essay introduction democratic government

By the People: Essays on Democracy

Harvard Kennedy School faculty explore aspects of democracy in their own words—from increasing civic participation and decreasing extreme partisanship to strengthening democratic institutions and making them more fair.

Winter 2020

By Archon Fung , Nancy Gibbs , Tarek Masoud , Julia Minson , Cornell William Brooks , Jane Mansbridge , Arthur Brooks , Pippa Norris , Benjamin Schneer

The basic terms of democratic governance are shifting before our eyes, and we don’t know what the future holds. Some fear the rise of hateful populism and the collapse of democratic norms and practices. Others see opportunities for marginalized people and groups to exercise greater voice and influence. At the Kennedy School, we are striving to produce ideas and insights to meet these great uncertainties and to help make democratic governance successful in the future. In the pages that follow, you can read about the varied ways our faculty members think about facets of democracy and democratic institutions and making democracy better in practice.

Explore essays on democracy

Archon fung: we voted, nancy gibbs: truth and trust, tarek masoud: a fragile state, julia minson: just listen, cornell william brooks: democracy behind bars, jane mansbridge: a teachable skill, arthur brooks: healthy competition, pippa norris: kicking the sandcastle, benjamin schneer: drawing a line.

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Introduction: What Is Democracy? by Danielle Allen

Introductory essay

Written by the educators who created Cyber-Influence and Power, a brief look at the key facts, tough questions and big ideas in their field. Begin this TED Study with a fascinating read that gives context and clarity to the material.

Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world’s people and not the other way around. Rebecca MacKinnon

Over the past 20 years, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have transformed the globe, facilitating the international economic, political, and cultural connections and exchanges that are at the heart of contemporary globalization processes. The term ICT is broad in scope, encompassing both the technological infrastructure and products that facilitate the collection, storage, manipulation, and distribution of information in a variety of formats.

While there are many definitions of globalization, most would agree that the term refers to a variety of complex social processes that facilitate worldwide economic, cultural, and political connections and exchanges. The kinds of global connections ICTs give rise to mark a dramatic departure from the face-to-face, time and place dependent interactions that characterized communication throughout most of human history. ICTs have extended human interaction and increased our interconnectedness, making it possible for geographically dispersed people not only to share information at an ever-faster rate but also to organize and to take action in response to events occurring in places far from where they are physically situated.

While these complex webs of connections can facilitate positive collective action, they can also put us at risk. As TED speaker Ian Goldin observes, the complexity of our global connections creates a built-in fragility: What happens in one part of the world can very quickly affect everyone, everywhere.

The proliferation of ICTs and the new webs of social connections they engender have had profound political implications for governments, citizens, and non-state actors alike. Each of the TEDTalks featured in this course explore some of these implications, highlighting the connections and tensions between technology and politics. Some speakers focus primarily on how anti-authoritarian protesters use technology to convene and organize supporters, while others expose how authoritarian governments use technology to manipulate and control individuals and groups. When viewed together as a unit, the contrasting voices reveal that technology is a contested site through which political power is both exercised and resisted.

Technology as liberator

The liberating potential of technology is a powerful theme taken up by several TED speakers in Cyber-Influence and Power . Journalist and Global Voices co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon, for example, begins her talk by playing the famous Orwell-inspired Apple advertisement from 1984. Apple created the ad to introduce Macintosh computers, but MacKinnon describes Apple's underlying narrative as follows: "technology created by innovative companies will set us all free." While MacKinnon examines this narrative with a critical eye, other TED speakers focus on the ways that ICTs can and do function positively as tools of social change, enabling citizens to challenge oppressive governments.

In a 2011 CNN interview, Egyptian protest leader, Google executive, and TED speaker Wael Ghonim claimed "if you want to free a society, just give them internet access. The young crowds are going to all go out and see and hear the unbiased media, see the truth about other nations and their own nation, and they are going to be able to communicate and collaborate together." (i). In this framework, the opportunities for global information sharing, borderless communication, and collaboration that ICTs make possible encourage the spread of democracy. As Ghonim argues, when citizens go online, they are likely to discover that their particular government's perspective is only one among many. Activists like Ghonim maintain that exposure to this online free exchange of ideas will make people less likely to accept government propaganda and more likely to challenge oppressive regimes.

