Democracy: the story on HearLore

Democracy

The word democracy first appeared in the 5th century BC in the city-state of Athens, derived from the Greek terms dêmos meaning common people and krátos meaning force or rule. This ancient invention represented a radical departure from the prevailing systems of monarchy and aristocracy, where power was concentrated in the hands of a single ruler or a small elite class. Cleisthenes, known as the father of Athenian democracy, established the first example of this form of government in 508 BC, creating a system where ordinary citizens could participate directly in the political process. The Athenian assembly consisted of all eligible citizens who had the right to speak and vote on laws, setting a precedent for political participation that would echo through millennia. However, this early democracy was far from inclusive by modern standards, as it excluded women, slaves, foreigners, and youths below the age of military service, meaning that effectively only one in four residents of Athens qualified as citizens. The system relied on the random selection of ordinary citizens to fill administrative and judicial offices, a practice known as sortition, which ensured that political power was distributed among the general population rather than concentrated in the hands of a professional political class. Despite these limitations, the Athenian experiment demonstrated that ordinary people could govern themselves, challenging the ancient belief that only the wealthy or noble possessed the wisdom to rule. The concept spread beyond Athens, with Sparta developing its own form of democratic assembly where male citizens over 20 could participate in electing leaders through range voting and shouting, a method Aristotle dismissed as childish compared to the stone voting ballots used by Athenians. The Roman Republic, while contributing significantly to democratic thought, maintained a system where only a minority of Romans were citizens with voting rights, and the votes of the powerful carried more weight through a system of weighted voting. The legacy of these ancient experiments would shape political philosophy for centuries, influencing thinkers from Montesquieu to the American Founding Fathers who grappled with the question of how to create a stable democracy that could survive the challenges of size and diversity.

The Medieval Awakening

During the Middle Ages, most regions in Europe were ruled by clergy or feudal lords, yet various systems involving elections or assemblies existed that hinted at democratic principles. In Scandinavia, bodies known as things consisted of freemen presided by a lawspeaker, responsible for settling political questions, with notable examples including the Althing in Iceland and the Løgting in the Faeroe Islands. The veche, found in Eastern Europe, represented a similar deliberative body, while the Roman Catholic Church had been electing popes through a papal conclave composed of cardinals since 1059. The first documented parliamentary body in Europe emerged in 1188 with the Cortes of León, established by Alfonso IX, which held authority over setting taxation, foreign affairs, and legislating, though the exact nature of its role remains disputed. The Parliament of England had its roots in the restrictions on the power of kings written into Magna Carta in 1215, which explicitly protected certain rights of the King's subjects and implicitly supported what became the English writ of habeas corpus, safeguarding individual freedom against unlawful imprisonment. Simon de Montfort's Parliament in 1265 represented the first representative national assembly in England, marking a pivotal moment in the development of parliamentary democracy. The emergence of petitioning provided some of the earliest evidence of parliament being used as a forum to address the general grievances of ordinary people, although the power to call parliament remained at the pleasure of the monarch. Studies have linked the emergence of parliamentary institutions in Europe during the medieval period to urban agglomeration and the creation of new classes, such as artisans, as well as the presence of nobility and religious elites. Political scientist David Stasavage has connected the fragmentation of Europe, and its subsequent democratization, to the manner in which the Roman Empire collapsed, with Roman territory being conquered by small fragmented groups of Germanic tribes, thus leading to the creation of small political units where rulers were relatively weak and needed the consent of the governed to ward off foreign threats. In Poland, noble democracy was characterized by an increase in the activity of the middle nobility, which wanted to increase their share in exercising power at the expense of the magnates, leading to the establishment of the institution of the land sejmik, which subsequently obtained more rights. During the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth century, sejmiks received more and more power and became the most important institutions of local power, with Casimir IV Jagiellon granting them the right to decide on taxes and to convene a mass mobilization in the Nieszawa Statutes in 1454. The Republic of Ragusa, established in 1358 and centered around the city of Dubrovnik, provided representation and voting rights to its male aristocracy only, while various Italian city-states and polities had republic forms of government, such as the Republic of Florence, established in 1115, which was led by the Signoria whose members were chosen by sortition. In the 10th to 15th century Frisia, a distinctly non-feudal society, the right to vote on local matters and on county officials was based on land size, demonstrating that democratic practices had emerged organically in societies around the world that had no contact with each other.

