1. The document discusses whether democracy is a universal value or a Western construct only applicable in Western societies. 2. It examines different definitions and conceptions of democracy, ranging from thin to thick definitions. A thin definition focuses only on competitive elections, while a thick definition incorporates additional factors like civil liberties and minority rights. 3. The document explores challenges in determining whether a country is democratic, pseudodemocratic, or nondemocratic. Even well-established democracies have uneven playing fields and flaws in their electoral systems. Strict definitions may classify too many countries as nondemocratic.

1. What is the Democratic Value: Is democracy a universal value? Or is it a
Western construct that is only applicable in Western societies?
It is useful at this point to pause and consider a bit more closely what is necessary for a
country to be termed a democracy. To many Americans, and to many others who live or
believe they live in a democracy, the term is so intuitive it seems straightforward. In a
democracy, people have the right to choose their leaders in regular, free, and fair elections.
But how many “people” are we talking about? Is a political system democratic if some of its
citizens are denied the right to vote and run for office? What if a lot of people just don’ t
care and drop out? Elections must be openly competitive to be free. That means allowing
multiple parties to compete. But must the electoral arena be open to any party, no matter its
creed or values? What about personal freedom? Isn’ t democracy also about the individual
freedoms embeIDed in the American Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, and so many national and international charters and covenants dating back decades
and in fact centuries? Can a country be a democracy if it does not grant its people the basic
civil freedoms of speech, press, association, and assembly? Don’ t citizens have the right to
“redress their grievances” in between elections, through petition and protest? And what
about other personal freedoms: the right to practice one’ s religion, to live where one
wants, to travel freely, to own and dispose of private property, and to conduct commerce?
How can a system be called a democracy if it abuses and disenfranchises ethnic, racial, or
religious minorities? Can a political system really be called a democracy if it does not ensure
a rule of law, in which all citizens are equal before the law, no one is above the law, and the
laws themselves are known in advance and administered by an impartial judiciary?A
country cannot be a democracy if there is no freedom of speech and association and no rule
of law. But is this because elections themselves cannot be free and fair under such
circumstances, or because free and fair elections are not enough for a country to be a
democracy?Among political scientists, there is no consensus answer to these questions.
Neither does one exist among democratic policy makers, or think tank analysts, or human
rights activists, or even ordinary citizens. Defining democracy is a bit like interpreting the
Talmud (or any religious text): ask a room of ten rabbis (or political scientists) for the
meaning, and you are likely to get at least eleven different answers. In the case of
democracy, however, these answers tend to group into “thin” and “thick” conceptions. On
the thin side, in a minimal sense, democracy is defined as the Austrian economist Joseph

2. Schumpeter outlined it in the 1940s: a system “for arriving at political decisions in which
individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’ s
vote.” “Or to put it in modern terms, by means of regular, “free and fair” elections. On the
thick side, a system is not a democracy unless it also ensures the following
attributes:Substantial individual freedom of belief, opinion, discussion, speech, publication,
broadcast, assembly, demonstration, petition, and (why not) the Internet.Freedom of ethnic,
religious, racial, and other minority groups (as well as historically excluded majorities) to
practice their religion and culture and to participate equally in political and social life.The
right of all adult citizens to vote and to run for office (if they meet certain minimum age and
competency requirements).Genuine openness and competition in the electoral arena,
enabling any group that adheres to constitutional principles to form a party and contest for
office.Legal equality of all citizens under a rule of law, in which the laws are “clear, publicly
known, universal, stable, and non retroactive.”An independent judiciary to neutrally and
consistently apply the law and protect individual and group rights.Thus, due process of law
and freedom of individuals from torture, terror, and unjustified detention, exile, or
interference in their personal lives’by the state or nonstate actors.Institutional checks on
the power of elected officials, by an independent legislature, court system, and other
autonomous agencies.Real pluralism in sources of information and forms of organization
independent of the state; and thus, a vibrant “civil society.”Control over the military and
state security apparatus by civilians who are ultimately accountable to the people through
elections.How do we sort through these many reasonable expectations of democracy? There
cannot be any one “right” answer to the question of what democracy is; we can only be
transparent, and logical and consistent, in whatever standard we adopt. My own decision’in
this book and in a long career as a political scientist and activist struggling over this
conceptual terrain’has been to view democracy as a political system that varies in depth and
may exist above two distinct thresholds.At the minimal level, if a people can choose and
replace their leaders in regular, free, and fair elections, there is an electoral democracy.
Calling a political system a democracy doesn’ t mean it is a good or admirable system, or
that we needn’ t worry much about improving it further. It simply means that if a majority
of the people want a change in leaders and policies and are able to organize effectively
within the rules, they can get change.But electoral democracies vary enormously in their
quality. Competitive and uncertain elections, even frequent alternation of parties in power,
can coexist with serious abuses of human rights, significant constraints on freedom in many
areas of life, discrimination against minorities, a weak rule of law, a compromised or
ineffectual judiciary, rampant corruption, gerrymandered electoral districts, unresponsive
government, state domination of the mass media, and widespread crime and violence.
Genuine competition to determine who rules does not ensure high levels of freedom,
equality, transparency, social justice, or other liberal values. Electoral democracy helps to
make these other values more achievable, but it does not by any means ensure them.When
we speak of democracy, then, we should aspire to its realization at a higher plane, to the
achievement of the ten “thick” dimensions. When these exist in substantial measure, we can
call a system a liberal democracy. To the extent that these are greatly diminished,
democracy’if it exists at all’is illiberal. If there are regular, multiparty elections and other

