The tool illustrated in this workshop is the language tool “Definitions: Dictionaries and beyond” and the subject matter is representative democracy.
Dictionaries are useful tools, they look at many uses of the words they define and attempt to summarize what the person who used the word meant by it — what they intended to communicate. However, there are times we need to be wary of factors such as the brevity of the definition, the context of the particular use and especially that people may use the dictionary definition to mislead deliberately. There will be more detail on this in the chapter on use and abuse of dictionaries in Finished tools.
I will focus on Canada and the United Kingdom as specific examples of representative democracy, because I am most familiar with them and because the other example I know next best, the USA, appears to be disintegrating.
So what is a democracy and why should we want to live in one? Let’s start with a dictionary definition in which we get an approximate idea of what the term means and then develop a deeper and more useful understanding.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “democracy” as
a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.
Merriam-Webster says
a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.
This is vague. This is not the fault of the dictionary but of the fact that it has to cover the ways that millions of people use the word.
The dictionaries also have differences. The Oxford English Dictionary refers to the whole population “or all the eligible members of a state” which could literally mean that if only one member were eligible, it would still be a democracy. Merriam-Webster just uses “the people”, with no such limitations, but many democracies limit participation to adult citizens, excluding many immigrants, and the US excludes adult citizens who have been convicted of a felony.
In particular for democracy, since there is broad agreement that democracy is a Good Thing, many people try to apply it as a way of claiming some of its benefits for their own system. For example, the former East Germany called itself the “German Democratic Republic”, though most people would consider it to be closer to a dictatorship. In this way the usage as reported by dictionaries gets diluted.
The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) compiles an annual report on democracy, which assesses how democratic a country is. It may come as a surprise to many, especially some Americans, to learn that the USA is well down the list and is rated as a “flawed democracy” rather than a “full democracy”.
The EIU assigns countries a score based on various criteria which it documents in its annual report, “Report on Democracy”. It uses 60 factors to rate countries. Others, such as the Freedom House use a different set, but most agree that there is spectrum of democracies.
This shows that democracy is not a binary concept. There are no criteria by which we can simply classify a system of government as a democracy or not; there are degrees of democracy, starting with what portion of the population is deemed eligible. Clearly, the same formal institutions can be more or less democratic, even from this basic definition, if the eligible members include more or fewer members of the population. Even the spectrum — a linear range assigning a single score — is arbitrary because they have to decide which of the factors should carry more weight. Is a score of 3 out of 5 on a free press more important to being a democracy than 3 out of 5 on having an independent elections management body? There is some value in simplifying things like this, both to make it easier to understand and to do comparisons between institutions and over time for one institution but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there are many variables involved and there is a multi-dimensional range of democracies, real and imagined.
Why should we limit the definition to “government”? There are many decisions taken that directly affect people’s lives, that are taken by people and institutions outside government. Restricting democracy to government and excluding it from the workplace, from health care, from the market is part of conservative ideology and is related to their constant resistance to extending more power to the people. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy agrees:
we intend for this definition to cover many different kinds of groups and decision-making procedures that may be called democratic. So there can be democracy in families, voluntary organizations, economic firms, as well as states and transnational and global organizations[ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/democracy/].
Some people are in favour of ‘small government’, by which they mean shrinking the role of government. This shifts many decisions outside government, so this means that the country is less democratic. Those places where health care is managed by the state are surely more democratic than those where it is managed by private providers and by insurance corporations? Regardless of whether it is true that services are provided more efficiently, in some sense, by private industry, it is clearly true that the people have far less say in decision making than the insurance companies that replace government funding. Especially for most people whose employers decided which insurance company to use for their employees and give only a limited range of options.
So if two countries are otherwise identical but in one the healthcare system is managed by a democratic government and in the other by private insurance companies and healthcare providers, the first is more democratic than the other.
Similarly, if two countries are otherwise identical but many businesses are democratically run by co-operatives and the other by capitalists who are the sole decision makers, the first is more democratic. If two countries are otherwise identical but in one, pollution is heavily regulated and inspected, either by government or by independent industry agreement and in the other the air and water are foul, the first is more democratic.