When and where did the word democracy first appear?

The word democracy first appeared in the 5th century BC in the city-state of Athens. It was derived from the Greek terms dêmos meaning common people and krátos meaning force or rule.

Who established the first example of Athenian democracy and when?

Cleisthenes established the first example of Athenian democracy in 508 BC. He is known as the father of Athenian democracy and created a system where ordinary citizens could participate directly in the political process.

Which country became the first to establish active universal suffrage in 1893?

New Zealand became the first country in the world to establish active universal suffrage in 1893. This achievement recognized women as having the right to vote, excluding the short-lived 18th-century Corsican Republic.

What is the oldest surviving governmental codified constitution in the United States?

The United States Constitution of 1787 is the oldest surviving, still active, governmental codified constitution. It provides for an elected government and protects civil rights and liberties but did not end slavery nor extend voting rights in the United States.

When was the Polish-Lithuanian Constitution of the 3rd of May 1791 declared null and void?

The Polish-Lithuanian Constitution of the 3rd of May 1791 was declared null and void by the Grodno Sejm that met in 1793. It was in force for less than 19 months but helped keep alive Polish aspirations for the eventual restoration of the country's sovereignty.

What is the difference between direct democracy and representative democracy?

Direct democracy is a political system where citizens participate in decision-making personally, while representative democracy involves the election of government officials by the people being represented. In representative democracy, political power is exercised indirectly through elected representatives.

The Enlightenment Revolution

In 17th century England, there was renewed interest in Magna Carta, leading to the Parliament of England passing the Petition of Right in 1628, which established certain liberties for subjects. The English Civil War, fought between 1642 and 1651, was waged between the King and an oligarchic but elected Parliament, during which the idea of a political party took form with groups debating rights to political representation during the Putney Debates of 1647. Subsequently, the Protectorate and the English Restoration restored more autocratic rule, although Parliament passed the Habeas Corpus Act in 1679, which strengthened the convention that forbade detention lacking sufficient cause or evidence. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Bill of Rights was enacted in 1689, which codified certain rights and liberties and is still in effect, setting out the requirement for regular elections, rules for freedom of speech in Parliament, and limiting the power of the monarch, ensuring that, unlike much of Europe at the time, royal absolutism would not prevail. Economic historians Douglass North and Barry Weingast have characterized the institutions implemented in the Glorious Revolution as a resounding success in terms of restraining the government and ensuring protection for property rights. Thomas Hobbes was the first philosopher to articulate a detailed social contract theory, writing in Leviathan in 1651, theorizing that individuals living in the state of nature led lives that were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, and constantly waged a war of all against all. In order to prevent the occurrence of an anarchic state of nature, Hobbes reasoned that individuals ceded their rights to a strong, authoritarian power, advocating for an absolute monarchy which, in his opinion, was the best form of government. Later, philosopher and physician John Locke would posit a different interpretation of social contract theory, writing in his Two Treatises of Government in 1689, positing that all individuals possessed the inalienable rights to life, liberty and estate, or property. According to Locke, individuals would voluntarily come together to form a state for the purposes of defending their rights, with property rights being particularly important, whose protection Locke deemed to be a government's primary purpose. Locke asserted that governments were legitimate only if they held the consent of the governed, and citizens had the right to revolt against a government that acted against their interest or became tyrannical. Although they were not widely read during his lifetime, Locke's works are considered the founding documents of liberal thought and profoundly influenced the leaders of the American Revolution and later the French Revolution. His liberal democratic framework of governance remains the preeminent form of democracy in the world. In the Cossack republics of Ukraine in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Cossack Hetmanate and Zaporizhian Sich, the holder of the highest post of Hetman was elected by the representatives from the country's districts, demonstrating that democratic practices had emerged in diverse contexts. In North America, representative government began in Jamestown, Virginia, with the election of the House of Burgesses, the forerunner of the Virginia General Assembly, in 1619, while English Puritans who migrated from 1620 established colonies in New England whose local governance was democratic, applying the democratic organization of their congregations also to the administration of their communities in worldly matters.

