5. Democracy

For most of human history, societies have been governed by a single ruler – monarchy. The monarch can be a king, an emperor, a Pharaoh, a chief, a Khan, a dictator; but the defining feature is that one person (almost always a man) makes the law. The opposite of one-man rule is rule by the people, the demos – democracy. Democracy emerged in the Ancient Greek city-state of Athens, 3,000 years ago. It did not emerge in a completed form, and the Athenian system changed repeatedly over three hundred years until dying out 2,700 years ago. Since then, democracy has existed in limited and/or temporary forms around the world, but as a means of governing large, complex societies, democracy was extremely rare until the nineteenth century. As recently as the 1950s, most states in the world were not democracies (at least not by our current definition of the concept). Since the breakup of European empires and the collapse of the communist world in the late twentieth century, nearly all states in the world today are some form of democracy. But these systems are very different from each other, and there is not a single form of “democracy”. Three common themes of a modern democracy are:

1. Participation.Citizens of the state can vote in elections to change the government, and the government is obliged to enact the citizens’ wishes.

2. A liberal constitution.Thelawsandrulesofthestateareinawrittendocument, a form of contract, which the government and the people agree to follow. If the government does not obey this contract, the people can vote to change the government. However, this is not found in all democracies and some do not have a written constitution e.g., the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.

3. Multiple political parties exist, and these can be voted in or out of government by the citizens. Parties work with and against each other in different combinations, depending on the context at the time.