The conclusion of the article “What makes a democracy ‘democratic’” included the familiar refrain of democracy being “the rule of the people,” as derived from the original term dēmokratiā comprised of demos (people) and kratos (rule). In sum – in a democracy sovereignty theoretically lies with the people and is expressed through the will of the majority (of the demos).
But who are “the people,” or what constitutes the demos that gets to make the rules? Who is given the right to legislate within a society or association, whether a tribe, city-state, nation-state or other appropriate vehicle?
The first thing to note is that “the people” has never included all the people in a particular society – children for example are generally excluded. The question is how to define the limit of who has the right of participation in the ruling, and who is to be excluded.
The kind of historical questions raised around who constitutes the people have included:
- At what age should someone have the right to become part of the people?
- Can women become part of the people? What about people of a different ethnicity?
- Is participation in ruling solely a hereditary right (i.e. being born to certain parents), or can someone gain the right (such as by a slave becoming a free man, or someone whose parents were not part of the demos becoming naturalised?
In Athenian democracy only adult males whose parents were Athenians were considered part of the demos. In contemporary democracies, women were not given the right to vote until the 20th century. Black and other non-white Americans were also excluded from the demos until the 19th and 20th century. In current Western democracies, many residents and tax-payers are excluded from the demos due to not holding citizenship of the nation they reside within.
This raises the conundrum of how does a demos define itself?
To claim that it is the demos that defines the demos is a circular argument. The “people” cannot define themselves – at some point a decision was made by a subset of the people to define who the people are. Historically, the definition of who the people are has been changed, sometimes due to public pressure as with the suffragette movement, but the decision to make that change was not made by women since they were not part of the demos at the time.
This question is one of the (many) confounding and sometimes contradictory elements that make up democratic theory – that the decision on who can participate in a democracy when it is formed cannot be democratic in origin.
There are several other similar questions, such as at what point does the exclusion of others from being part of the demos mean that the system would no longer be democratic. For example – if only land-owners had the right to vote (such as in the United States after the declaration of independence) – such a system would be better characterised as an Aristocracy rather than a democracy.
A particularly important and relevant issue is what is the nature and role of the demos once it has grown too large for all of it to be practically involved in ruling. While early forms of democracy such as in Athens had an assembly where discussions, voting and decisions could be taken by a show of hands of however many of the demos took part at the time, such a model is only practical for similar sized city-states.
Modern nation-states comprise of too many citizens for such “direct democracy” to be possible, with the size of the state and the number of citizens making it impossible for the demos to have the kind of regular influence on decision making that would be possible in a city-state or other form of smaller association. Over time, theories of representative democracy have been developed – where instead of direct participation in decision making and legislature, the role of “the people” is to vote for representatives who would take such decisions on their behalf.
This type of democracy is fundamentally different from the direct democracy originally theorised and practised and can be in direct contradiction with it. One contemporary example is the Brexit referendum – a tension between the results of the will of the demos and their elected representatives, which is why many talk of a crisis of trust in democracy if the result of the referendum is not fulfilled via withdrawal from the EU.
The differences between direct democracy and representative democracy will be further explored in this series, as the question of whether elected representation can represent the will of the people, or not, is fundamental to contemporary democracies.
Dr. Reza Pankhurst is the author of The Inevitable Caliphate (Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Untold History of the Liberation Party (C Hurst & Co, 2016)