The Expanding Franchise

The first Parliament of Great Britain was established in 1707, after the merger of the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland under the Acts of Union, with two key documents of the UK's uncodified constitution, the English Declaration of Right and the Scottish Claim of Right, both from 1689, cementing Parliament's position as the supreme law-making body and saying that the election of members of Parliament ought to be free. However, Parliament was only elected by male property owners, which amounted to 3% of the population in 1780, and the first known British person of African heritage to vote in a general election, Ignatius Sancho, voted in 1774 and 1780. During the Age of Liberty in Sweden from 1718 to 1772, civil rights were expanded and power shifted from the monarch to parliament, with the taxed peasantry represented in parliament, although with little influence, but commoners without taxed property had no suffrage. The creation of the short-lived Corsican Republic in 1755 was an early attempt to adopt a democratic constitution, with all men and women above age of 25 able to vote, making this Corsican Constitution the first based on Enlightenment principles and including female suffrage, something that was not included in most other democracies until the 20th century. Colonial America had similar property qualifications as Britain, and in the period before 1776 the abundance and availability of land meant that large numbers of colonists met such requirements, with at least 60 per cent of adult white males able to vote. The great majority of white men were farmers who met the property ownership or taxpaying requirements, but with few exceptions, no blacks or women could vote. Vermont, which, on declaring independence of Great Britain in 1777, adopted a constitution modelled on Pennsylvania's citizenship and democratic suffrage for males with or without property, represented an early exception. The United States Constitution of 1787 is the oldest surviving, still active, governmental codified constitution, providing for an elected government and protecting civil rights and liberties, but did not end slavery nor extend voting rights in the United States, instead leaving the issue of suffrage to the individual states. Generally, states limited suffrage to white male property owners and taxpayers, and at the time of the first Presidential election in 1789, about 6% of the population was eligible to vote. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites only, and the Bill of Rights in 1791 set limits on government power to protect personal freedoms but had little impact on judgements by the courts for the first 130 years after ratification. In 1789, Revolutionary France adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and, although short-lived, the National Convention was elected by all men in 1792, while the Polish-Lithuanian Constitution of the 3rd of May 1791 sought to implement a more effective constitutional monarchy, introducing political equality between townspeople and nobility, and placing the peasants under the protection of the government, mitigating the worst abuses of serfdom. In force for less than 19 months, it was declared null and void by the Grodno Sejm that met in 1793, but nonetheless, the 1791 Constitution helped keep alive Polish aspirations for the eventual restoration of the country's sovereignty over a century later. In the United States, the 1828 presidential election was the first in which non-property-holding white males could vote in the vast majority of states, with voter turnout soaring during the 1830s, reaching about 80% of the adult white male population in the 1840 presidential election. North Carolina was the last state to abolish property qualification in 1856, resulting in a close approximation to universal white male suffrage, although tax-paying requirements remained in five states in 1860 and survived in two states until the 20th century. In the 1860 United States census, the slave population had grown to four million, and in Reconstruction after the Civil War, three constitutional amendments were passed: the 13th Amendment in 1865 that ended slavery, the 14th Amendment in 1869 that gave black people citizenship, and the 15th Amendment in 1870 that gave black males a nominal right to vote. Full enfranchisement of citizens was not secured until after the civil rights movement gained passage by the US Congress of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The voting franchise in the United Kingdom was expanded and made more uniform in a series of reforms that began with the Reform Act 1832 and continued into the 20th century, notably with the Representation of the People Act 1918 and the Equal Franchise Act 1928. Universal male suffrage was established in France in March 1848 in the wake of the French Revolution of 1848, during which several revolutions broke out in Europe as rulers were confronted with popular demands for liberal constitutions and more democratic government. In 1876, the Ottoman Empire transitioned from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one, and held two elections the next year to elect members to her newly formed parliament, with Provisional Electoral Regulations stating that the elected members of the Provincial Administrative Councils would elect members to the first Parliament. Later that year, a new constitution was promulgated, which provided for a bicameral Parliament with a Senate appointed by the Sultan and a popularly elected Chamber of Deputies, with only men above the age of 30 who were competent in Turkish and had full civil rights allowed to stand for election. Full universal suffrage was achieved in 1934. In 1893, the self-governing colony New Zealand became the first country in the world, except for the short-lived 18th-century Corsican Republic, to establish active universal suffrage by recognizing women as having the right to vote.

