For much of the twentieth century, it was legal to require citizens to pay a poll tax as part of their qualification for voting. Rosa Parks herself paid $1.50 in 1957 for the right to vote in Alabama.
There should also be broad participation in the elections. This is a matter of degree—there is never 100 percent participation. But as we will see in Chapter 9, countries vary a good deal in how fully their citizens participate in elections. This is partly a function of citizens’ own willingness to honor their responsibility to participate, but it is also a function of whether the government makes it easy for citizens to vote or sets up impediments to make it inconvenient for them to do so.
A third basic requirement of democracy, beyond the formal arrangements of voting and elections, is sufficient individual freedom to allow open debate. This in turn requires freedom of speech and a free, uncontrolled media. A country might hold regular elections and yet not be a democracy. Singapore is such a country. Another good example is Russia, which holds regular elections with alternative candidates but maintains such stringent governmental control over the media that the country cannot be considered a full democracy.
Finally, citizens of a democracy need to be able to organize independently into political parties and other organizations to pool their political efforts. Again, countries may hold elections yet fail to meet this requirement. For instance, China, which is ruled tightly by its Communist Party, holds elections in which individuals are allowed to run for office freely and sometimes can even win against the official candidate. But these independents are not allowed to form an organization to coordinate their efforts, which prevents them from having an effective voice. The Chinese system is not a democracy because isolated individuals—individuals who cannot combine with others—cannot challenge the sole legal political organization, the Communist Party, in any effective way.
For a democracy to function effectively, therefore, it needs more than just elections. A true democracy allows those with competing points of view to present their ideas in a lively and effective way through the following principles and structures:
competing political parties
freedom of speech and association
equal access of voters to the process of selecting public officials
equal access to those officials once they are elected
These requirements—the principles of democracy—as they apply to the United States are a central focus of this book. The United States was the world’s first modern democracy, and over the years, aspiring democracies have measured themselves against the U.S. system, treating it as a standard. The extent to which the principles of democracy are realized in countries of the world today varies greatly, however. How does the United States’ democracy compare with that of other governments around the world? Of the 116 democracies shown in the map in Figure 1.1, Freedom House, an organization that researches and promotes democracy, places the United States, along with only 47 other countries, in the highest category of democracies that meet most fully the requirements of a democracy.
For the first two hundred years after the first modern democracy was established in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century, the spread of this form of government was gradual. In a sudden spurt starting in the mid-1970s, however, many countries shifted from nondemocratic forms of government to democracy. Democracies represented only 31 percent of the world’s states in 1977, a figure that had remained essentially unchanged since the 1950s. By the mid-1990s, however, about 62 percent of the world’s states had become democratic, with the sharpest jump in the number of democracies occurring between 1989 and 1995.5 Since the 1990s, however, there has been essentially no growth in the number of democracies. It was still the case in 2018 that 62 percent of the countries in the world were democracies.
Most democracies are found among the more prosperous countries of the world. In fact, the average per capita income of democracies is almost twice that of non-democracies.6 The reasons why this is so are not fully understood, but it may simply be that people find it easier to work out their differences peaceably when they are reasonably well-off economically. The United States has been one of the world’s most prosperous countries for two centuries.7 This has helped it to cement its democratic form of government even during trying times, such as the nineteenth-century Civil War, when that government was severely tested.
The Challenges of Democracy
The widespread adoption of democracy in the later twentieth century probably stems ultimately from a basic human need for respect. Even if democracy is imperfect as practiced, the aspiration toward a more democratic form of government implies that all people are of equal worth and, at least in principle, have a right to be heard. Certainly, this aspiration has been present throughout American history and has led to a perception, both among Americans and worldwide, that the United States is a moral leader of the world. Translating the aspiration into practice, however, presents obvious difficulties. Democracies face two difficulties in particular—the problem of ensuring majority rule and the problem of protecting minority rights.
Ensuring Majority Rule
Representative democracy embodies the principle of majority rule—the idea that 50 percent plus one of the people should be able to choose a majority of the elected officials in a country and thereby determine its direction. Aside from many questions about the mechanics of elections (which we will explore in greater depth in Chapter 8), the fact that representative democracy makes people equal only in their right to vote also limits majority rule. The vote is a powerful resource in democratic politics, but other resources that are unequally distributed—for example, money, education, and social position (being a newspaper editor, for instance)—give some citizens more access to decision making than others. To the extent that these other resources affect the decisions that elected officials make, 50 percent plus one of the votes may not be the determining factor. According to surveys, for instance, for most of the period since World War II, strong majorities in the United States have favored prayer in the schools and stricter control of firearms, yet neither practice has become national law.
Protecting Minority Rights
Even if majority rule always prevailed, democracies would still face a second challenge—protecting minority rights, the basic freedoms of smaller groups within the general population. These may be racial, ethnic, or religious groups or individuals whose opinions differ from those of the majority. For example, what if a majority wanted to revoke a minority group’s basic human rights, such as the right to equal treatment by the government or the right to speak freely? The principle of majority rule would seem to validate this decision, but most people would agree that it would be the wrong thing to do. In a telling example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white majorities in the Southern states passed many laws pushing African American minorities into inferior, segregated schools and other public facilities and denying them the right to vote. Overcoming the preferences of these majorities did not occur until the 1950s and 1960s, and doing so took rulings from the Supreme Court as well as congressional and presidential action. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, majorities of voters in many