What is the Democratic Value: Is democracy a universal value? Or is it a Western construct that is only applicable in Western societies? Custom Essay

It is useful at this point to pause and consider a bit more closely what is necessary for a country to be termed a democracy. To many Americans, and to many others who live or believe they live in a democracy, the term is so intuitive it seems straightforward. In a democracy, people have the right to choose their leaders in regular, free, and fair elections. But how many "people" are we talking about? Is a political system democratic if some of its citizens are denied the right to vote and run for office? What if a lot of people just don’t care and drop out? Elections must be openly competitive to be free. That means allowing multiple parties to compete. But must the electoral arena be open to any party, no matter its creed or values? What about personal freedom? Isn’t democracy also about the individual freedoms embedded in the American Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and so many national and international charters and covenants dating back decades and in fact centuries? Can a country be a democracy if it does not grant its people the basic civil freedoms of speech, press, association, and assembly? Don’t citizens have the right to "redress their grievances" in between elections, through petition and protest? And what about other personal freedoms: the right to practice one’s religion, to live where one wants, to travel freely, to own and dispose of private property, and to conduct commerce? How can a system be called a democracy if it abuses and disenfranchises ethnic, racial, or religious minorities? Can a political system really be called a democracy if it does not ensure a rule of law, in which all citizens are equal before the law, no one is above the law, and the laws themselves are known in advance and administered by an impartial judiciary?
A country cannot be a democracy if there is no freedom of speech and association and no rule of law. But is this because elections themselves cannot be free and fair under such circumstances, or because free and fair elections are not enough for a country to be a democracy?
Among political scientists, there is no consensus answer to these questions. Neither does one exist among democratic policy makers, or think tank analysts, or human rights activists, or even ordinary citizens. Defining democracy is a bit like interpreting the Talmud (or any religious text): ask a room of ten rabbis (or political scientists) for the meaning, and you are likely to get at least eleven different answers. In the case of democracy, however, these answers tend to group into "thin" and "thick" conceptions. On the thin side, in a minimal sense, democracy is defined as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter outlined it in the 1940s: a system "for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote." "Or to put it in modern terms, by means of regular, "free and fair" elections. On the thick side, a system is not a democracy unless it also ensures the following attributes:
Substantial individual freedom of belief, opinion, discussion, speech, publication, broadcast, assembly, demonstration, petition, and (why not) the Internet.
Freedom of ethnic, religious, racial, and other minority groups (as well as historically excluded majorities) to practice their religion and culture and to participate equally in political and social life.
The right of all adult citizens to vote and to run for office (if they meet certain minimum age and competency requirements).
Genuine openness and competition in the electoral arena, enabling any group that adheres to constitutional principles to form a party and contest for office.
Legal equality of all citizens under a rule of law, in which the laws are "clear, publicly known, universal, stable, and non retroactive."
An independent judiciary to neutrally and consistently apply the law and protect individual and group rights.
Thus, due process of law and freedom of individuals from torture, terror, and unjustified detention, exile, or interference in their personal lives�by the state or nonstate actors.
Institutional checks on the power of elected officials, by an independent legislature, court system, and other autonomous agencies.
Real pluralism in sources of information and forms of organization independent of the state; and thus, a vibrant "civil society."
Control over the military and state security apparatus by civilians who are ultimately accountable to the people through elections.
How do we sort through these many reasonable expectations of democracy? There cannot be any one "right" answer to the question of what democracy is; we can only be transparent, and logical and consistent, in whatever standard we adopt. My own decision�in this book and in a long career as a political scientist and activist struggling over this conceptual terrain�has been to view democracy as a political system that varies in depth and may exist above two distinct thresholds.
At the minimal level, if a people can choose and replace their leaders in regular, free, and fair elections, there is an electoral democracy. Calling a political system a democracy doesn’t mean it is a good or admirable system, or that we needn’t worry much about improving it further. It simply means that if a majority of the people want a change in leaders and policies and are able to organize effectively within the rules, they can get change.