The Modern Waves

20th-century transitions to liberal democracy have come in successive waves of democracy, variously resulting from wars, revolutions, decolonization, and religious and economic circumstances. Global waves of democratic regression reversing democratization have also occurred in the 1920s and 30s, in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the 2010s. World War I and the dissolution of the autocratic Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires resulted in the creation of new nation-states in Europe, most of them at least nominally democratic. In the 1920s democratic movements flourished and women's suffrage advanced, but the Great Depression brought disenchantment and most of the countries of Europe, Latin America, and Asia turned to strong-man rule or dictatorships. Fascism and dictatorships flourished in Nazi Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal, as well as non-democratic governments in the Baltics, the Balkans, Brazil, Cuba, China, and Japan, among others. The Soviet of Workers' Deputies of Saint Petersburg in 1905, with Leon Trotsky in the center, represented an early example of a workers council. World War II brought a definitive reversal of this trend in Western Europe, with the democratisation of the American, British, and French sectors of occupied Germany, Austria, Italy, and the occupied Japan serving as a model for the later theory of government change. However, most of Eastern Europe, including the Soviet sector of Germany, fell into the non-democratic Soviet-dominated bloc. The war was followed by decolonization, and again most of the new independent states had nominally democratic constitutions. India emerged as the world's largest democracy and continues to be so, with countries that were once part of the British Empire often adopting the British Westminster system. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights mandated democracy, and by 1960, the vast majority of country-states were nominally democracies, although most of the world's populations lived in nominal democracies that experienced sham elections, and other forms of subterfuge, particularly in Communist states and the former colonies. A subsequent wave of democratisation brought substantial gains toward true liberal democracy for many states, dubbed the third wave of democracy. Portugal, Spain, and several of the military dictatorships in South America returned to civilian rule in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by countries in East and South Asia by the mid-to-late 1980s. Economic malaise in the 1980s, along with resentment of Soviet oppression, contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the associated end of the Cold War, and the democratisation and liberalisation of the former Eastern bloc countries. The most successful of the new democracies were those geographically and culturally closest to western Europe, and they are now either part of the European Union or candidate states. In 1986, after the toppling of the most prominent Asian dictatorship, the only democratic state of its kind at the time emerged in the Philippines with the rise of Corazon Aquino, who would later be known as the mother of Asian democracy. The liberal trend spread to some states in Africa in the 1990s, most prominently in South Africa, with some recent examples of attempts of liberalisation including the Indonesian Revolution of 1998, the Bulldozer Revolution in Yugoslavia, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, and the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia. According to Freedom House, in 2007 there were 123 electoral democracies, up from 40 in 1972, and according to World Forum on Democracy, electoral democracies now represent 120 of the 192 existing countries and constitute 58.2 per cent of the world's population. At the same time liberal democracies, i.e., countries Freedom House regards as free and respectful of basic human rights and the rule of law, are 85 in number and represent 38 per cent of the global population. Also in 2007 the United Nations declared the 15th of September the International Day of Democracy. Many countries reduced their voting age to 18 years, with the major democracies beginning to do so in the 1970s starting in Western Europe and North America, while most electoral democracies continue to exclude those younger than 18 from voting. The voting age has been lowered to 16 for national elections in a number of countries, including Brazil, Austria, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and in California, a 2004 proposal to permit a quarter vote at 14 and a half vote at 16 was ultimately defeated. In 2008, the German parliament proposed but shelved a bill that would grant the vote to each citizen at birth, to be used by a parent until the child claims it for themselves. According to Freedom House, starting in 2005, there have been 17 consecutive years in which declines in political rights and civil liberties throughout the world have outnumbered improvements, as populist and nationalist political forces have gained ground everywhere from Poland under the Law and Justice party to the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte. In a Freedom House report released in 2018, Democracy Scores for most countries declined for the 12th consecutive year. The Christian Science Monitor reported that nationalist and populist political ideologies were gaining ground, at the expense of rule of law, in countries like Poland, Turkey and Hungary, with in Poland, the President appointing 27 new Supreme Court judges over legal objections from the European Commission, and in Turkey, thousands of judges being removed from their positions following a failed coup attempt during a government crackdown. Democratic backsliding in the 2010s were attributed to economic inequality and social discontent, personalism, poor government's management of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as other factors such as manipulation of civil society, toxic polarization, foreign disinformation campaigns, racism and nativism, excessive executive power, and decreased power of the opposition. Within English-speaking Western democracies, protection-based attitudes combining cultural conservatism and leftist economic attitudes were the strongest predictor of support for authoritarian modes of governance.

