Politics & International Relations
Liberal Democracy
Liberal democracy is a form of government characterized by the protection of individual rights and freedoms, the rule of law, and a system of checks and balances on power. It emphasizes the importance of free and fair elections, political pluralism, and the protection of minority rights. Liberal democracies typically have a constitution that limits the powers of the government and protects the rights of citizens.
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11 Key excerpts on "Liberal Democracy"
eBook - PDFThe Democratic Challenge
Rethinking Democracy and Democratization
- Jorge Nef, Bernd Reiter(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Red Globe Press(Publisher)
49 Chapter 3 Myths and Misconceptions about Democracy The term Liberal Democracy is very often used in current discourse to characterize the type of political regime prevalent in most western nations. Giddens provides a basic definition of this construct: Liberal Democracy, I shall accept with Weber and Bobbio, is essentially a system of representation. It is a form of government characterized by regular elections, universal suffrage, freedom of conscience, and the uni-versal right to stand for office or to form political associations. Defined in such a way, democracy is normally understood in relation to pluralism and the expression of diverse interests. (Giddens, 1994: 112) Having introduced the potential challenges to democracy and laid out what democracy is, as well as what it is not, we can begin to formulate a concept of democracy that reflects all its normative and operational dimensions. We are now also in a better position to evaluate the different challenges to democracy. One of the oldest, most discussed, and yet still unresolved, challenges to democracy results from an inherent tension among the basic principles of democracy and liberalism – both economic and political. This tension has attracted so much reflection and produced such a vast amount of scholarly discussion that we need to dedicate some space to its discussion and provide some relevant background informa-tion in order to allow for an adequate grasping of this old problem. Liberalism and democracy The uneasy relationship between liberalism and democracy is both a theoretical and a practical problem. This means delving into the com-plex historical and structural interplay between the notions of power, equality, liberty, freedom, justice, majority rule, inclusiveness and the like. In its most elementary sense, democracy is majority, popular rule. Liberalism, on the other hand, means safeguarding individual liberty, first and foremost, against a potentially coercive state.
No longer available |Learn more- (Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- University Publications(Publisher)
The political spectrum changed; traditional monarchy became more and more a fringe view and Liberal Democracy became more and more mainstream. By the end of the 19th century, Liberal Democracy was no longer only a liberal idea, but an idea supported by many different ideologies. After World War I and especially after World War II, Liberal Democracy achieved a dominant position among theories of government and is now endorsed by the vast majority of the political spectrum. Although Liberal Democracy was originally put forward by Enlightenment liberals, the relationship between democracy and liberalism has been controversial since the beginning. The ideology of liberalism—particularly in its classical form—is highly individualistic and concerns itself with limiting the power of the state over the individual. In contrast, democracy is seen by some as a collectivist ideal, concerned with empo-wering the masses. Thus, Liberal Democracy may be seen as a compromise between liberal individualism and democratic collectivism. Those who hold this view sometimes point to the existence of ilLiberal Democracy and liberal autocracy as evidence that constitutional liberalism and democratic government are not necessarily interconnected. On the other hand, there is the view that constitutional liberalism and democratic government are not only compatible but necessary for the true existence of each other, both arising from the underlying concept of political equality. The research institute Freedom House today simply defines Liberal Democracy as an electoral democracy also protecting civil liberties. Liberal democracies around the world This map reflects the findings of Freedom House's survey Freedom in the World 2008. Freedom House considers the green nations to be liberal democracies (some of these estimates are disputed). Free Partly Free Not Free
- Rory O'Connell(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
8 Some may put so much emphasis on liberal rights that it is dif fi cult to see what is left of democracy. 9 Conversely, others, while defending the idea of rights, believe that ultimately some authority has to have the fi nal say on what rights we have and that fi nal say belongs with a representative assembly. 10 Whilst the tension between liberalism and democracy (or the rights of the moderns and the rights of the ancients) is a central concern of modern political theorising, 11 it is not clear that there is any de fi nitive resolution of this tension. At some point, it seems any balancing act must come down on the side (at least temporarily) of either liberal rights or representative democracy. The nature and content of the liberal rights protected is also a point of contestation. Do they include only a minimum core of civil and political rights (somewhat like the ECHR and P 1 were originally intended to do), or do they run the gamut of civil, cultural, economic, social and political rights found in UN human rights instruments? Not to mention collective rights, minority rights, people ’ s rights, environmental rights and so on. Liberalism ’ s history is even more deeply contested than this, and critics may argue that liberalism and liberal rights create an overly individualistic or atomistic approach to politics, one where individuals are encouraged to be self-regarding and indeed sel fi sh. 12 The implicit liberal preference for liberty may favour leaving unchecked market forces while the liberal zone of auton-omy may well be a cloak for private oppression, particularly in the home. 13 Thus a host of political theorists from different camps – conservative, socialist, communitarian, republican, feminist – have taken issue with liberal individualism.
