Conceptualizing Politics

3.   Democratic  government
We are now concluding our journey through some conceptual pre-stages of 
Democracy Two and come to the outline of democracy as a system of government: 
it is a procedure that, based on the political (voting) equality of citizens and under certain pre-
conditions establishes a government while settling conflicts by majority rule. This  definition 
is different from the most common ones.
Calling democracy a procedure means giving it a formal or procedural defini-
tion, at the first sight containing no substantive goals. This has been much criticized 
as impoverishing democracy, but here we are trying to catch the core element of 

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Government and democracy  87
it, which is common to its sub-types; to suggest what particular, time-related ends 
democracy should serve is not our business, as it belongs to political debate rather 
than political philosophy. Besides, we shall see that, once the definition has devel-
oped in all its implications, it turns out not to be as empty of values and goals as it 
may first appear.
The pre-conditions, which will be enumerated below, are co-essential to the pro-
cedure: without them the latter does not deserve the name of democracy.
Establishing a government (not just the executive branch) is the first perfor-
mance of the democratic procedure, though it is often marginalised by theorists and 
ideologues: the much praised advantage of democracy, that is to deliver the most 
ample representation of the people’s interests and ideals, is vain whenever the accent 
set exclusively on representation prevents democratic politics from providing a gov-
ernment that can really implement the projects based on those interests and ideals. 
That the country can have a government providing for its security and wellbeing 
is for the generality of citizens more important than giving every single group a 
share in ruling and legislating; access to media and the parliamentary tribune for its 
representatives meets the requirement of participation. All this is again, in another 
conceptual framework, the same complex we examined in Chapter 2 with regard 
to a legitimate regime’s performances being necessary to its effective legitimation.
Turning now to the core question of democracy, its claim to assert the power 
of the people is ambiguous, even dangerous and should be reformulated. An actor 
called ‘the people’ does not exist; what exists are the citizens, each individual with 
their own rights, interests, passions and goals – which mostly differ from one 
another. In representative democracies, the citizens convene at the ballot box in 
order to establish whose will receives the highest approval, and it is on this ground 
that a government is formed that rules the country, based on the political obliga-
tion taken by both the majority’s and minority’s members. Politocracy, or the rule 
of the citizens (
πολίτης/polites), would be a better name than democracy, as it 
would also dodge the demos-etnos equivocation, but I do not dream of introducing 
it straightaway.
7
This is only possible under the following pre-conditions (A–C):
A1. Whatever the majority, the democratic procedure is neither terminated and 
replaced by dictatorship or theocracy nor disfigured by acts impeding the idea 
that everybody can – now and in the future – cast his or her ballot in freedom 
and equality and after due debate and information.
A2.  Equal voting rights make sense only if the citizens have full access to free media 
and can at any and all times adhere to parties that assemble their demands and 
preferences in somehow coherent projects of how to govern the polity.
The sense of these pre-conditions is that the minority can accept the distribution of 
political power by majority rule only as long as it is reassured of the stable chance 
of becoming majority in the next election. Otherwise it may turn to other, more 
bellicose means of resolving differences or walk out of the community entirely. 

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88  How politics works
This is the fundamental reason for the superiority of democracy over all other types 
of government: it makes government possible by assigning temporary asymmetric 
power by peaceful means, while at the same time preserving everybody’s freedom as 
well as basic equality (‘one citizen, one vote’).
B.  The fundamental civil rights of the citizens cannot be infringed upon by 
majority vote – which rights are intended by this definition will be exam-
ined in Chapter 8. This means that a number of issues are excluded from 
democratic decision making, which has to bow to limits required by lib-
eralism and protected by non-elected bodies such as the courts of law and 
eminently the constitutional courts. The rationale for this is clear: citizens 
will participate in an open political game, unprotected by their own mili-
tias and fortresses, only as long as they can trust that they will not be hurt 
in body or have their property damaged because of what they have said or 
done. The uneasy marriage of liberalism/constitutionalism and democracy 
is also a wall against a totalitarian degeneration of democracy, enacted by a 
legislative branch that may want to assert the alleged will of the people by 
beheading the ‘enemies of the revolution’ (as it happened in France in the 
Years of Terror, 1792–1794) – or those sentenced for heresy in a theocracy. 
Still another institutional mechanism has been devised and also implemented 
in various forms in different countries to shield democracy against the poi-
sons that it may itself generate: a system of checks and balances that adds to the 
democratic strife of parties and personalities a strong monarch-like figure 
such as the president in the US Constitution and/or a quasi-aristocratic 
body such as the US Senate or, previously, the House of Lords in the UK.
8
 