The Theoretical Framework

Aristotle's democratic theory contrasted rule by the many, or democracy and timocracy, with rule by the few, or oligarchy, aristocracy, and elitism, and with rule by a single person, or tyranny, autocracy, and absolute monarchy. He also thought that there was a good and a bad variant of each system, considering democracy to be the degenerate counterpart to timocracy. A common view among early and renaissance Republican theorists was that democracy could only survive in small political communities, heeding the lessons of the Roman Republic's shift to monarchism as it grew larger or smaller. These Republican theorists held that the expansion of territory and population inevitably led to tyranny, and democracy was therefore highly fragile and rare historically, as it could only survive in small political units, which due to their size were vulnerable to conquest by larger political units. Montesquieu famously said, if a republic is small, it is destroyed by an outside force, if it is large, it is destroyed by an internal vice, while Rousseau asserted, It is, therefore the natural property of small states to be governed as a republic, of middling ones to be subject to a monarch, and of large empires to be swayed by a despotic prince. Among modern political theorists, there are different fundamental conceptions of democracy, with Aggregation theory claiming that the aim of the democratic processes is to solicit citizens' preferences and aggregate them together to determine what social policies society should adopt. Therefore, proponents of this view hold that democratic participation should primarily focus on voting, where the policy with the most votes gets implemented. Different variants of aggregative democracy exist, and according to the minimalist democracy conception, elections are a mechanism for competition between politicians. Joseph Schumpeter articulated this view famously in his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, with contemporary proponents of minimalism including William H. Riker, Adam Przeworski, and Richard Posner. According to the median voter theorem, governments will tend to produce laws and policies close to the views of the median voter with half to their left and the other half to their right, and Anthony Downs suggests that ideological political parties are necessary to act as a mediating broker between individuals and governments, laying out this view in his 1957 book An Economic Theory of Democracy. According to the theory of direct democracy, on the other hand, citizens should vote directly, not through their representatives, on legislative proposals, with proponents offering varied reasons to support this view, including that political activity can be valuable in itself, it socialises and educates citizens, and popular participation can check powerful elites. Proponents view citizens do not rule themselves unless they directly decide laws and policies. Robert A. Dahl argues that the fundamental democratic principle is that, when it comes to binding collective decisions, each person in a political community is entitled to have his or her interests be given equal consideration, not necessarily that all people are equally satisfied by the collective decision, using the term polyarchy to refer to societies in which there exists a certain set of institutions and procedures which are perceived as leading to such democracy. First and foremost among these institutions is the regular occurrence of free and open elections which are used to select representatives who then manage all or most of the public policy of the society, although these polyarchic procedures may not create a full democracy if, for example, poverty prevents political participation. Similarly, Ronald Dworkin argues that democracy is a substantive, not a merely procedural, ideal. Deliberative democracy is based on the notion that democracy is government by deliberation, and unlike aggregative democracy, deliberative democracy holds that, for a democratic decision to be legitimate, it must be preceded by authentic deliberation, not merely the aggregation of preferences that occurs in voting. Authentic deliberation is deliberation among decision-makers that is free from distortions of unequal political power, such as power a decision-maker obtained through economic wealth or the support of interest groups. If the decision-makers cannot reach consensus after authentically deliberating on a proposal, then they vote on the proposal using a form of majority rule, with citizens assemblies considered by many scholars as practical examples of deliberative democracy, with a recent OECD report identifying citizens assemblies as an increasingly popular mechanism to involve citizens in governmental decision-making.