eBook - PDFThe Government of the Peoples
On the Idea and Principles of Multilateral Democracy
- F. Cheneval(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
According to the concept of Liberal Democracy: (1) individuals have the right to claim political freedom collectively as statespeoples if they recognize and negotiate the right of others to do the same; (2) political authority implies coercion; and (3) the legitimacy of coercion depends on the mutual recognition of cit- izens as free and equal members of a statespeople. The consequence of these aspects of the normative core of Liberal Democracy is that political authority cannot be carried out simply on the basis of universalistic moral claims of individual rights and societal pluralism. While it is wrong to disregard indi- viduals as the normative reference point of a theory of coexistence of liberal democratic statespeoples, it is equally wrong to disregard the peoples-centered approach to justice. Multilateral democracy is the idea of a specific political order that takes into account the two fundamental normative reference points of Liberal Democracy, that is, citizens and peoples, under conditions of con- tact and interaction among liberal statespeoples. Moreover, it respects the criterion of domestic compatibility, and therefore limits duties to reciprocate the enhancement of individual freedoms under the law to liberal demo- cratic statespeoples only. 7 In other words, it does not suggest constructing transnational democracy among liberal democratic and nondemocratic states. The basic tenet of the idea of multilateral democracy is thus the improve- ment of Liberal Democracy’s guarantee of rights in a transnational context by joint government. The focus is on those rights whose meaningful exer- cise implies a transnational dimension and ultimately entails the necessity of multilateral regulation and coordinated enforcement.
eBook - ePubGreen Liberalism
The Free And The Green Society
- Marcel Wissenburg(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
1Liberal Democracy
1.1 Introduction
Since it is my intention to design a ‘green’ liberalism, a liberal democratic view on nature, the environment and environmental problems, the first thing to ask is: where to start? What precisely is Liberal Democracy about? The aim of this chapter is to develop a relatively formal model of criteria of Liberal Democracy. The criteria I formulate define a stringent but minimal version of Liberal Democracy; stringent in that the conditions are quite strict, but minimal in the sense that adapting them would either change nothing about our conclusions or would disfigure Liberal Democracy beyond recognition.The first thing to note about Liberal Democracy is that it can be represented, like (to some degree) any other political system, as a system designed to translate preferences into rights. More precisely: it can be represented as the existence, on a collective level, of mediating and reconciliatory mechanisms (state, market, education, etc.), transforming the claims of individuals to benefits and the reduction of burdens into formal rights via the recognition of valid claims by means of principles of social justice. Claims can be seen as based on preferences and metadesires, and these in turn are intrinsically related to the individuals’ plans of life and views of the good. Despite the diversity of conceptions of the good life we may assume the existence of a rough consensus on the need for these mechanisms – that is, a rough consensus on the institutions defining Liberal Democracy.This is, obviously, a very one-dimensional view of Liberal Democracy and of politics in general. In real life, the decisions to translate some preferences of some citizens for, say, the conservation of a forest into a specific type of right for all, i.e. the obligation not to destroy the forest, in fact shapes or rearranges preferences. In this case, the lives, possibilities and perspectives of building constructors, businessmen and women, investors, nature lovers etc. are changed, hence their respective sets of (feasible) preferences are altered. Ideally, even the public debate on whether or not to protect a forest can change preferences: opponents may actually convince one another of their views or influence them just enough to build a compromise. In short, it is not realistic to take preferences as a given. Yet this is precisely what I shall do, for the most part.