A case in point is the controversy that erupted around Khaled Said, a young Egyptian man who died after being arrested by Egyptian police. The police claimed that Said suffocated when he attempted to swallow a bag of hashish; witnesses, however, reported that he was beaten to death by the police. Stories about the beating and photos of Said's disfigured body circulated widely in online communities, and Ghonim's Facebook group, titled "We are all Khaled Said," is widely credited with bringing attention to Said's death and fomenting the discontent that ultimately erupted in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, or what Ghonim refers to as "revolution 2.0."

Ghonim's Facebook group also illustrates how ICTs enable citizens to produce and broadcast information themselves. Many people already take for granted the ability to capture images and video via handheld devices and then upload that footage to platforms like YouTube. As TED speaker Clay Shirky points out, our ability to produce and widely distribute information constitutes a revolutionary change in media production and consumption patterns. The production of media has typically been very expensive and thus out of reach for most individuals; the average person was therefore primarily a consumer of media, reading books, listening to the radio, watching TV, going to movies, etc. Very few could independently publish their own books or create and distribute their own radio programs, television shows, or movies. ICTs have disrupted this configuration, putting media production in the hands of individual amateurs on a budget — or what Shirky refers to as members of "the former audience" — alongside the professionals backed by multi-billion dollar corporations. This "democratization of media" allows individuals to create massive amounts of information in a variety of formats and to distribute it almost instantly to a potentially global audience.

Shirky is especially interested in the Internet as "the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversations at the same time." This shift has important political implications. For example, in 2008 many Obama followers used Obama's own social networking site to express their unhappiness when the presidential candidate changed his position on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The outcry of his supporters did not force Obama to revert to his original position, but it did help him realize that he needed to address his supporters directly, acknowledging their disagreement on the issue and explaining his position. Shirky observes that this scenario was also notable because the Obama organization realized that "their role was to convene their supporters but not to control their supporters." This tension between the use of technology in the service of the democratic impulse to convene citizens vs. the authoritarian impulse to control them runs throughout many of the TEDTalks in Cyber-Influence and Power.

A number of TED speakers explicitly examine the ways that ICTs give individual citizens the ability to document governmental abuses they witness and to upload this information to the Internet for a global audience. Thus, ICTs can empower citizens by giving them tools that can help keep their governments accountable. The former head of Al Jazeera and TED speaker Wadah Khanfar provides some very clear examples of the political power of technology in the hands of citizens. He describes how the revolution in Tunisia was delivered to the world via cell phones, cameras, and social media outlets, with the mainstream media relying on "citizen reporters" for details.

Former British prime minister Gordon Brown's TEDTalk also highlights some of the ways citizens have used ICTs to keep their governments accountable. For example, Brown recounts how citizens in Zimbabwe used the cameras on their phones at polling places in order to discourage the Mugabe regime from engaging in electoral fraud. Similarly, Clay Shirky begins his TEDTalk with a discussion of how cameras on phones were used to combat voter suppression in the 2008 presidential election in the U.S. ICTs allowed citizens to be protectors of the democratic process, casting their individual votes but also, as Shirky observes, helping to "ensure the sanctity of the vote overall."

Technology as oppressor

While smart phones and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have arguably facilitated the overthrow of dictatorships in places like Tunisia and Egypt, lending credence to Gordon Brown's vision of technology as an engine of liberalism and pluralism, not everyone shares this view. As TED speaker and former religious extremist Maajid Nawaz points out, there is nothing inherently liberating about ICTs, given that they frequently are deployed to great effect by extremist organizations seeking social changes that are often inconsistent with democracy and human rights. Where once individual extremists might have felt isolated and alone, disconnected from like-minded people and thus unable to act in concert with others to pursue their agendas, ICTs allow them to connect with other extremists and to form communities around their ideas, narratives, and symbols.

Ian Goldin shares this concern, warning listeners about what he calls the "two Achilles heels of globalization": growing inequality and the fragility that is inherent in a complex integrated system. He points out that those who do not experience the benefits of globalization, who feel like they've been left out in one way or another, can potentially become incredibly dangerous. In a world where what happens in one place very quickly affects everyone else — and where technologies are getting ever smaller and more powerful — a single angry individual with access to technological resources has the potential to do more damage than ever before. The question becomes then, how do we manage the systemic risk inherent in today's technology-infused globalized world? According to Goldin, our current governance structures are "fossilized" and ill-equipped to deal with these issues.

