What is democracy?
Democracy is a system of government in which political authority rests with the citizen body and is exercised through binding, contested elections. Citizens hold formally equal votes, officials govern under law, and power changes hands by procedure rather than by force.
Last reviewed . Not yet independently reviewed.
Core tenets
- Popular sovereignty
- Authority to govern originates in the citizen body rather than in birth, conquest, doctrine, or wealth.
- Binding, contested elections
- Office is filled by elections that more than one side can win, and the result binds the losing side.
- Political equality
- Each citizen's vote carries the same formal weight in the decision.
- Civil and political liberties
- Speech, assembly, and association are protected, because a contested election requires the ability to organize and dissent.
- Rule of law
- Officials hold power under rules they did not write for themselves and can be removed under those rules.
How it works in practice
Democratic systems vary widely in mechanism. Five choices account for most of the variation between them.
- Franchise
- Rules fixing who counts as a voter. No system has ever enfranchised every resident, so the boundary is itself a democratic question.
- Electoral formula
- How votes convert to seats or offices: plurality districts, proportional lists, ranked ballots, runoffs.
- Representation
- Whether citizens decide directly, through elected representatives, or through a mix such as referendums inside a representative system.
- Constraints on majorities
- Written constitutions, judicial review, federal division, and supermajority thresholds, which limit what a current majority may enact.
- Transfer of power
- The procedure by which an incumbent leaves office. Where this is not routine, the other mechanisms carry little weight.
Common variants
- Direct democracy
- Citizens vote on measures themselves. Used at scale in Swiss cantonal and federal referendums.
- Representative democracy
- Citizens elect officials who legislate. The dominant modern form.
- Parliamentary democracy
- Executive is drawn from and accountable to the legislature.
- Presidential democracy
- Executive is elected separately and serves a fixed term.
- Liberal democracy
- Majority rule plus entrenched individual rights and judicial constraint.
- Constitutional republic
- A representative democracy whose powers and limits are fixed in a written constitution and which has no monarch.
What it is often confused with
Each of these is a separate comparison page that handles the overlap as well as the difference.
Criticisms and debates
Everything above is definitional. This section is evaluative, and it is kept separate for that reason. Each criticism is attributed to a named school and paired with the standard response from within democratic theory.
Public choice theory
Voters face negligible individual influence and so have little reason to inform themselves, while concentrated interests have strong reason to organize. Outcomes therefore skew toward organized minorities.
Response: Democratic theorists reply that aggregation across many imperfectly informed voters can still track the better option, and that the alternative selection methods on offer have no better information record.
Classical and elite theory
From Plato onward, critics have argued that competence in governing is a skill and that selection by popular vote does not test for it.
Response: The standard answer is that democracy is defended less as a filter for competence than as a mechanism for removing rulers without violence, which competing systems lack.
Marxist critique
Formal political equality coexists with large inequality in wealth, and wealth converts into political influence, so the equality is nominal.
Response: Liberal democrats generally accept the mechanism and argue for campaign finance limits and broad franchise protections rather than for abandoning the form.
Historical examples
- Athens, fifth century BCE
- Assembly and sortition, with a citizen body that excluded women, slaves, and resident foreigners.
- Iceland, from 930
- The Althing, one of the oldest continuously cited representative assemblies.
- The United States, from 1789
- A written constitution with a separately elected executive and judicial review, with the franchise expanded repeatedly over two centuries.
- The Third French Republic, 1870 to 1940
- A parliamentary democracy that shows both the durability and the fragility of the form under external pressure.
Sources
- 1.Aristotle. Politics. Book IV, on the forms of rule and the composition of the citizen body.
- 2.Madison, James. Federalist No. 10. 1787.
- 3.Dahl, Robert A. On Democracy. Yale University Press, 1998.
- 4.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Democracy. Substantive revision 2022.
- 5.Encyclopaedia Britannica. Democracy. Accessed 2026-06-30.