Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

To assess forms of representation, one needs criteria. These can be
provided by looking at how modes of representation enact different
democratic virtues. To have that discussion in a useful way requires
dispensing with views of democracy in which all good democratic
things happily go together.
1. Minimal democracy and democracy
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DEMOCRACY TODAY
There can certainly be bad and unfair democracies, but it is hard to
imagine an actual ‘minimal’ democracy in the sense that this concept
has often been used in the last sixty years.
Proponents of a ‘minimal’ definition of democracy, from Schumpeter
on, have achieved large political effects and limited analytical results.
Minimal definitions of democracy do notable work in rejecting
the democratic claims of many regimes and political forces. This is
valuable work in a world where no licensing procedure prevents a
tyranny from declaring itself democratic.
Yet analytically these efforts have not been so successful. They
narrow the meaning of their own concepts so severely as to leave them
with little substance. An election, to take the key term, cannot be nearly
as limited an event as most definitions of minimal democracy claim or
imply, or else the term is simply misapplied. We do not recognize a
contest with one candidate as an election. Nor do we regard an election
without real competition and uncertainty as an election. Nor do we
accept an election under conditions in which citizens cannot express
their views of candidates openly and actively. In these ways and many
more, elections contain a robust range of political and cultural elements.
There is not much minimal about this complex of conditions.
Usually the debate goes like this. Someone – famously Joseph
Schumpeter or more recently Adam Przeworski – tries to provide
a narrow and limited definition of democracy: democracies choose
rulers via elections.
Here is Schumpeter’s definition:
“[…W]e now take the view that the role of the people is to produce a
government, or else an intermediate body which in turn will produce a