Other critics of the notion that ICTs are inherently liberating point out that ICTs have been leveraged effectively by oppressive governments to solidify their own power and to manipulate, spy upon, and censor their citizens. Journalist and TED speaker Evgeny Morozov expresses scepticism about what he calls "iPod liberalism," or the belief that technology will necessarily lead to the fall of dictatorships and the emergence of democratic governments. Morozov uses the term "spinternet" to describe authoritarian governments' use of the Internet to provide their own "spin" on issues and events. Russia, China, and Iran, he argues, have all trained and paid bloggers to promote their ideological agendas in the online environment and/or or to attack people writing posts the government doesn't like in an effort to discredit them as spies or criminals who should not be trusted.

Morozov also points out that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are tools not only of revolutionaries but also of authoritarian governments who use them to gather open-source intelligence. "In the past," Morozov maintains, "it would take you weeks, if not months, to identify how Iranian activists connect to each other. Now you know how they connect to each other by looking at their Facebook page. KGB...used to torture in order to get this data." Instead of focusing primarily on bringing Internet access and devices to the people in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes, Morozov argues that we need to abandon our cyber-utopian assumptions and do more to actually empower intellectuals, dissidents, NGOs and other members of society, making sure that the "spinternet" does not prevent their voices from being heard.

The ICT Empowered Individual vs. The Nation State

In her TEDTalk "Let's Take Back the Internet," Rebecca MacKinnon argues that "the only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens, and…the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us." It is clearly not a given, however, that governments, organizations, and individuals will use technology benevolently. Part of the responsibility of citizenship in the globalized information age then is to work to ensure that both governments and technologies "serve the world's peoples." However, there is considerable disagreement about what that might look like.

WikiLeaks spokesperson and TED speaker Julian Assange, for example, argues that government secrecy is inconsistent with democratic values and is ultimately about deceiving and manipulating rather than serving the world's people. Others maintain that governments need to be able to keep secrets about some topics in order to protect their citizens or to act effectively in response to crises, oppressive regimes, terrorist organizations, etc. While some view Assange's use of technology as a way to hold governments accountable and to increase transparency, others see this use of technology as a criminal act with the potential to both undermine stable democracies and put innocent lives in danger.

ICTs and global citizenship

While there are no easy answers to the global political questions raised by the proliferation of ICTs, there are relatively new approaches to the questions that look promising, including the emergence of individuals who see themselves as global citizens — people who participate in a global civil society that transcends national boundaries. Technology facilitates global citizens' ability to learn about global issues, to connect with others who care about similar issues, and to organize and act meaningfully in response. However, global citizens are also aware that technology in and of itself is no panacea, and that it can be used to manipulate and oppress.

Global citizens fight against oppressive uses of technology, often with technology. Technology helps them not only to participate in global conversations that affect us all but also to amplify the voices of those who have been marginalized or altogether missing from such conversations. Moreover, global citizens are those who are willing to grapple with large and complex issues that are truly global in scope and who attempt to chart a course forward that benefits all people, regardless of their locations around the globe.

Gordon Brown implicitly alludes to the importance of global citizenship when he states that we need a global ethic of fairness and responsibility to inform global problem-solving. Human rights, disease, development, security, terrorism, climate change, and poverty are among the issues that cannot be addressed successfully by any one nation alone. Individual actors (nation states, NGOs, etc.) can help, but a collective of actors, both state and non-state, is required. Brown suggests that we must combine the power of a global ethic with the power to communicate and organize globally in order for us to address effectively the world's most pressing issues.

Individuals and groups today are able to exert influence that is disproportionate to their numbers and the size of their arsenals through their use of "soft power" techniques, as TED speakers Joseph Nye and Shashi Tharoor observe. This is consistent with Maajid Nawaz's discussion of the power of symbols and narratives. Small groups can develop powerful narratives that help shape the views and actions of people around the world. While governments are far more accustomed to exerting power through military force, they might achieve their interests more effectively by implementing soft power strategies designed to convince others that they want the same things. According to Nye, replacing a "zero-sum" approach (you must lose in order for me to win) with a "positive-sum" one (we can both win) creates opportunities for collaboration, which is necessary if we are to begin to deal with problems that are global in scope.