- Alison J. Ayers(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
26 Hence an orthodox (neo)liberal, procedural notion of democratic governance does seem to exist, which informs and is promulgated by and through the democratisa-tion project. This orthodoxy is identified in the following sections of this chapter. Further critique is elaborated in subsequent chapters. Briefly stated, according to the orthodoxy, democracy comprises the following: the periodic election of political representatives via credible multiparty elections in which (virtually) all the adult population is eligible to vote; constitutionalism, the ‘rule of law’ (including strengthened judicial and legal systems and an inde-pendent judiciary) and respect for ‘human rights’; ‘good governance,’ character -ised by limited, neutral, accountable, transparent and participatory government with the separation of governmental powers and an effective bureaucracy; and an active, independent, plural civil society. 27 Political community is understood exclusively in terms of the state. Thus the Western (neo)liberal orthodoxy is not confined to notions of democratic government, narrowly construed. Liberal Democracy (including its neoliberal variant) is a system of governance under-pinned by putative liberal conceptions and assumptions, such as accountability, transparency, legitimacy, consensus, participation, tolerance and pluralism. In particular, modern liberalism’s distinction between the ‘right’ and the ‘good,’ and apparent prioritisation of the former over the latter, engenders related proposi-tions concerning the nature of state, civil society and the self. Accordingly, mod-ern liberals contend that the state should constitute a ‘neutral’ framework “within which competing conceptions of the good can be equally pursued.” Necessarily related to the notion of a neutral state is the notion of ‘civil society,’ “character-ized as a realm of freedom in which individuals engage in formally uncoerced
eBook - PDF- Gregory H. Fox, Brad R. Roth(Authors)
- 2000(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
24 Nonetheless, international organizations increas- ingly assert that a commitment to the principles of choice, transparency and pluralism that mark political democracy is essential to securing an institutionalized protection of other human rights. 25 This is hardly a new insight: the mutually reinforcing nature of broad political participation and individual freedom has been a major theme in Western political thought over the past two centuries. 26 Second, democratization is increasingly regarded as a means of pre- venting internal armed conflict, which in the s has been unrivaled as the leading form of deadly strife. 27 Democratization is said to address the exclusionary politics lying at the heart of civil conflicts. As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has stated, “in the absence of genuinely democratic institutions, contending interests are likely to seek to settle The spread of Liberal Democracy 24 See Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, UN Doc A/Conf. /, para. () (“[t]he international community should support the strengthening and promoting of democracy, development and respect for human rights”); Annual Report of the Secretary-General on the Work of the Organization, UN Doc. A//, paras. ff. (section of report entitled “Governance, Human Rights and Democratization”); Case C-/, Portuguese Republic v. Council of the European Union, – ECJ Rep. , () (Article () of the EC Treaty “demonstrates the importance to be attached to respect for human rights and democratic principles”); Case ., Inter-Am. Comm’n Hum. Rts. (Mexico), reprinted in Annual Report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, (), pp.
eBook - PDFLiberalism and Pluralism
The Politics of E pluribus unum
- C. Carr(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
C h a p t e r 6 Liberalism and Democracy Mention was made in the last chapter of practical liberalism’s broadly democratic character, and I want now to explore the nature of this char- acter more thoroughly. Although democratic process is an integral feature of practical liberalism, the theory still falls rather short of the demo- cratic extremes favored by so-called deliberative democrats. This will seem wrongheaded to those thinkers who suppose that liberalism should endorse a stronger commitment to democracy than what is on display here. Thus an ancillary aim of the chapter is to consider the kinds of objec- tions deliberative democrats push against liberal theories that advocate a more constrained form of democracy. Under practical liberalism, democratic process is not a necessary con- dition of political legitimacy. Instead, legitimacy rests upon the general acceptability of the liberal principle in conjunction with the governmen- tal commitment to bring the ideal articulated by the principle to life in the polity. Democratic involvement is required here only to flesh out the system of social justice introduced and inspired by the liberal principle. A broader commitment to democracy is present in those thinkers, like Bernard Williams, who argue that people should be permitted input to those decisions that will affect them in some way. 1 The defense of this view can make appeal to the notion of autonomy (respecting persons as autonomous necessitates permitting them input into decisions affecting them) or rational self-interest (people will naturally want to have input into those decisions affecting them). In either case, thinkers holding this view generally suppose that political legitimacy depends upon such a democratic condition. Political legitimacy, in other words, is here regarded as a condition of political process rather than as the outcome of adherence to a politics of principle.
eBook - PDFRawls's Law of Peoples
A Realistic Utopia?