The Global Landscape

Democracy has taken a number of forms, both in theory and practice, with some varieties of democracy providing better representation and more freedom for their citizens than others. However, if any democracy is not structured to prohibit the government from excluding the people from the legislative process, or any branch of government from altering the separation of powers in its favour, then a branch of the system can accumulate too much power and destroy the democracy. There are two basic forms of democracy, both of which concern how the whole body of all eligible citizens executes its will. One form of democracy is direct democracy, in which all eligible citizens have active participation in the political decision making, for example voting on policy initiatives directly. In most modern democracies, the whole body of eligible citizens remain the sovereign power but political power is exercised indirectly through elected representatives, this is called a representative democracy. Direct democracy is a political system where the citizens participate in the decision-making personally, contrary to relying on intermediaries or representatives, giving the voting population the power to change constitutional laws, put forth initiatives, referendums and suggestions for laws. Within modern-day representative governments, certain electoral tools like referendums, citizens' initiatives and recall elections are referred to as forms of direct democracy, with some advocates of direct democracy arguing for local assemblies of face-to-face discussion. Direct democracy as a government system currently exists in the Swiss cantons of Appenzell Innerrhoden and Glarus, the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities, communities affiliated with the CIPO-RFM, the Bolivian city councils of FEJUVE, and Kurdish cantons of Rojava. Semi-direct modern democracies that are predominantly representative in nature also heavily rely upon forms of political action that are directly democratic, termed semi-direct democracies or participatory democracies, with examples including Switzerland and some U.S. states, where frequent use is made of referendums and initiatives. The Swiss confederation is a semi-direct democracy, with citizens able to propose changes to the constitution or ask for a referendum to be held on any law voted by the parliament, and between January 1995 and June 2005, Swiss citizens voted 31 times, to answer 103 questions, while during the same period, French citizens participated in only two referendums. Although in the past 120 years less than 250 initiatives have been put to referendum, examples include the extensive use of referendums in the US state of California, which is a state that has more than 20 million voters, and in New England, town meetings are often used, especially in rural areas, to manage local government, creating a hybrid form of government, with a local direct democracy and a representative state government. Most Vermont towns hold annual town meetings in March in which town officers are elected, budgets for the town and schools are voted on, and citizens have the opportunity to speak and be heard on political matters. Representative democracy involves the election of government officials by the people being represented, and if the head of state is also democratically elected then it is called a democratic republic. The most common mechanisms involve election of the candidate with a majority or a plurality of the votes, with most western countries having representative systems. Representatives may be elected or become diplomatic representatives by a particular district or constituency, or represent the entire electorate through proportional systems, with some using a combination of the two. Some representative democracies also incorporate elements of direct democracy, such as referendums, and a characteristic of representative democracy is that while the representatives are elected by the people to act in the people's interest, they retain the freedom to exercise their own judgement as how best to do so. Such reasons have driven criticism upon representative democracy, pointing out the contradictions of representation mechanisms with democracy. Parliamentary democracy is a representative democracy where government is appointed by or can be dismissed by representatives as opposed to a presidential rule wherein the president is both head of state and the head of government and is elected by the voters. Under a parliamentary democracy, government is exercised by delegation to an executive ministry and subject to ongoing review, checks and balances by the legislative parliament elected by the people, with the prime minister able to be dismissed by the legislature at any point in time for not meeting the expectations of the legislature through a vote of no confidence where the legislature decides whether or not to remove the prime minister from office with majority support for dismissal. In some countries, the prime minister can also call an election at any point in time, typically when the prime minister believes that they are in good favour with the public as to get re-elected, while in other parliamentary democracies, extra elections are virtually never held, a minority government being preferred until the next ordinary elections. An important feature of the parliamentary democracy is the concept of the loyal opposition, with the essence of the concept being that the second largest political party or opposition opposes the governing party or coalition, while still remaining loyal to the state and its democratic principles. Presidential democracy is a system where the public elects the president through an election, with the president serving as both the head of state and head of government controlling most of the executive