Let's get started

Collectively, the TEDTalks in this course explore how ICTs are used by and against governments, citizens, activists, revolutionaries, extremists, and other political actors in efforts both to preserve and disrupt the status quo. They highlight the ways that ICTs have opened up new forms of communication and activism as well as how the much-hailed revolutionary power of ICTs can and has been co-opted by oppressive regimes to reassert their control.

By listening to the contrasting voices of this diverse group of TED speakers, which includes activists, journalists, professors, politicians, and a former member of an extremist organization, we can begin to develop a more nuanced understanding of the ways that technology can be used both to facilitate and contest a wide variety of political movements. Global citizens who champion democracy would do well to explore these intersections among politics and technology, as understanding these connections is a necessary first step toward MacKinnon's laudable goal of building a world in which "government and technology serve the world's people and not the other way around."

Let's begin our exploration of the intersections among politics and technology in today's globalized world with a TEDTalk from Ian Goldin, the first Director of the 21st Century School, Oxford University's think tank/research center. Goldin's talk will set the stage for us, exploring the integrated, complex, and technology rich global landscape upon which the political struggles for power examined by other TED speakers play out.

Navigating our global future

i. "Welcome to Revolution 2.0, Ghonim Says," CNN, February 9, 2011. http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2011/02/09/wael.ghonim.interview.cnn .

Relevant talks

Gordon Brown

Wiring a web for global good.

Clay Shirky

How social media can make history.

Wael Ghonim

Inside the egyptian revolution.

Wadah Khanfar

A historic moment in the arab world.

Evgeny Morozov

How the net aids dictatorships.

Maajid Nawaz

A global culture to fight extremism.

Rebecca MacKinnon

Let's take back the internet.

Julian Assange

Why the world needs wikileaks.

Global power shifts

Shashi Tharoor

Why nations should pursue soft power.

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democracy summary

Understand the meaning and types of democracy.

democracy , Form of government in which supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodic free elections. In a direct democracy, the public participates in government directly (as in some ancient Greek city-state s, some New England town meetings, and some cantons in modern Switzerland). Most democracies today are representative. The concept of representative democracy arose largely from ideas and institutions that developed during the European Middle Ages and the Enlightenment and in the American and French Revolutions. Democracy has come to imply universal suffrage, competition for office, freedom of speech and the press, and the rule of law. See also republic.

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4.1: What is Democracy?

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• Dino Bozonelos, Julia Wendt, Charlotte Lee, Jessica Scarffe, Masahiro Omae, Josh Franco, Byran Martin, & Stefan Veldhuis
• Victor Valley College, Berkeley City College, Allan Hancock College, San Diego City College, Cuyamaca College, Houston Community College, and Long Beach City College via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI)

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Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Define democracy.
• Recognize the origins and characteristics of democracies.
• Distinguish between (the) types of democracy.

Introduction

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…” — Winston Churchill, November 11th, 1947

More than half of the governments currently in existence operate under some variation of democracy. The global trends towards democratization worldwide during the twentieth century prompted some to conclude that democracy is simply the best, or most ideal, form of government. Indeed, near the end of the twentieth century, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a book entitled, The End of History and the Last Man , where he argued humanity had reached the end of history because many countries had adopted forms of liberal democracy. His book was a best-seller which energized many about the prospects of a world which embraces democracy and will not again suffer the likes of major World Wars and conflicts. Twenty years after this publication, however, and in light of events like the September 11th attacks on the United States, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of China, the backsliding of Russia, the COVID-19 pandemic and the eventual fall of Afghanistan back to authoritarian rule, Fukuyama mostly retracted his conclusion that the world had accepted democracy as the standard. Instead, he now asserts that issues related to political identity now threaten the security of geo-political stability. The many challenges facing democracy, democratization, and democratic backsliding (discussed in Chapter 5), prompts us to take a hard look at democracy, its types, its institutions and models, and various manifestations throughout the world. Is democracy the best form of government? What are its advantages and disadvantages?

Francis Fukuyama is an American Political Scientist, economist, and author of books and journal articles. From left to right, his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, prompted discussion over whether the world had reached the end of history because so many countries had been adopting liberal democracy as their form of government. One of his more recent books, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, came out in 2018, and his conclusions began veering away from the belief that the world had accepted liberal democracy. Instead, political identity and the weight of historical disputes potentially impede global geopolitical potential for long-term peace.