But electoral democracies vary enormously in their quality. Competitive and uncertain elections, even frequent alternation of parties in power, can coexist with serious abuses of human rights, significant constraints on freedom in many areas of life, discrimination against minorities, a weak rule of law, a compromised or ineffectual judiciary, rampant corruption, gerrymandered electoral districts, unresponsive government, state domination of the mass media, and widespread crime and violence. Genuine competition to determine who rules does not ensure high levels of freedom, equality, transparency, social justice, or other liberal values. Electoral democracy helps to make these other values more achievable, but it does not by any means ensure them.
When we speak of democracy, then, we should aspire to its realization at a higher plane, to the achievement of the ten "thick" dimensions. When these exist in substantial measure, we can call a system a liberal democracy. To the extent that these are greatly diminished, democracy�if it exists at all�is illiberal. If there are regular, multiparty elections and other formal institutions of democracy like a national assembly, court system, constitution, and so on, but the people are not able to vote their leaders out of power because the system is, in effect, rigged, then the country has what I call pseudodemocracy.
If this distinction seems neat and manageable, it is not. First, if elections are to be considered democratic, they must be meaningful in the sense of bestowing real power to govern on those who are elected. Even if elections were free and fair today in Iran (which they are not), the country could hardly be considered a democracy when the ultimate power to decide rests with a religious "supreme leader" who is not accountable to the people. The same could be said for Morocco or Jordan, where the ultimate power remains with the monarchy, or for some Central American countries in the 1970s and ’80s, when the ultimate power rested with the military, despite elections. All these systems are or were pseudodemocracies, or what is sometimes called electoral authoritarian regimes.
A similar problem applies when the state is so thinly present, or so dominated by foreign powers, that the elected government is a hollow shell, with little effective authority. When civil war rages with little or very limited effective authority for elected government officials, as in Sierra Leone recently and Afghanistan today, the mere fact of competitive, reasonably fair elections does not create a democracy.
Many other regimes in the world are only pseudodemocracies because the realities and rules of the political game really do not make it possible, except through extraordinary means, to evict the ruling party, coalition, or cabal from power. The standard of "free and fair" is in fact a fairly demanding one. Elections are "free" when the legal barriers to entry into the political arena are low, when competing candidates, parties, and their supporters are free to campaign, and when people can vote for whom they want without fear and intimidation.
Freedom to campaign requires some considerable freedom of speech, movement, assembly, and association in political life, if not more broadly in civil society. However, it is hard to separate these two spheres. How many opposition candidates and supporters must be killed or arrested before one discerns a blatantly undemocratic pattern? Perhaps it is more than one, but certainly it is less than the twenty-one political killings, mainly of opposition supporters, in the two months prior to Cambodia’s 1998 elections. Yet in India, election-related killings have a long history and have in recent years risen to an alarming degree. No major observer denies that India is a democracy, but particularly in states like Bihar, where corruption, criminality, murder, and kidnapping have heavily penetrated the electoral process, it is an illiberal and degraded one.
Assessing electoral fairness can be similarly complicated. The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that political systems descend into competitive authoritarianism when violations of the "minimum criteria" for democracy are so serious that they create "an uneven playing field between government and opposition." Yet even among the liberal and established democracies, there is rarely a truly level playing field. Most governing parties or executives enjoy advantages of incumbency: readier access to the media, an easier time raising money from business, and the ability (strictly legal or not) to use government transport and staff while campaigning. It is a virtually intrinsic feature of incumbency that the ruling party can (to one degree or another) steer government spending and benefits to swing districts and voters. In the United States, electoral competition has become so disfigured by the scientific gerrymandering of electoral districts that only about a tenth of the seats in the House of Representatives are competitive. In the European Union, political corruption and favoritism remain so entrenched in the process of government contracting that one new study labels it "the best system money can buy. If we demand a fully level playing field as the test of electoral fairness, few if any political systems will qualify. In the real world, every elected government tries to draw some electoral advantage from its incumbency, every system is vulnerable to abuse, and maintaining democratic quality requires constant vigilance. Scattered violations of the rules, or the fact that the ruling party has some competitive advantages, do not make elections undemocratic, so long as it is still possible for the voters to "throw the bums out" through normal political means.