- Rex Martin, David A. Reidy, Rex Martin, David A. Reidy(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
165–6. 16 John Rawls: Collected Papers (hereafter CP ), ed. Samuel Freeman, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 607. 17 LoP , p. 24. 18 See LoP , p. 75, n. 16. A Human Right to Democracy? 297 19 See, for example, Teson, A Philosophy of International Law and Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination . 20 This conception of governmental legitimacy is formulated so as to resemble that used by Charles Beitz in his Political Theory and International Relations , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 78, n. 26; as well as that used by T. M. Scanlon in his “Human Rights as a Neutral Concern,” in Human Rights and United States Foreign Policy , ed. P. Brown and D. MacLean, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1979, p. 83. 21 Some definitions of “democracy” combine substantive features with procedural ones, or blur the distinction between liberalism and democracy. Regarding the practical as well as theoretical importance of these distinctions, see Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice , 2nd edition, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003, ch. 11; Amy Gutmann, “Rawls on the Relationship between Liberalism and Demo-cracy,” in CCR ; and Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right , New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999, especially pp. 154–8. 22 See section 2.3. 23 CP , p. 59. 24 LoP , pp. 52–3. 25 LoP , pp. 44–54. Support for Rawls’s view is provided by John M. Owen, IV in his article, “International Law and the Liberal Peace,” in Democratic Governance and Inter-national Law , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Owen argues that liberal states, which “limit governmental power via civil rights and competitive elections,” do not fight wars against one another, and that it is not democracy alone but liberalism that causes the peace, via ideology and institutions working in tandem.
eBook - PDFDemocracy and the Global System
A Contribution to the Critique of Liberal Internationalism
- F. Biancardi(Author)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
This has begun to have an impact as the case of General Pinochet, among others, has illustrated – it is indeed unlikely that he would have been stripped of his domestic legal immunity were it not for his protracted detainment by Britain. There are also, within international legal documents, increasingly explicit references to democracy as the prime legitimate political frame- work. The European Convention on Human Rights, the conditions of membership to the EU as well as the declaration of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) fall into this category. 498 In addition, of course, Article 21 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights stipulates the right to take part in gov- ernment through free and fair elections. Because of democracy’s ideo- logical and practical affinity with many of the most prevalent human rights issues, as well as its increasingly perceived links with security concerns (see Disjuncture 3), the marginalisation of non-democratic regimes is a key trend of humanitarian international law. While obvi- ously not insurmountable, this marginalisation can serve as an obstacle to the further political and economic integration into the global system, the forgoing of which, particularly under globalised conditions, may be said to exact an increasing cost. Disjuncture 2: internationalisation of political decision-making This issue-area relates to the ‘rapid expansion of transnational links, the growing interpenetration of foreign and domestic policy, and the corre- sponding desire by most states for some form of international gover- nance and regulation to deal with collective policy problems’. 499 The resulting proliferation of international regimes and organisations has 156 Democracy and the Global System
eBook - PDFDemocracy
Problems and Perspectives
- Roland Axtmann(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- EUP(Publisher)
This creates a tension between the effectiveness of political problem-solving at the ‘international’ level, on the one hand, and democratic legitimacy which remains embedded in ‘domestic’ political institu-tional arrangements, on the other hand. This tension is aggravated by the repercussions of international policy-making on domestic socie-ties. Democratic politics at the nation-state level is increasingly curtailed as a result of the binding force of international political agreements. While ‘democracy beyond the nation-state’ remains weak, ‘democracy within the nation-state’ is weakened as well. International policy agreements restrict the range of democratically contested domestic policy options. The human rights regime since 1948, which we discussed in Chapter 2, may serve as an example. For better or worse, human rights qualify the notion of the rightful authority of the state: ‘How a state treats its own citizens, and even what legal and constitutional arrangements it has, can thus no longer 219 Democracy be regarded as a purely internal matter for the government con-cerned’ (Beetham 1998: 61–2). According to David Held, one of the foremost analysts of these developments, globalisation poses the question as to how to combine adequately the system of territorially rooted democratic governance with the transnational and global organisation of social and economic life. Held pinpoints the problem succinctly: National boundaries have traditionally demarcated the basis on which individuals are included and excluded from participation in decisions affecting their lives; but if many socio-economic processes, and the out-comes of decisions about them, stretch beyond national frontiers, then the implications of this are serious, not only for the categories of consent and legitimacy but for all the key ideas of democracy.
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