Comparative Politics Term Paper

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Politics

Notions of Modern Democracy

Is Democracy just a simple definition of 'majority rules?' In reality, it's a much more complicated concept.

Democracy' is a word that is often bandied about as a world with an inherently positive meaning in the public political discourse of America as well as other Western (as well as some non-Western) nations. But what constitutes a democratic political system, much less democratic political values often varies from country to country, almost as much as the definition of democracy has varied from political epoch to epoch. In the introductory chapter of his edited volume, Comparative Democracy and Democratization, Howard J. Wiardad puts for the idea that rather than forming a singular and universal schema of values, democracy is in fact very particular and based on very different local, regional, and cultural traditions and institutions.

Technically, of course neither America nor any modern nation-state is truly a pure democracy. The city-state of ancient Athens in Greece defined itself as a pure democracy. In Classical Athens, all Athenian citizens came together and collectively decided whether, for instance, the nation should go to war. Those who decided the nation should fight would have to take up arms themselves and fight, if the majority of their fellow Athenians believed in any particular war. Athens was a pure democracy because it was guided by the fundamental principle of 'majority rules.

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' Political offices were rotated and filled by lot.

In America today, in our modern republic of representational democratic values, the populace elects representatives to speak for them and to vote for them. Regional representatives of states and districts speak for the constituents whom reside in their respective states and districts. On the level of the executive branch, the president speaks for nation as a whole. Greece might seem superior in form in that those individuals who fight are different than those who vote for or against war, and a politician whom he or she did not elect may represent an individual in congress.

However, in the supposedly pure democracy that was Athens, citizenship by its nature was extremely limited to free males residing within the city-state, unlike….....

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