be rooted in a few sources. Consider first four textbook classics:
“[Democracy is] a political system which supplies regular constitutional opportunities for changing the governing officials, and a social mechanism which permits the largest possible part of the population to influence major decisions by choosing among contenders for political office (Lipset 1960: 27, 45).
We consider a government democratic if it supplies regular constitutional opportunities for peaceful competition for political power to different groups, without excluding any significant sector of the population by force (Linz 1964: 295).
At the level of nation states, democracy consists of political structures that involve citizens in selecting among competing political leaders. The more citizens are involved and the more meaningful their choices, the more democratic the system. (Almond and Powell 1984: 46).
A political system is defined as democratic to the extent that its most powerful collective decision makers are selected through periodic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes and in which virtually all the adult population is eligible to vote (Huntington 1984: 195).
Here, the minor differences in wording clearly stem not from a substantive disagreement over the concept, but some hesitation as to how one could most clearly formulate and empirically operationalize the two fundamental pillars of the same definition. These two pillars are what we would call the ultimate – albeit largely symbolic political equality of all citizens in the act of choosing political representatives who directly or indirectly control access to all public offices in the country and the political liberty of citizens and their organizations. We note, however, that in the last ten fifteen years there seems to have been a trend towards increasing inclusion of a third pillar into both scholarly definitions of political democracy and scholarly measures of its level. This third pillar is the effectiveness of elections, i.e. the degree to which elections effectively and de facto control access to the totality of executive power in the given country – a requirement violated, for instance, by the very substantial authoritarian residuals (in the form of Senate seats, presidential prerogatives and judicial offices outside the frame of any democratic control) in post transition Chile (cf. Arat 1991; Bollen 1980; Hadenius 1992; Przeworski et al. 2000).
Next, there is a minor disagreement among scholars as to whether the above, merely procedural criteria should be supplemented with some references to the normative environment that regulates the political process. Some who answer this question affirmatively offered the following definitions:
Democracy is a goal, not an achievement. ... The democratic goal ... consists of a condition to be attained and a principle guiding the procedure for attaining it. The condition is political equality, which we define as follows:
Control over government decisions is shared so that the preferences of no one citizen are weighted more heavily than the preferences of any other citizen.
The principle is majority rule, which we define as follows:
Governmental decisions should be controlled by the greater number expressing their preferences in the last say . (Dahl and Lindblom 1953: 41).
Democracy is an ideal of both justice and political life, and it is a method of realizing that ideal in ordinary politics. The ideal is individual self realization (that is, the achievement of the human potential for good qualities of character and behavior) and individual self respect (that is, a sense of one s worthiness as a person and a pride in one s self realization). The method is, for each person, free and equal participation in the political life of the community, engaging thus in whatever control of the social environment is possible. ... what makes democracy unique is that the democratic means and the democratic ends are joined. ... According to democratic theory, democratic ends can be achieved by democratic means. … if the method cannot realize the ideal, then ... the notion of democracy is meaningless. (Riker 1982: 2 3).
Large scale democracy is a procedure and/or a mechanism that (a) generates an open polyarchy whose competition on the electoral market (b) attributes power to the people and (c) specifically enforces responsiveness of the leaders to the led (Sartori 1987: 156).
Although some of the present authors tend to see great theoretical merit in the latter definitions, we note that for the present purposes there is little difference between them and the previously cited ones for the simple reason that the normative environment of the political process can be probably best measured through the formal procedures that are deemed binding. Thus, the significant, and, as we would think, relevant theoretical difference between the two families of definitions is basically inconsequential for the operational indicators of the concept.
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