Origins, Definitions and Characteristics of Democracy

Although there is evidence of what anthropologists have designated primitive democracy , wherein small communities have face-to-face discussions in order to make decisions, as far back as 2,500 years ago, the first formal application of democratic institutions and processes is generally attributed to ancient Greece. Athens, Greece is generally credited with being the birthplace of democracy. In its simplest terms, democracy is a government system in which the supreme power of government is vested in the people. Democracy comes from the Greek word, dēmokratiā, where “demos” means “people”, and “kratos” meaning “power” or “rule.” Prior to the formation of legal reforms, Athens had operated as an aristocracy.

An aristocracy is a form of government where power is held by nobility or those concerned to be of the highest classes within a society. Aristocracy proved troublesome for Athens, and the people eventually rallied under an Athenian leader named Solon (circa 640 - 560 B.C.E.). In trying to meet the demands of the people, Solon attempted to satisfy all classes of the Athenian population, rich and poor alike, to devise a form of government which satisfied all. To this end, in 594 B.C.E., Solon created legal reforms and a constitution, which provided the foundations for citizen participation in government affairs, and abolished slavery of Athenian citizens. Under this construct, adult males who had completed their military training were given the right to vote, and as much as 20% of the population was considered to be active in making laws. Eventually, democracy in Athens failed, due to both internal and external factors. Internally, there was heavy criticism that the aristocracy was still in force, and able to pervert and manipulate legal outcomes to their own benefit. Further, the works of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, all of whom were critical of the merits and feasibility of democracy, led to the erosion of trust in democracy in Athens. Generally, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, though they had their own unique critiques of democracy, tended to value political stability over the potential of “rule of the mob.” Externally, and tied to the prospect of political stability, Athens faced frequent challenges to its democracy from the outside. The Peloponnesian War, the changes in leadership from King Phillip II of Macedon and Alexander the Great, and finally, the rise of the Roman Empire, all are also attributed to the eventual decline of democracy in ancient Greece. After the fall of democracy in Greece, the prospect of democracy did not re-emerge as a feasible, or even desired, option until the early modern era in the 1600s.

Ancient concepts and manifestations of democracy differ greatly from modern conceptualization and application of democracy. One of the key differences is in the way power from the people is channeled; the difference becomes apparent in comparing a direct democracy versus an indirect democracy. A direct democracy enables citizens to vote directly, or participate directly, in the formation of laws, public policy and government decisions. In this system, citizens personally get involved in all aspects of politics, and are able to change constitutional laws, recommend referendums and make suggestions for laws, and mandate the activities and actions of government officials. To some extent, Athens exercised a direct democracy in that adult male citizens, who had completed their military training, could participate directly in the making of laws. It was not a 'perfect' democracy in that not all citizens, male and female, rich and poor, could participate, but it did have a mechanism for a certain class of citizen participating, i.e. males. In contrast, indirect democracy channels the power of the people through representation, where citizens elect representatives to make laws and government decisions on their behalf. In this scenario, citizens of the country are granted suffrage , which is the right to vote in political elections and propose referendums. In a healthy democracy, elections are both free and fair . Free elections are those where all citizens are able to vote for the candidate of their choice. The election is free if all citizens who meet the requirements to vote (e.g. are of lawful age and meet the citizenship requirements, if they exist), are not prevented from participating in the election process. Fair elections are those in which all votes carry equal weight, are counted accurately, and the election results are able to be accepted by parties. Ideally, the following standards are met to ensure elections are free and fair:

Before the Election

• Eligible citizens are able to register to vote;
• Voters are given access to reliable information about the ballot and the elections;
• Citizens are able to run for office.

During the Election

• All voters have access to a polling station or some method of casting their vote;
• Voters are able to vote free from intimidation;
• The voting process is free of fraud and tampering.

After the Election

• Ballots are accurately counted and the results are announced;
• The results of the election are accepted / respected / honored.

The integrity of the election is of paramount importance in democracies, for if the process is not found to be free or fair, it violates the core principles of what constitutes a democracy: by the people, for the people.

