Democratizing or Reconfiguring Predatory Autocracy? Myths and Realities in Africa Today: Myths and Realities in Africa Today

Chapter Eight - Essential Elements of Democracy

Chapter Eight Essential Elements of Democracy Democracy as a form of government always has the following characteristics: • there is a demos, a group which makes political decisions by some form of collective procedure. Non-members of the demos do not participate. In modern democracies the demos is the nation, and citizenship is usually equivalent to membership: • there is a territory where the decisions apply, and where the demos is resident. In modern democracies, the territory is the nation-state, and since this corresponds (in theory) with the homeland of the nation, the demos and the reach of the democratic process neatly coincide. Colonies of democracies are not considered democratic in themselves, if they are governed from the colonial motherland: demos and territory do not coincide; • there is a decision-making procedure, which is either direct (for instance a referendum) or indirect (for instance election of a parliament); • the procedure is regarded as legitimate by the demos, implying that its outcome will be accepted. Political legitimacy is the willingness of the population to accept decisions of the state (government and courts), which go against personal choices or interests. It is especially relevant for democracies, since elections have both winners and losers; • the procedure is effective in the minimal sense that it can be used to change the government, assuming there is sufficient support for that change. Showcase elections, pre-arranged to re-elect the existing regime, are not democratic. • the demos has a long-term unity and continuity, from one decision-making round to the next – without secession of the minority; 52 Democratizing or Reconfiguring Predatory Autocracy? Myths and Realities in Africa Today • in the case of nation-states, the state must be sovereign: democratic elections are pointless if an outside authority can overrule the result. Artificial Suffrage Voting is not in itself a sufficient condition for the existence of democracy. Elections have often been used by authoritarian regimes or dictatorships to give a false sense of democracy. Historical examples include Kenya under Daniel Arab Moi, Egypt under Hosni Mubarak, Cameroon under Paul Biya, etc. or the then USSR under the CPSU before its collapse in 1991, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos. This can happen in a variety of different ways: • Restrictions on either suffrage (the power to vote) or citizenship/membership, because of an individual’s race, social status, beliefs or lifestyle (including work habits, professions or wealth status) voting which is not truly free and fair (e.g., through intimidation of those voting for particular candidates) falsification of the results by vote collection, assessment or reporting fraud restrictions on the formal, actual amount of power that elected representatives are allowed to hold, like amending the constitution; • Representatives are not required to represent their constituents; lacking the use of various overriding mechanisms such as voter override (where the majority of a particular constituency reverses a representative’s decision) or representative recall (where the majority prematurely terminates the representative’s term of service) restrictions on the time periods allowed for voting or prevoting (proxy voting) inhibit true democracy restrictions on the permissible issues of an election and on the “answers” allowed concerning them the strongest support on a plurality of issues or candidates is incorrectly assumed to represent the majority voice and no additional elections are held (restricting the choices to the most popular options from the previous election) to establish the majority opinion 53 Essential Elements of Democracy restrictions on the methods allowed for voting or against changing one’s vote the electoral majority (majority of the votes) supersedes the popular majority (majority of the entire population or demos); the rule of the people is really just the rule of the voters and issues of legitimacy arise. ...