In historical perspective this can be seen as a modern resurrection of the 
doctrine of mixed government, put forward not only by Aristotle and Poly-
bius (the Greek historian 
Πολύβιος, BCE 200–118, not the videogame), but 
also Machiavelli, Jean Calvin (1509–1564) and the Federalist.
9
 Philosophically, 
democracy presupposes that everybody accepts the pluralism of conflicting 
views about God, the world and the polity, with the exception of doctrines 
preaching the destruction of tolerant coexistence among citizens such as 
Nazism or Islamist fundamentalism. Politheism, as we first encountered it in 
Chapter 1, is the foundation of democracy as well – what politicians seem 
to forget in the heat of the debate, when they dismiss the dissenting views 
of their adversaries simply as undemocratic or ‘insulting the people’. Demo-
cratic governance is peaceful management of human conflict, and needs to 
be rooted in a culture of conflict fed by the acceptance of diversity. Democ-
racy cannot be founded – except in a self-defeating mode – on the truth of 
a religion or philosophy. This has nothing to do with moral relativism, since 
government is a political, not a moral, issue and can justify its existence only 
by keeping peace among the citizens, not by submitting some of them to the 
‘truth’ of another part – except in the case of fanaticism or bigotry. Nobody 
is hindered from believing whatever one wishes to believe, or from acting 

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Government and democracy  89
according to it, except if this means hurting others. On the other hand, in the 
case of verifiable and verified truths abstaining from cheating fellow citizens 
by falsifying statistics in economic policy or by denying research results in 
matters of technology and environment is a necessary premise of democratic 
procedures of understanding and bargaining.
10
C.  The will of the voters must effectively shape policy making and be superseded 
neither by the will of foreign powers nor by the influence or imposition due 
to non-elective factors
11
 such as money or mono/oligopolistic media power. 
This opens the difficult question about ‘democracy and capitalism’, which will 
be addressed at the end of this chapter.
The examination that has worked out the pre-conditions under which democracy 
alone as procedure makes sense has confirmed that this model of government, despite 
its much contested formal character, involves a number of values and principles to be 
respected or implemented. When seen as a conflict-settling and  government-providing 
scheme under conditions of freedom and equality, it may look less lofty and inspiring 
than democracy as ‘power of the people’, but is better focused on democracy’s real 
achievements or failures and can better focus our sight on the dangers surrounding it. 
Before we begin examining them, let us however still dwell on its morphology, con-
sidering a number of dichotomies it is sometimes involved with.
The first dichotomy is between ancient and modern democracy.
12
 The first type 
implied the direct participation of the citizens in the proceedings of the assembly as 
the only venue of sovereignty and government, leaving no room for any representa-
tive mechanism or free individual agency. Modern democracy is, as we now know, 
essentially representative and based on the exercise of individual freedoms.
The second dichotomy differentiates between majoritarian and consensus democ-
racy, as defined by the Dutch-American political scientist Arend Lijphart. The first 
one comes close to the British or Westminster model of government (though this 
has been changing since Lijphart formulated his theory and may further change 
towards multipartitism) and entails a clear majority-minority divide; while in a 
consensus democracy all actors seek shared solutions that do not make the divisions 
of society sharper and rather try to include large political and social majorities in a 
‘consociational’ way of governing.
The third dichotomy is the most significant, and comes up here only because 
it furnishes a bridge to another thematic complex, which we could put under the 
heading of the downsides of democracy. It’s the dichotomy between representative 
and  direct democracy, and contains an argument both normative and historical in 
favour of the former, while explaining most of the present evils from the confu-
sion between the two models. The argument maintains that direct democracy, in 
which all citizens participate in frequent or daily decision making, is far from being 
the ideal democracy; that it is wrong to believe that we must replace it with the 
representative one only because of the size of our polities, or that representative 
democracy has to come as near as possible to the direct one. There is a weak and a 
strong reason for this argument.

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90  How politics works
The weak reason says that in modernity, in our late modernity in particular, 
governing an extremely complex mass society surrounded by an even more com-
plex and precarious international environment can be managed only by a political 
leadership and an administrative apparatus that have learned the vision, the skills 
and the sense of balance adequate to the challenge. This remains true even if the 
fundamental choices are made every fourth or fifth year by the entire  population – 
or rather by those who believe that voting is still better than abstention. By vot-
ing (but also by non-voting, which favours candidates and parties more adept at 
mobilising voters) citizens not only choose representatives, but also the strategies 
and policies they or their parties stand for. There remains, however, a difference for 
the electorate between expressing its prevailing will by electing a candidate (or a