Читать книгу American Democracy in Context - Joseph A. Pika - Страница 18

Direct democracy is impossible in a complex, modern country such as the United States. How could millions of U.S. citizens come together to make decisions? Faced with thousands of complex, detailed issues each year, how could all citizens participate adequately and still do anything else with their lives? Accordingly, almost all democracies today are indirect democracies, also called representative democracies. In an indirect democracy, all citizens vote to choose, from among alternative candidates, the people who will be in charge of making decisions and implementing policies. In the United States, for example, the people of a city may elect a mayor and members of a city council; residents of each state elect a governor and other statewide officials as well as members of the state’s legislature. Every eligible U.S. citizen can vote to elect the president and members of Congress to represent them.

What is needed for indirect democracy to work well? Obviously, elections are a basic requirement. But are elections enough? Earlier in the chapter, we explained that Singapore holds elections regularly, but we noted that in the 2015 election, the People’s Action Party, which has ruled the country since 1965, got 70 percent of the vote, winning 83 of the 89 seats in Singapore’s Parliament. The government achieved this result by suppressing opposition. Such outcomes show that elections alone do not a democracy make. Thus, effective indirect democracy goes beyond merely holding elections; a number of other pieces must also be in place to ensure that the elections offer citizens a chance to affect decisions through their vote:

 open elections

 broad participation in the elections

 freedom of speech and media

 the right to organize

 majority rule … but with protection for minority rights

The first four requirements are discussed in this section. The twin requirements of majority rule and protection of minority rights are discussed later in this chapter in the section titled “The Challenges of Democracy.”

The first requirement, of course, is that elections must be held regularly, and all qualified citizens must have an equal right to participate. Which citizens are considered “qualified” may evolve over time. Women’s right to vote is viewed differently today than it was in the early nineteenth century, for instance, and in every country, there is some age below which citizens are not considered qualified to vote. But a democracy is limited if it denies the right to citizens who are widely regarded as qualified. Democracy in the United States was limited by the systematic denial of African Americans’ right to vote in much of the South until 1965, when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.

For much of the twentieth century, it was legal to require citizens to pay a poll tax as part of their qualification for voting. Rosa Parks herself paid $1.50 in 1957 for the right to vote in Alabama.

There should also be broad participation in the elections. This is a matter of degree—there is never 100 percent participation. But as we will see in Chapter 9, countries vary a good deal in how fully their citizens participate in elections. This is partly a function of citizens’ own willingness to honor their responsibility to participate, but it is also a function of whether the government makes it easy for citizens to vote or sets up impediments to make it inconvenient for them to do so.

A third basic requirement of democracy, beyond the formal arrangements of voting and elections, is sufficient individual freedom to allow open debate. This in turn requires freedom of speech and a free, uncontrolled media. A country might hold regular elections and yet not be a democracy. Singapore is such a country. Another good example is Russia, which holds regular elections with alternative candidates but maintains such stringent governmental control over the media that the country cannot be considered a full democracy.

Finally, citizens of a democracy need to be able to organize independently into political parties and other organizations to pool their political efforts. Again, countries may hold elections yet fail to meet this requirement. For instance, China, which is ruled tightly by its Communist Party, holds elections in which individuals are allowed to run for office freely and sometimes can even win against the official candidate. But these independents are not allowed to form an organization to coordinate their efforts, which prevents them from having an effective voice. The Chinese system is not a democracy because isolated individuals—individuals who cannot combine with others—cannot challenge the sole legal political organization, the Communist Party, in any effective way.

For a democracy to function effectively, therefore, it needs more than just elections. A true democracy allows those with competing points of view to present their ideas in a lively and effective way through the following principles and structures:

 competing political parties

 freedom of speech and association

 equal access of voters to the process of selecting public officials

 equal access to those officials once they are elected

These requirements—the principles of democracy—as they apply to the United States are a central focus of this book. The United States was the world’s first modern democracy, and over the years, aspiring democracies have measured themselves against the U.S. system, treating it as a standard. The extent to which the principles of democracy are realized in countries of the world today varies greatly, however. How does the United States’ democracy compare with that of other governments around the world? Of the 116 democracies shown in the map in Figure 1.1, Freedom House, an organization that researches and promotes democracy, places the United States, along with only 47 other countries, in the highest category of democracies that meet most fully the requirements of a democracy.

For the first two hundred years after the first modern democracy was established in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century, the spread of this form of government was gradual. In a sudden spurt starting in the mid-1970s, however, many countries shifted from nondemocratic forms of government to democracy. Democracies represented only 31 percent of the world’s states in 1977, a figure that had remained essentially unchanged since the 1950s. By the mid-1990s, however, about 62 percent of the world’s states had become democratic, with the sharpest jump in the number of democracies occurring between 1989 and 1995.⁵ Since the 1990s, however, there has been essentially no growth in the number of democracies. It was still the case in 2018 that 62 percent of the countries in the world were democracies.

Most democracies are found among the more prosperous countries of the world. In fact, the average per capita income of democracies is almost twice that of non-democracies.⁶ The reasons why this is so are not fully understood, but it may simply be that people find it easier to work out their differences peaceably when they are reasonably well-off economically. The United States has been one of the world’s most prosperous countries for two centuries.⁷ This has helped it to cement its democratic form of government even during trying times, such as the nineteenth-century Civil War, when that government was severely tested.