There is by now a rather well-evolved set of criteria for electoral fairness. Elections are fair when they are administered by a neutral authority; when the electoral administration is sufficiently competent and resourceful to take specific precautions against fraud; when the police, military, and courts treat competing candidates and parties impartially; when contenders all have access to the public media; when electoral districts and rules do not grossly handicap the opposition; when independent monitoring of the voting and vote counting is allowed; when the secrecy of the ballot is protected; when virtually all adults can vote; when the procedures for organizing and counting the vote are widely known; and when there are transparent and impartial procedures for resolving election complaints and disputes. Serious efforts to compromise the freedom and fairness of elections form a visible pattern, beginning well before election day. The biases and misdeeds are there for international observers to see if those observers have the time, experience, courage, resources, and expertise in the country’s politics to do so."
Unfortunately, however, international observers are typically reluctant to denounce a superficially competitive election as rigged beyond redemption. Over and over, from Armenia to Nigeria to Venezuela, the instinct is for international observer missions to declare that even if there was extensive fraud the election broadly reflected "the will of the voters"�as if foreign observers could clearly discern that in the absence of a decent election! The fact that the voting results more or less match reasonably accurate preelection opinion polls does not make an election democratic, for elections are a process that involves much more than merely casting votes on election day and counting them fairly. As Miriam Kornblith, an independent member of Venezuela’s National Electoral Council who watched the country’s president gradually subvert democracy after his initial election in 1998, warns, "Elections can serve to express the collective will and consolidate democracy only when the voting and all that surrounds it are free and fair. Elections that deviate significantly from such standards can serve different ends�including the consolidation of an autocracy that disdains the very democratic mechanisms it loosely and instrumentally follows.
Since the elements of electoral constraint and unfairness span the continuum from isolated to systematic, it is hard to know where precisely to draw the line between democratic and not. Some countries, such as Venezuela, Nigeria, Tanzania, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan, occupy an ambiguous or disputed space between democracy and overt authoritarianism. They have a multiparty electoral system, with significant opposition. They have some space for civil society and intellectual dissent. However, individual and associational freedoms are under such mounting pressure, or elections are so riddled with fraud, or the arenas of political opposition and competition are so constrained and intimidated by the domineering power of the incumbent, that it is difficult to call the systems democratic, even in the minimal sense. I therefore classify them all, as well as Malaysia, Singapore, and Iran, as electoral authoritarian. There are many such regimes in the Middle East and Africa, including monarchies (like Morocco and Jordan) and one-party hegemonic systems (like Cameroon and Ethiopia), which have multiparty elections but are not democracies either because the winning parties do not have real and full power to rule, or because the political opposition does not have a realistic and fair chance of winning. In none of these cases do voters have an adequate chance to hold their rulers accountable.
Although there remains an extensive international system for observing elections, there is also a growing tendency to take democratic elections for granted, as something that, once achieved, becomes easily consolidated. This is a pity, because while free and fair elections are only one component of democracy, they are the most indispensable one, and they are one that ruling parties and presidents have a strong incentive to manipulate and degrade.
Source: Larry Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World, excerpt from Chapter 1: The Universal Value, pp. 17-38 (New York : Times Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2008.)
answer"Is democracy a universal value? Or is it a Western construct that is only applicable in Western societies?"
1. Please refer to the rubric in order to fully understand the expectation of the writing assignment. Many students did not have organization in their essays and did not include a clear thesis. You need to have an introduction (where your thesis must be stated), a body paragraph (where you develop your logic to support your thesis), and a conclusion. This does not necessarily mean that it must be long. Actually there was almost no correlation between the length and the score on the first assignment. But you do need to have a coherently organized paper with a clear topic.

2. This assignment is NOT a summary or a book report, unless the question asks you to do so. Quite many of you wrote papers that resemble more of a summary rather than a critical writing assignment. Since this class is at college-level, you are expected to not only read and comprehend, but also critically think about the material. The thesis in your introduction must reflect on your critical analysis, not what the author argues. It needs to be your own voice. Do you agree with the author? What do you think about the reading that you did? Such questions to yourself would help in forming your own thesis. In the paper, you need to have your own stance as a thesis.

3. After coming up with your thesis, expand on your logic and argument in the body paragraph(s). This can be where you can extensively use evidence from the reading in order to support your own argument. But one thing to note is that, in case you agreed with the author, be careful not to make your body paragraph a repetition of the reading assignment. You can use details and evidence from the reading in whichever way you want in order to support your thesis, but should not lose your own voice in the body paragraph as well.

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