3. formal institutions of democracy like a national assembly, court system, constitution, and so
on, but the people are not able to vote their leaders out of power because the system is, in
effect, rigged, then the country has what I call pseudodemocracy.If this distinction seems
neat and manageable, it is not. First, if elections are to be considered democratic, they must
be meaningful in the sense of bestowing real power to govern on those who are elected.
Even if elections were free and fair today in Iran (which they are not), the country could
hardly be considered a democracy when the ultimate power to decide rests with a religious
“supreme leader” who is not accountable to the people. The same could be said for Morocco
or Jordan, where the ultimate power remains with the monarchy, or for some Central
American countries in the 1970s and ’ 80s, when the ultimate power rested with the
military, despite elections. All these systems are or were pseudodemocracies, or what is
sometimes called electoral authoritarian regimes.A similar problem applies when the state
is so thinly present, or so dominated by foreign powers, that the elected government is a
hollow shell, with little effective authority. When civil war rages with little or very limited
effective authority for elected government officials, as in Sierra Leone recently and
Afghanistan today, the mere fact of competitive, reasonably fair elections does not create a
democracy.Many other regimes in the world are only pseudodemocracies because the
realities and rules of the political game really do not make it possible, except through
extraordinary means, to evict the ruling party, coalition, or cabal from power. The standard
of “free and fair” is in fact a fairly demanding one. Elections are “free” when the legal
barriers to entry into the political arena are low, when competing candidates, parties, and
their supporters are free to campaign, and when people can vote for whom they want
without fear and intimidation.Freedom to campaign requires some considerable freedom of
speech, movement, assembly, and association in political life, if not more broadly in civil
society. However, it is hard to separate these two spheres. How many opposition candidates
and supporters must be killed or arrested before one discerns a blatantly undemocratic
pattern? Perhaps it is more than one, but certainly it is less than the twenty-one political
killings, mainly of opposition supporters, in the two months prior to Cambodia’ s 1998
elections. Yet in India, election-related killings have a long history and have in recent years
risen to an alarming degree. No major observer denies that India is a democracy, but
particularly in states like Bihar, where corruption, criminality, murder, and kidnapping have
heavily penetrated the electoral process, it is an illiberal and degraded one.Assessing
electoral fairness can be similarly complicated. The political scientists Steven Levitsky and
Lucan Way argue that political systems descend into competitive authoritarianism when
violations of the “minimum criteria” for democracy are so serious that they create “an
uneven playing field between government and opposition.” Yet even among the liberal and
established democracies, there is rarely a truly level playing field. Most governing parties or
executives enjoy advantages of incumbency: readier access to the media, an easier time
raising money from business, and the ability (strictly legal or not) to use government
transport and staff while campaigning. It is a virtually intrinsic feature of incumbency that
the ruling party can (to one degree or another) steer government spending and benefits to
swing districts and voters. In the United States, electoral competition has become so
disfigured by the scientific gerrymandering of electoral districts that only about a tenth of

