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In nonauthoritarian systems, ultimate power rests with the individuals to make decisions concerning their lives. The most extreme form of nonauthoritarianism is called anarchy. Anarchists would do away with government and laws altogether. People advocate anarchy because they value the freedom to do whatever they want more than they value the order and security that governments provide by forbidding or regulating certain kinds of behavior. Few people are true anarchists, however. Anarchy may sound attractive in theory, but the inherent difficulties of the position make it hard to practice. For instance, how could you even organize a revolution to get rid of government without some rules about who is to do what and how decisions are to be made?

anarchy the absence of government and laws

A less extreme form of nonauthoritarian government, and one much more familiar to us, is democracy (from the Greek demos, meaning “people”). In democracies, government is not external to the people, as it is in authoritarian systems; in a fundamental sense, government is the people. Recognizing that collective life usually calls for some restrictions on what individuals may do (laws forbidding murder, for instance, or theft), democracies nevertheless try to maximize freedom for the individuals who live under them. Although they generally make decisions through some sort of majority rule, democracies still provide procedural guarantees to preserve individual rights—usually protections of due process (guarantee of a fair trial, right to a lawyer, and so on) and minority rights. This means that if individuals living in a democracy feel their rights have been violated, they have the right to ask government to remedy the situation.

democracy a government that vests power in the people

Democracies are based on the principle of popular sovereignty; that is, there is no power higher than the people and, in the United States, the document establishing their authority, the Constitution. The central idea here is that no government is considered legitimate unless the governed consent to it, and people are not truly free unless they live under a law of their own making. Democratic narratives vary, however, in how much active control they give to individuals:

popular sovereignty the concept that the citizens are the ultimate source of political power

 Theorists of elite democracy propose that democracy is merely a system of choosing among competing leaders; for the average citizen, input ends after the leader is chosen.⁷ In this view, elections are merely symbolic—to perpetuate the illusion that citizens have consented to their government.

 Advocates of pluralist democracy argue that what is important is not so much individual participation but rather membership in groups that participate in government decision making on their members’ behalf.⁸ As a way of trying to influence a system that gives them a limited voice, citizens join groups of people with whom they share an interest, such as labor unions, professional associations, and environmental or business groups.

 Supporters of participatory democracy claim that individuals have the right to control all the circumstances of their lives, and direct democratic participation should take place not only in government but in industry, education, and community affairs as well.⁹ For advocates of this view, democracy is more than a way to make decisions: it is a way of life, an end in itself.

elite democracy a theory of democracy that limits the citizens’ role to choosing among competing leaders

pluralist democracy a theory of democracy that holds that citizen membership in groups is the key to political power

participatory democracy a theory of democracy that holds that citizens should actively and directly control all aspects of their lives

These theories about how democracy should (or does) work locate the focus of power in elites, groups, and individuals, respectively. Real-world examples of democracy probably include elements of more than one of these theories; they are not mutually exclusive.

The people of many Western countries have found the idea of democracy persuasive enough to found their governments on it. In recent years, especially since the mid-1980s, democracy has been spreading rapidly through the rest of the world as the preferred form of government. No longer the primary province of industrialized Western nations, attempts at democratic governance now extend into Asia, Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the republics of the former Soviet Union. There are many varieties of democracy other than our own. Some democracies make the legislature (the representatives of the people) the most important authority, some retain a monarch with limited powers, and some hold referenda at the national level to get direct feedback on how the people want the government to act on specific issues.

Most democratic forms of government, because of their commitment to procedural values, practice a capitalist form of economics. Fledgling democracies may rely on a high degree of government economic regulation, but advanced industrial democracies combine a considerable amount of personal freedom with a free-market (though still usually regulated) economy. It is rare to find a country that is truly committed to individual political freedom that also tries to regulate the economy heavily. The economist Karl Marx believed that radical democracy would coexist with communally owned property in a form of communist democracy, but such a system has never existed, and most real-world systems fall somewhere along the horizontal continuum shown in Figure 1.3.

advanced industrial democracy a system in which a democratic government allows citizens a considerable amount of personal freedom and maintains a free-market (though still usually regulated) economy

communist democracy a utopian system in which property is communally owned and all decisions are made democratically