Republicans’ attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act led to vigorous protest, including by disabled Americans, some of whom staged sit-ins at congressional office buildings.
Tom Williams / Getty Images
To facilitate the decision-making process, regardless of who participates (or is allowed to participate), every country has a government. A government helps a country to maintain internal order, to interact with other countries, and to develop laws and policies. What sets government apart from any other group is that only the government has the right to make decisions that are binding on everyone within the nation’s borders and that the government has the right to use force (the threat of fines or jail) to ensure that the laws are followed and to implement its decisions.3 Other groups can make more limited decisions, but they are prohibited from using force to implement them. A corporation such as Microsoft, for instance, can decide to design the Windows operating system for personal computers in a particular way, but that decision is binding only on those who voluntarily buy its product. Furthermore, Microsoft cannot use force to implement its decision. By contrast, the government of the United States can pass a law outlawing child pornography for everyone in the country and can use force to make sure everyone follows it.
government The set of people who make decisions that are binding for all people in the country and have the right to use force and coercion to implement their choices.
citizens Members of a country’s population who are legally recognized as subjects or nationals of the country.
Every person living in a country, then, is required to obey its laws—citizens and noncitizens alike. Citizens are people who are fully qualified and legally recognized as members of a country. However, not everyone living in a country at a given time is considered a citizen. Citizens of other countries who are visiting briefly or who have obtained permission to work or pursue their education in the country for a long or even indefinite period of time are not citizens. Also, several million undocumented immigrants live and work in the United States. But whether they are citizens or not, all who reside within a country’s borders are both protected by the country’s laws and required to obey them.
Naturalization ceremonies, in which noncitizens take an oath of allegiance to the United States and formally become American citizens, are held periodically around the country, usually in nondescript government offices but occasionally at special venues such as the Turner Field baseball stadium in Atlanta.
AP Photo / David Goldman
Various types of governments exist, and political scientists distinguish between them according to the basis of their power—in other words, where they get their right to rule. Many countries throughout the world have some form of nondemocratic government, in which a small group of people govern and the rest of the citizens of the country have no direct voice in what the government does. Important types of non-democracy include government by army officers (Thailand, for instance), government by a hereditary monarch (Saudi Arabia), government by a single party that allows no other parties to operate (Singapore), and government by religious leaders (Iran). In this chapter, however, we will focus on democratic government because that is the form of government in the United States.
Democracy as a Form of Government
In a democracy, all citizens can participate in the making of governmental policy, at least to some extent, even if indirectly. Though democracy is generally defined as “rule by citizens,” this definition is more an ideal than a concrete, observable phenomenon. As we will see in this section, a variety of factors influence how fully and how directly citizens in a democracy share in the rule of the country. In fact, there is no country in the world where all citizens have precisely equal roles in making the decisions of the country. However, a number of countries approximate the ideal well enough that we call them democracies. As shown in Figure 1.1, 116 countries—more than half of all countries in the world—are democracies.
Figure 1.1 Democracies of the World
Source: Freedom House, Electoral Democracies 2018.
Direct Democracy
The closest approximation to rule by all citizens is direct democracy, in which all of the citizens of a community gather to decide policies for that community. It was the mode of government in some ancient Greek city-states, and it still exists today in New England town meetings where all citizens come together to discuss and decide issues.4 Direct democracy is possible only in a small community with relatively simple issues to decide. Even a direct democracy does not exactly accomplish “rule by the citizens,” at least in the sense that all citizens contribute equally to the decision-making process. As in any group formed to accomplish assigned tasks, some people are more experienced or articulate than others, so not everyone is able to contribute equally. In fact, a direct democracy may actually express the will of only a fairly small group of leaders.
democracy Rule by the people.
direct democracy Democracy in which all of the people of a community gather to decide policies for the community.
indirect democracy Democracy in which the people do not decide policies for the community themselves but elect representatives to decide the policies.
Indirect Democracy
Direct democracy is impossible in a complex, modern country such as the United States. How could millions of U.S. citizens come together to make decisions? Faced with thousands of complex, detailed issues each year, how could all citizens participate adequately and still do anything else with their lives? Accordingly, almost all democracies today are indirect democracies, also called representative democracies. In an indirect democracy, all citizens vote to choose, from among alternative candidates, the people who will be in charge of making decisions and implementing policies. In the United States, for example, the people of a city may elect a mayor and members of a city council; residents of each state elect a governor and other statewide officials as well as members of the state’s legislature. Every eligible U.S. citizen can vote to elect the president and members of Congress to represent them.
What is needed for indirect democracy to work well? Obviously, elections are a basic requirement. But are elections enough? Earlier in the chapter, we explained that Singapore holds elections regularly, but we noted that in the 2015 election, the People’s Action Party, which has ruled the country since 1965, got 70 percent of the vote, winning 83 of the 89 seats in Singapore’s Parliament. The government achieved this result by suppressing opposition. Such outcomes show that elections alone do not a democracy make. Thus, effective indirect democracy goes beyond merely holding elections; a number of other pieces must also be in place to ensure that the elections offer citizens a chance to affect decisions through their vote:
open elections
broad participation in the elections
freedom of speech and media
the right to organize
majority rule … but with protection for minority rights
The first four requirements are discussed in this section. The twin requirements of majority rule and protection of minority rights are discussed later in this chapter in the section titled “The Challenges of Democracy.”
The first requirement, of course, is