powers, serving for a specific term and cannot exceed that amount of time. The legislature often has limited ability to remove a president from office, with elections typically having a fixed date and not easily changed, and the president having direct control over the cabinet, specifically appointing the cabinet members. The executive usually has the responsibility to execute or implement legislation and may have the limited legislative powers, such as a veto, while a legislative branch passes legislation and budgets, providing some measure of separation of powers. However, a legislative branch passes legislation and budgets, and this provides some measure of separation of powers, but in consequence, however, the president and the legislature may end up in the control of separate parties, allowing one to block the other and thereby interfere with the orderly operation of the state, which may be the reason why presidential democracy is not very common outside the Americas, Africa, and Central and Southeast Asia. A semi-presidential system is a system of democracy in which the government includes both a prime minister and a president, with the particular powers held by the prime minister and president varying by country. Many countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavian countries, Thailand, Japan and Bhutan turned powerful monarchs into constitutional monarchs, often gradually, with limited or symbolic roles, with strongly limited constitutional monarchies, such as the United Kingdom, having been referred to as crowned republics by writers such as H. G. Wells. In other countries, the monarchy was abolished along with the aristocratic system, as in France, China, Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Greece, and Egypt, with an elected person, with or without significant powers, becoming the head of state in these countries. The term republic has many different meanings, but today often refers to a representative democracy with an elected head of state, such as a president, serving for a limited term, in contrast to states with a hereditary monarch as a head of state, even if these states also are representative democracies with an elected or appointed head of government such as a prime minister. The Founding Fathers of the United States often criticised direct democracy, which in their view often came without the protection of a constitution enshrining inalienable rights, with James Madison arguing, especially in The Federalist No. 10, that what distinguished a direct democracy from a republic was that the former became weaker as it got larger and suffered more violently from the effects of faction, whereas a republic could get stronger as it got larger and combats faction by its very structure. Professors Richard Ellis of Willamette University and Michael Nelson of Rhodes College argue that much constitutional thought, from Madison to Lincoln and beyond, has focused on the problem of majority tyranny, concluding that the principles of republican government embedded in the Constitution represent an effort by the framers to ensure that the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would not be trampled by majorities. What was critical to American values, John Adams insisted, was that the government be bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making, and a right to defend, and as Benjamin Franklin was exiting after writing the US Constitution, Elizabeth Willing Powel asked him, Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?, with He replied, A republic, if you can keep it. A liberal democracy is a representative democracy which enshrines a liberal political philosophy, where the ability of the elected representatives to exercise decision-making power is subject to the rule of law, moderated by a constitution or laws such as the protection of the rights and freedoms of individuals, and constrained on the extent to which the will of the majority can be exercised against the rights of minorities. Socialist thought has several different views on democracy, for example social democracy or democratic socialism, with many democratic socialists and social democrats believing in a form of participatory, industrial, economic and/or workplace democracy combined with a representative democracy. Marxist theory supports a democratic society centering the working class, with some Marxists and Trotskyists believing in direct democracy or workers' councils, which are sometimes called soviets, with this system able to begin with workplace democracy and can manifest itself as soviet democracy or dictatorship of the proletariat. Trotskyist groups have interpreted socialist democracy to be synonymous with multi-party far-left representation, autonomous union organizations, worker's control of production, internal party democracy and the mass participation of the working masses, while some communist parties support a soviet republic with democratic centralism, and within democracy in Marxism there can be hostility to what is commonly called liberal democracy. Anarchists are split in this domain, depending on whether they believe that a majority-rule is tyrannic or not, with to many anarchists, the only form of democracy considered acceptable is direct democracy, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon argued that the only acceptable form of direct democracy is one in which it is recognised that majority decisions are not binding on the minority, even when unanimous. Anarcho-communist Murray Bookchin criticised individualist anarchists for opposing democracy, and says majority rule is consistent with anarchism, while some anarcho-communists oppose the majoritarian nature of direct democracy, feeling that it can impede individual liberty and opt-in favour of a non-majoritarian form of consensus democracy, similar to