Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

national executive or government. And we define: the democratic method
is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which
individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle
for the people’s vote.” [1]
Here is Przeworski’s statement:
“Yet suppose this is all there is to democracy: that rulers are elected. Is it
little? That depends on the point of departure…Yet if the point of departure
is that in any society there are conflicts, of values and of interests, electing
rulers appears nothing short of miraculous.” [2] (44)
These definitions focus on choosing a government via elections
– ‘electing rulers’ in Przeworski’s terms or a ‘competitive struggle for
the peoples’ vote’ in Schumpeter’s.
Taking the bait, critics then claim that this definition is too narrow,
often that it is only electoral or formal rather than substantive.
The argument goes on and on, for at least six or seven decades now.
While critics of minimal definitions are guilty of simplification and analytical
sloppiness, their arguments get life from the basic wrong move
of those who propose minimal definitions. The minimal definitions are
either wrong or not really minimal. Unless we are playing with words,
election means an open competition with real choices. It is a rich and
expansive concept, and it contains a number of important political and
cultural elements. We can recognize the polemical aims of efforts to
establish a minimal definition, but not accept them as plausible ways
to define the concept or as an adequate analytical framework.
Proponents of allegedly minimal definitions have been wrong
about what they have produced. Their core statements are either
not valid definitions of something we would recognize as democracy,
or more often, these statements are not at all minimal in what they
require and strongly imply. Again, there may well be something called
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DEMOCRATIC VIRTUES
David Plotke
1
Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row,
1950): 269.
2
Adam Przeworski, “Minimalist conception of democracy: a defense,” in Ian Shapiro
and Casiano Hacker-Cordon, editors, Democracy’s Value: 44.