4. the seats in the House of Representatives are competitive. In the European Union, political
corruption and favoritism remain so entrenched in the process of government contracting
that one new study labels it “the best system money can buy. If we demand a fully level
playing field as the test of electoral fairness, few if any political systems will qualify. In the
real world, every elected government tries to draw some electoral advantage from its
incumbency, every system is vulnerable to abuse, and maintaining democratic quality
requires constant vigilance. Scattered violations of the rules, or the fact that the ruling party
has some competitive advantages, do not make elections undemocratic, so long as it is still
possible for the voters to “throw the bums out” through normal political means.There is by
now a rather well-evolved set of criteria for electoral fairness. Elections are fair when they
are administered by a neutral authority; when the electoral administration is sufficiently
competent and resourceful to take specific precautions against fraud; when the police,
military, and courts treat competing candidates and parties impartially; when contenders
all have access to the public media; when electoral districts and rules do not grossly
handicap the opposition; when independent monitoring of the voting and vote counting is
allowed; when the secrecy of the ballot is protected; when virtually all adults can vote;
when the procedures for organizing and counting the vote are widely known; and when
there are transparent and impartial procedures for resolving election complaints and
disputes. Serious efforts to compromise the freedom and fairness of elections form a visible
pattern, beginning well before election day. The biases and misdeeds are there for
international observers to see if those observers have the time, experience, courage,
resources, and expertise in the country’s politics to do so.”Unfortunately, however,
international observers are typically reluctant to denounce a superficially competitive
election as rigged beyond redemption. Over and over, from Armenia to Nigeria to
Venezuela, the instinct is for international observer missions to declare that even if there
was extensive fraud the election broadly reflected “the will of the voters”‘as if foreign
observers could clearly discern that in the absence of a decent election! The fact that the
voting results more or less match reasonably accurate preelection opinion polls does not
make an election democratic, for elections are a process that involves much more than
merely casting votes on election day and counting them fairly. As Miriam Kornblith, an
independent member of Venezuela’ s National Electoral Council who watched the
country’ s president gradually subvert democracy after his initial election in 1998, warns,
“Elections can serve to express the collective will and consolidate democracy only when the
voting and all that surrounds it are free and fair. Elections that deviate significantly from
such standards can serve different ends’including the consolidation of an autocracy that
disdains the very democratic mechanisms it loosely and instrumentally follows.Since the
elements of electoral constraint and unfairness span the continuum from isolated to
systematic, it is hard to know where precisely to draw the line between democratic and not.
Some countries, such as Venezuela, Nigeria, Tanzania, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan, occupy an
ambiguous or disputed space between democracy and overt authoritarianism. They have a
multiparty electoral system, with significant opposition. They have some space for civil
society and intellectual dissent. However, individual and associational freedoms are under
such mounting pressure, or elections are so riIDled with fraud, or the arenas of political

5. opposition and competition are so constrained and intimidated by the domineering power
of the incumbent, that it is difficult to call the systems democratic, even in the minimal
sense. I therefore classify them all, as well as Malaysia, Singapore, and Iran, as electoral
authoritarian. There are many such regimes in the MiIDle East and Africa, including
monarchies (like Morocco and Jordan) and one-party hegemonic systems (like Cameroon
and Ethiopia), which have multiparty elections but are not democracies either because the
winning parties do not have real and full power to rule, or because the political opposition
does not have a realistic and fair chance of winning. In none of these cases do voters have an
adequate chance to hold their rulers accountable.Although there remains an extensive
international system for observing elections, there is also a growing tendency to take
democratic elections for granted, as something that, once achieved, becomes easily
consolidated. This is a pity, because while free and fair elections are only one component of
democracy, they are the most indispensable one, and they are one that ruling parties and
presidents have a strong incentive to manipulate and degrade.Source: Larry Diamond, The
Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World, excerpt
from Chapter 1: The Universal Value, pp. 17-38 (New York : Times Books/Henry Holt and
Co., 2008.)answer”Is democracy a universal value? Or is it a Western construct that is only
applicable in Western societies?”1. Please refer to the rubric in order to fully understand the
expectation of the writing assignment. Many students did not have organization in their
essays and did not include a clear thesis. You need to have an introduction (where your
thesis must be stated), a body paragraph (where you develop your logic to support your
thesis), and a conclusion. This does not necessarily mean that it must be long. Actually there
was almost no correlation between the length and the score on the first assignment. But you
do need to have a coherently organized paper with a clear topic.2. This assignment is NOT a
summary or a book report, unless the question asks you to do so. Quite many of you wrote
papers that resemble more of a summary rather than a critical writing assignment. Since
this class is at college-level, you are expected to not only read and comprehend, but also
critically think about the material. The thesis in your introduction must reflect on your
critical analysis, not what the author argues. It needs to be your own voice. Do you agree
with the author? What do you think about the reading that you did? Such questions to
yourself would help in forming your own thesis. In the paper, you need to have your own
stance as a thesis.3. After coming up with your thesis, expand on your logic and argument in
the body paragraph(s). This can be where you can extensively use evidence from the
reading in order to support your own argument. But one thing to note is that, in case you
agreed with the author, be careful not to make your body paragraph a repetition of the
reading assignment. You can use details and evidence from the reading in whichever way
you want in order to support your thesis, but should not lose your own voice in the body
paragraph as well.