Why Identifying Democracy is Hard

 

Introduction

It is easy to point to a regime and declare it to be non-democratic. I am sure that even before many of us came under the guidance of our wise and esteemed leader, Xavier, we would have been able to easily identify some regimes as non-democratic. North Korea and Turkmenistan come to mind. However, the identification of democratic regimes is far less easy. Many articles can and have been written on the status of democracy in Hungary, Turkey, Poland, and others. The reason for these difficulties in identification is simple: there are clearly exclusive factors to democracy, those being factors whose presence is essential to being a democratic regime. However, it is far harder to designate inclusive factors, that is, factors that allow us to declare with certainty that a regime is democratic.

Exclusive Factors

An example of an exclusive factor is elections. Any country that does not hold elections is clearly not a democracy. No one would dispute this fact. On the other hand, many modern non-democracies do still hold elections. For example, North Korea is a country so committed to its elections that voting is mandatory; however, only one candidate appears on each ballot. So, here once again, we can easily declare this to not be following the democratic process. Therefore, we can identify another exclusive factor: the election must be multiparty, or once again, a nation is clearly undemocratic. So just through common sense, we have identified that to be a democracy, a nation must have elections and those elections must offer the electorate multiple choices.

Inclusive Factors

Now that we have covered how and why we can easily identify non-democracies with our two exclusive factors, let us look at why things are not quite so simple when we want to identify democracies. To start, let us list traits we generally associate with democratic regimes: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, a free press, an education system which does not strongly bias the youth, and of course, free, fair, and secret elections. These traits are all clearly important for a healthy democracy; however, many of these traits are present in countries we consider undemocratic and not present in many countries we consider democratic. For example, Singapore has free and secret elections, and in the South of the USA, the education system is highly biased towards Republican ideas. So clearly these factors are not inclusive or exclusive. Non-democracies can have them, and democracies can lack them. They are, for lack of a better word, supplementary. This is the core of the problem: undoubtedly, a nation lacking all of these factors would be considered non-democratic, and one possessing all would be democratic. But the middle of this scale is a no man's land of disagreement where no one's definition reigns supreme (with the exception of our supreme leader, Xavier, obviously).

Conclusion

So, where does this leave us? Well, to me, it makes one thing clear: democracy is non-binary, and outside the fantasy land of thought experiments, there is no perfect democracy (apart from that led by El Partido Único de la Revolución Estudiantil, of course), only shades of grey. As such, we should be careful when appointing the title of democratic to any nation and ensure we are looking carefully at all factors, from as simple as whether or not ID is needed to vote to more complex issues such as the content of textbooks. Furthermore, in my view, it is better to never use the term democracy without clarification. I believe it is much better to describe what about a country is democratic and what needs further work, so as to ensure that an audience is fully aware of the strengths and failings of your target country.