DEMOCRACY

Democracy



Democracy

Introduction

Democracy is a form of collective decision making that presupposes some form of equality among the participants. The term used empirically and normatively, often simultaneously. It gets used to describe or distinguish one political regime from another. A parliamentary system, for example, is one in which there are procedures and institutions for capturing the views of citizens and translating them into binding decisions. At the same time, however, these empirical descriptions often contain within them normative claims about the way institutions ought to be structured or behave. A democratic political system, in this view, is one that manifests in its institutions and procedures a conception of its members as free and equal and therefore, owed equal respect.

Discussion

Britain, amongst many other countries, claims to be a democracy. Such a claim would suggest that as UK citizens, we have effective influence over government, and over decisions that affect us. However, there has been much controversy over this claim, some arguing that power lies in the hands of just a few, and others standing by the allegation that power in the UK gets widely distributed. In this essay, I will be discussing matters such as elections and the influence of the media to clarify just how democratic the UK is (Inglehart, Welzel, 2005, Pp 21-23).

One of the key features of a democracy is that people have the ability to vote whoever they want, a privilege which we as, citizens of the UK have. Nonetheless, there is still a large amount of dispute as to whether the voting system in the UK is truly democratic. At UK general elections, we use an electoral system most commonly known as first past the post. This means that to become a member of parliament all a candidate has to do is gain more votes than any rival in that constituency. Although this system has much strength, such as the fact that it is simple to understand and that it ultimately represents the views of the people, it also faces many weaknesses.

Direct Democracy and Its Variants

In terms of historical order, direct democracy comes first. Its basic idea was developed and practiced in some of the city-states of ancient Greece, notably Athens, for about a century and a half and then disappeared. The basic idea of direct or participatory democracy is that all members of the political community take part in discussion, debate, and decision making on matters ...