It is not the fault of the dictionaries that the definition is limited to governments, because most people use it that way. It is a systemic issue within capitalist countries that people do not even see it as a possibility to make the rest of their society more democratic. Within this workbook, I will use the phrase “broader democracy” to refer to extensions of democracy beyond government, where the context does not make it clear that I mean that.
The EIU rates some countries as in the upper 90th percentile in its scoring system, implying that they are close to perfect. However, it should be obvious that there is so much they could do to be far more democratic. For example, the fact that the government doesn’t censor the press isn’t the only measure of a free press, nor even the fact that the media are owned by only a few people who constrain what is published. There may be dominant media whose content includes a lot of falsehoods, leaving a large portion of the population believing them or at least having no idea of the truth. Is a Country whose population has free votes but has been deceived into false beliefs as democratic as one where the facts are easy to find and confirm and where deliberate deception is rare and always called out?
Is an otherwise free press that has lost almost all its advertising funding to Internet giants who publish its content for free, still serving democracy if it can’t afford to fund reporters? Surely democracy is less in that case than if it is funding significant investigative reporting?
The EIU gives only half marks on “free print media” if there is a “high degree of concentration of private ownership of national newspapers”, but what if there is only a moderate degree of concentration but all of those owners are billionaires, able to influence the content? Wouldn’t cooperatively-owned media be more democratice?
Most democracies at the national, subnational and even municipal level are representative democracies: the people don’t make decisions on what policies to have or what institutions to have, but only on which people should make those decisions. It is claimed that this is a more practical arrangement than direct democracy, for reasons such as the fact that participating in all decisions would be too time-consuming for most people. The time just to vote is often more than can be spared, let alone the time needed to investigate all the factors that are relevant and significant. However, before arriving at that conclusion, we should understand more of what would be an otherwise ideal democracy, before looking at compromises such as actual representative democracies, so that we can see whether the compromises are acceptable. To do that, we need to move beyond current definitions to ask “what is the point of democracy” and then check to confirm that the current systems do what democracy is supposed to do.
The usual justifications are in terms of equality: nobody is born with an inherent right to make decisions affecting other people. Doctrines such as “The Divine Right of Kings” and “Might Makes Right” are self-serving excuses which don’t justify anything. The only legitimate source of power over people is the voluntary sharing of power by the people. There are, however, practical difficulties. Humans are social animals, they live best where there is division of labour within institutions, whether formal or informal. No baby can survive without adults and nobody can survive without assistance from other adults.
None of us can grow all our own food, using only tools we have made ourselves with materials we have found and processed by ourselves, and we only flourish in association with larger communities. We rely on our institutions to provide the structures and processes needed to allow us to obtain all the products and services we need, and to allow us to provide them to others. Those can be informal, through family and local communities, or formal through organizations such as cooperatives, corporations, charities and government.
A major strength of democracy is to legitimize our relationships with those structures and organizations by giving us a say in how they affect us, so that somehow everyone has access to an equal opportunity to represent their interests, to the extent that our collective ingenuity can devise while preventing those who want to seize an illegitimate amount of power from doing so. This is far easier said than done and at the moment our institutions err on the side of the illegitimately powerful.
One way to evaluate the degree to which a system is democratic is to consider all the individual people whose lives are affected by the decisions made by the institutions in which we live and to consider all the decisions that get made in some sense by all the institutions, whether they are official (e.g. the laws passed by a government, or recorded decisions of a civil servant or judge), or unofficial, (e.g. the decision of a police officer to issue a ticket or merely a verbal warning).
Do all individuals affected in any way have an equal say in the decision or does their influence vary by how wealthy they are, what position they hold, or who they know and have influence over? Conversely, for an individual, how much influence do they have over all the decisions by the systems they are part of, in the cases where they wish to have influence?
What is the scope of government? Is it a minimal government such as demanded by many proponents of “free markets”, who prefer decision-making by markets, or does it make most of the important decisions within the territory it claims, or do other organizations, such as giant corporations make many of those decisions? Wouldn’t a system be more democratic if more of its members had more input to the decisions that affected their lives?