Proudhon's position on direct democracy. Sortition is the process of choosing decision-making bodies via a random selection, with these bodies able to be more representative of the opinions and interests of the people at large than an elected legislature or other decision-maker, with the technique in widespread use in Athenian Democracy and Renaissance Florence and still used in modern jury selection and citizens' assemblies. Consociational democracy, also called consociationalism, is a form of democracy based on power-sharing formula between elites representing the social groups within the society, with in 1969, Arendt Lijphart arguing this would stabilize democracies with factions, and a consociational democracy allowing for simultaneous majority votes in two or more ethno-religious constituencies, and policies being enacted only if they gain majority support from both or all of them, with the Qualified majority voting rule in European Council of Ministers being a consociational democracy approach for supranational democracies, with this system in Treaty of Rome allocating votes to member states in part according to their population, but heavily weighted in favour of the smaller states. A consociational democracy requires consensus of representatives, while consensus democracy requires consensus of electorate, and in contrast, in majoritarian democracy minority opinions can potentially be ignored by vote-winning majorities, with constitutions typically requiring consensus or supermajorities. Inclusive democracy is a political theory and political project that aims for direct democracy in all fields of social life, with political democracy in the form of face-to-face assemblies which are confederated, economic democracy in a stateless, moneyless and marketless economy, democracy in the social realm, i.e., self-management in places of work and education, and ecological democracy which aims to reintegrate society and nature, with the theoretical project of inclusive democracy emerging from the work of political philosopher Takis Fotopoulos in Towards An Inclusive Democracy and further developed in the journal Democracy & Nature and its successor The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy. A parpolity or participatory polity is a theoretical form of democracy that is ruled by a nested council structure, with the guiding philosophy being that people should have decision-making power in proportion to how much they are affected by the decision, with local councils of 25 to 50 people being completely autonomous on issues that affect only them, and these councils sending delegates to higher level councils who are again autonomous regarding issues that affect only the population affected by that council, with a council court of randomly chosen citizens serving as a check on the tyranny of the majority, and rules on which body gets to vote on which issue, with delegates able to vote differently from how their sending council might wish but are mandated to communicate the wishes of their sending council, with delegates being recallable at any time, and referendums being possible at any time via votes of lower-level councils, however, not everything is a referendum as this is most likely a waste of time, with a parpolity meant to work in tandem with a participatory economy. Radical democracy is based on the idea that there are hierarchical and oppressive power relations that exist in society, with radical democracy's role being to make visible and challenge those relations by allowing for difference, dissent and antagonisms in decision-making processes. Cosmopolitan democracy, also known as global democracy or world federalism, is a political system in which democracy is implemented on a global scale, either directly or through representatives, with an important justification for this kind of system being that the decisions made in national or regional democracies often affect people outside the constituency who, by definition, cannot vote, and by contrast, in a cosmopolitan democracy, the people who are affected by decisions also have a say in them, with according to its supporters, any attempt to solve global problems is undemocratic without some form of cosmopolitan democracy, with the general principle of cosmopolitan democracy being to expand some or all of the values and norms of democracy, including the rule of law, the non-violent resolution of conflicts, and equality among citizens, beyond the limits of the state, with to be fully implemented, this would require reforming existing international organisations, e.g., the United Nations, as well as the creation of new institutions such as a World Parliament, which ideally would enhance public control over, and accountability in, international politics, with cosmopolitan democracy having been promoted, among others, by physicist Albert Einstein, first published in United Nations World New York, October 1947, writer Kurt Vonnegut, columnist George Monbiot, and professors David Held and Daniele Archibugi, with the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2003 being seen as a major step forward by many supporters of this type of cosmopolitan democracy. Creative democracy is advocated by American philosopher John Dewey, with the main idea about creative democracy being that democracy encourages individual capacity building and the interaction among the society, with Dewey arguing that democracy is a way of life in his work of Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us and an experience built on faith in human nature, faith in human beings, and faith in working with others, with democracy, in Dewey's view, being a moral ideal requiring actual effort and work by people, and not an institutional concept that exists outside of ourselves, with the task of democracy, Dewey concludes, being forever.