Essential characteristics for successful democracy

¶ … characteristics are vital for a democracy to succeed?

Democracy is more than an actual political lifestyle, it is a concept and a philosophy. While today, noticing the realities in the world, we may arrive to the conclusion that democracy is a system that ensures the positive framework for the relations being created between individuals and the state, many of the present-day political philosophers have slightly deviated from this perception to either include other characteristics and perspectives on which to focus or to simply deny the classical concept of democracy and try to implement a new one.

John Mueller, for example, tends to present democracy as a single-sided affair, in which the responsibilities of the citizens are really minimal. Self-interested and egocentric, the citizen living in a democracy, according to Mueller, would simply evaluate whether he is doing well or not and, on these grounds, is likely to exercise his power to change the government or not. In this sense, the democratic citizen does not necessarily look after the well-being of the state or of the actual functionality of democracy.

On the other hand, Mueller supports the idea that democracy is chaotic and that it evolves in time to include more concepts and to better fit the current situations. This is certainly something that can be historically sustained. In the beginning, democracy was seen as a framework in which all members of the city-state (in ancient Greece) would mean and discuss the main decisions needed to be made in the nation. This is certainly not the case now: this form of direct democracy is no longer functional, but it has changed and adapted in order to fit the current needs of society. Representatives are elected by the people in different institutions to serve their interest. Again, Mueller's perspective on egocentric citizens seems justifiable.

Ketcham is keen to counter this one-sided perspective and, noting also the thoughts on the issues of important politicians, such as Vaclav Havel, argues that a functional democracy needs to have a responsible citizen. The good democratic governance will be based on this module of a responsible citizen.

This is certainly something closer to how we have presented democracy in the first paragraph. Democracy, especially because of the level of individual freedom that it proposes, can only be based on responsible citizenship, on the type of citizenship that allows individuals to live alongside each other in a responsible manner.

This type of perspective is somewhat followed through by Joseph Tussman. In an interview, he proposes the concept of the citizen as a "political agent." As a political agent, the responsibility for a citizen is duplicated into several different parts. First of all, as a political agent, the citizen is a participative agent of change. He is able to vote and thus modify the political construction of the society. On the other hand, he is also an agent of stability, because he is able to sustain the democratic development of society through his choices.

Moving on a similar trajectory, theoreticians such as Seymour Martin Lipset see the importance of key individual leaders at particular moments in the history of democracy. While this might be true, we can accept the role of such leaders only in the form of one-time regulators, agents who are able to keep democracy on the right track. While democracy does have its own regulatory capacities, it is true that such agents help avoided situations like the election of a future dictatorship (as was the case in Germany during the 1930s, when Hitler was democratically elected as German chancellor. The reason why this happened was that Germany lacked, during that time, a strong personality to prevent such deviations).