What is democracy?
‘Democracy’ literally means ‘rule by the people’. There are different flavours of democracy but they all involve some sort of participation (or having a say) by the people in the governance of their society.
At one end of the continuum would be Direct Democracy where the people vote on laws and decisions without elected representatives. The classic example is Ancient Athens. A modern example is Switzerland.
At the other end of the continuum would be Representative Democracy, which is the more common form in the modern world. Here the people elect representatives, usually from candidates offered by competing political parties, to a parliament. Examples would be the UK and the USA.
One notion commonly concomitant with democracy, at least as understood in the western sense, is that in an election there is a genuine opportunity for the government to be replaced. This does not necessarily mean that the government is actually changed; after all, the ruling party might be so successful that the citizenry do not wish to change it (can you think of a country where the ruling party is continually re-elected because it is so successful?). A corollary of this is that there are opposition parties available for the electorate to vote for, at least in principle. Thus, it follows that elections are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for democracy: there are, for instance, what some observers would consider to be authoritarian regimes which hold elections but perhaps there is only one political party offering candidates in those elections.
Q1: Do you think it is a hallmark of democracy that there are candidates in an election offered by competing political parties?
Q2: If so, why is it important to have competing political parties?