Indirect democracy is what most democratic countries today practice, partly because of logistics (In the U.S., how would every single adult citizen directly participate in the making of laws? Would requiring a vote for every decision be time efficient?), and to another extent, a question over whether voting is always the best option for determining just, equitable or ideal outcomes. In a representative democracy, citizens, to some extent, outsource the power of lawmaking to those who, ideally, either have expertise in making laws or who may be granted a greater depth of information in order to make decisions.In this sense, not every citizen necessarily wants to be involved in every government decision, but would prefer selecting a representative to getting political work done. Further, although most democratic countries do practice indirect democracy, there are often some mechanisms that align with some characteristics of a direct democracy. For instance, the U.S. has a representative democracy, but voters in some states have the ability to put forth initiatives and referendums, also referred to as Ballot Propositions. Overall, democracy’s definition, if practiced as indirect democracy, can be understood as: a government system in which the supreme power of the government is vested in the people, and exercised by the people through a system of representation which includes the continued practice of holding free and fair elections.

Importantly, democracy has a number of characteristics which can be central to understanding the variation in democracies that exist worldwide today. These differences also highlight the difference between concepts of ancient democracy versus contemporary democracy. Ancient democracy had no concept or foundations for widespread suffrage or the protection of civil liberties. Some of these modern accepted democratic themes include (but are not limited to): free, fair and regular elections (ideally, with the inclusion of more than one viable political party), respect for civil liberties (freedom of religion, speech, the press, peaceful assembly; freedom to criticize the government) as well as the protection of civil rights (freedom from discrimination based on various characteristics deemed important in society). Democracies which not only facilitate free and fair elections, but also ensure the protection of civil liberties are called liberal democracies . Although these are the general themes, there is still ample debate among scholars about the importance and weight of these characteristics. Larry Diamond, an American political sociologist and a scholar of democratic studies, put forth the following four characteristics which make a democracy, a democracy. A democracy must include:

• A system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections;
• Active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life;
• The protection of human rights of all citizens;
• A rule of law in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens. (Diamond 2004)

Karl Popper, an Austrian-British academic and philosopher (whom you may recognize from Chapter 2 for his work on the nature of inquiry and the recognition of falsification theory), had a more blunt definition for democracy, “I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence ‘democracy,’ and the other, ‘tyranny.’ (Popper 2002). Instead of citing specific characteristics of democracy, which Popper was hesitant to do given the wide variation in democracies that exist, he simply contrasted it with outright tyranny. In general, Popper emphasized the importance not in how the people could exercise authority, but that they have access, availability and opportunity, through some means, to control their leaders without violence, retribution or revolution.

Other scholars have noted more rigid qualifications for democracy. In looking at the world of Robert Dahl, Ian Shapiro and Jose Antonio Cheibub, all political scientists, they assert that every vote in a representative democracy must carry equal weight, and that the rights of citizens must be equally protected by a well-defined and clear “law of the land;” in most cases, the “law of the land,” rests with a written constitution. The rights and liberties of citizens must be protected by the law of the land. (Dahl, Shapiro, Cheibub, 2003)

Overall, there are hundreds of critiques and frameworks for defining democracies and noting its characteristics, and scholars are generally not in full agreement on what constitutes a perfect democracy. Nevertheless, reaching some consensus on the characteristics is important if scholars want to advance the understanding of regime types like democracy. The difference in perception of democracy can be seen in how some organizations choose to measure democracy across countries. At present, there are at least eight organizations which attempt to quantify the existence and health of democracies worldwide. These eight include: Freedom House, Economist Intelligence Unit, V-Dem, the Human Freedom Index, Polity IV, World Governance Indicators, Democracy Barometer, and Vanhanen’s Polyarchy Index. In Table 4.1.1, a few of these are highlighted based on what they identify as main characteristics of democracy. This table shows the differences in components considered when trying to measure democracy. From left to right, Freedom House, Economist Intelligence Unit, and Varieties of Democracy; all are organizations which attempt to determine whether countries are democratic and assess the strength of their democratic institutions.