Who are the “members” of the state? Who is eligible to participate? What about decisions with trans-national effect, such as global climate change, or the damming of rivers upstream of their nation? Should the affected people have a say about actions taken outside “their” territory? Should members of a state have a say in decisions that don’t affect them, such as men denying abortion rights to women or straight people denying marriage to same-gender or non-binary couples?
Considering only the right to vote, do the public not only have the right to vote, but exercise it actively with high turnout? If not, why not? Is it because their vote is suppressed by having to stand in line for hours, by feeling that their vote doesn’t count, for not having a candidate that they feel is sufficiently representative. Does it cost them time and money to vote?
Are they fully informed about relevant facts or are they overwhelmed by misinformation (lies)? Even if fully informed, do they have the time to analyze the facts and understand their consequences?
Do they have enough time left after the work they need to do to pay for life’s necessities and relaxation to invest in full participation in public life, or the incentive to do more than just vote, if they even do that?
Do they have a say over policy or do they merely have an ability to choose representatives? Is that “say” merely a vote for or against a given proposal, or do they have a forum in which they can make their views known during the making of the proposals?
Are the representatives accountable to the people or are they freely able to repudiate policies they campaigned on, with no consequence? Do they fully consult the people they supposedly represent when introducing policies that were not discussed during the campaign?
How many of the decisions affecting people’s lives is within a democratic structure in comparison with the portions left to personal decision-making and to decisions made by corporations, or secret deals in back rooms, such as tasks to be done at work, wages to be paid, pollution to be dumped into the environment, houses to be built, speed at which limited resources are to be used up, which stories are to be published in the media,…?
There are so many such questions that It is hard to believe that we have any countries so close to perfect on all these measures that they score over 90% on a democracy index. It leads to the absurd conclusion that countries such as Canada are so close to perfect that there is no point trying to make them more democratic, even though they do not score well on many of the questions above. An obvious example is that they get full marks for “Women in Parliament” if women hold over 20% of the seats. Surely 50 would be better. There is nothing for other under-represented people. They get full marks if the laws do not discriminate “on paper”, but when the people in prison are Indigenous or people of colour in huge disproportion to their numbers in the population and when the police murder them without penalty, that is not “equality before the law”.
Does anyone seriously think that an unhoused person on the street has the same influence over public policy as a billionaire? The city of Toronto bulldozes their temporary shelters while the billionaire’s mansion is protected against any harm by the same police as removed those shelters.
I doubt, on any measure of ability to participate in decisions, weighted by importance, that any countries are even close to 50%. To get closer to 100%, by criteria including those questions above, we need substantially different institutions.
In discussing the issues with the dictionary definition of democracy, it became clear that not only was it not a binary concept but that it had multiple dimensions. Part of the challenge was that the amount of space for a dictionary definition was too small to address the multiple questions raised by “a system of government by the whole population” — how exactly could that be done? Obviously there can’t be a poll of the entire population on every issue.
Dictionary definitions capture the status quo and so are inherently conservative. Part of our job in designing a better future involves pushing our vocabulary to normalize what we want to see, not how things are already seen.
My solution started with three main steps:
The definition I propose for now is based on the questions at the beginning of this investigation:
Democratic (adjective): the degree to which a system provides for all the individual people whose lives are affected by the decisions made within the system to participate effectively in those decisions, in proportion to the extent to which they are affected by the decisions, and taking into account all the decisions that get made in some sense by all the institutions within the system.
The clause about “in proportion to the extent to which they are affected” has an effect in diminishing the tyranny of the majority or the powerful, for example, in legislating control over abortions that do not affect them, or suppressing rights of minority groups.
The goal is to provide both a better, more comprehensive definition and some better underlying principles for democracy if we are to break out of the current claims to be democracies, which serve more as a marketing campaign to persuade us that we already live much closer to full democracy than we do, in spite of the fact that some people have vastly more power than most people put together.
The word “effectively” is intended to include “being fully informed of the facts and expert opinions which are important in making the decisions”.
A critical look at definitions is only one step, but is important to clarify our thinking.
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