Table 4.1.1 : Measuring Democracy

The different organizations, choosing different areas of emphasis and weight for characteristics of democracy, yield different outcomes in terms of identifying whether a country is a democracy, as well as judging the healthiness of a democracy. For instance, as of 2018, the Varieties of Democracies Project finds there are currently 99 democracies, and 80 autocracies. Autocracies are forms of government where countries are ruled either by a single person or group, who/which holds total power and control. For this same time-period, the Polity IV Index disagrees, finding 57 full democracies, 28 mixed-regime types, and 13 autocratic regimes. Importantly, the Polity IV Index does not take suffrage into consideration as a meaningful indicator of democracy. Freedom House also arrives at different outcomes for this same time-period, asserting that 86 countries are democracies, with 109 non-democracies. Finally, the Economist Intelligence Unit found 20 countries to be fully democratic, and 55 countries have “flawed democracies.” Given that scholars and these organizations have acknowledged that different types of democracies exist, it is now useful to discuss these types, as well as the implications for these types on the institution of democracy.

The number of democracies has significantly grown worldwide since 1900. Political scientists have sometimes called jumps in the number of democracies ‘waves.’ In this way, there have been three major waves of democratization: World War I (First wave, 1828-1926), with subsequent “waves” of democratization coming following World War II (Second wave) and the democratic transitions in Portugal, Spain and Latin American in the 1970s (Third wave).

Types of Democracy

The different organizations, choosing different areas of emphasis and weight for characteristics of democracy, yield different outcomes in terms of identifying whether a country is a democracy, as well as judging the healthiness of a democracy. For instance, as of 2018, the Varieties of Democracies Project finds there are currently 99 democracies, and 80 autocracies. Recall, autocracies are forms of government where countries are ruled either by a single person or group, who/which holds total power and control. For this same time-period, the Polity IV Index disagrees, finding 57 full democracies, 28 mixed-regime types, and 13 autocratic regimes. Importantly, the Polity IV Index does not take suffrage into consideration as a meaningful indicator of democracy. Freedom House also arrives at different outcomes for this same time-period, asserting that 86 countries are democracies, with 109 non-democracies. Finally, the Economist Intelligence Unit found 20 countries to be fully democratic, and 55 countries have “flawed democracies.” Given that scholars and these organizations have acknowledged that different types of democracies exist, it is now useful to discuss these types, as well as the implications for these types on the institution of democracy.

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• Democracy Essay for Students in English

Essay on Democracy

Introduction.

Democracy is mainly a Greek word which means people and their rules, here peoples have the to select their own government as per their choice. Greece was the first democratic country in the world. India is a democratic country where people select their government of their own choice, also people have the rights to do the work of their choice. There are two types of democracy: direct and representative and hybrid or semi-direct democracy. There are many decisions which are made under democracies. People enjoy few rights which are very essential for human beings to live happily. 

Our country has the largest democracy. In a democracy, each person has equal rights to fight for development. After the independence, India has adopted democracy, where the people vote those who are above 18 years of age, but these votes do not vary by any caste; people from every caste have equal rights to select their government. Democracy, also called as a rule of the majority, means whatever the majority of people decide, it has to be followed or implemented, the representative winning with the most number of votes will have the power. We can say the place where literacy people are more there shows the success of the democracy even lack of consciousness is also dangerous in a democracy. Democracy is associated with higher human accumulation and higher economic freedom. Democracy is closely tied with the economic source of growth like education and quality of life as well as health care. The constituent assembly in India was adopted by Dr B.R. Ambedkar on 26 th November 1949 and became sovereign democratic after its constitution came into effect on 26 January 1950.

What are the Challenges:

There are many challenges for democracy like- corruption here, many political leaders and officers who don’t do work with integrity everywhere they demand bribes, resulting in the lack of trust on the citizens which affects the country very badly. Anti-social elements- which are seen during elections where people are given bribes and they are forced to vote for a particular candidate. Caste and community- where a large number of people give importance to their caste and community, therefore, the political party also selects the candidate on the majority caste. We see wherever the particular caste people win the elections whether they do good for the society or not, and in some cases, good leaders lose because of less count of the vote.

India is considered to be the largest democracy around the globe, with a population of 1.3 billion. Even though being the biggest democratic nation, India still has a long way to becoming the best democratic system. The caste system still prevails in some parts, which hurts the socialist principle of democracy. Communalism is on the rise throughout the globe and also in India, which interferes with the secular principle of democracy. All these differences need to be set aside to ensure a thriving democracy.

Principles of Democracy:

There are mainly five principles like- republic, socialist, sovereign, democratic and secular, with all these quality political parties will contest for elections. There will be many bribes given to the needy person who require food, money, shelter and ask them to vote whom they want. But we can say that democracy in India is still better than the other countries.

Basically, any country needs democracy for development and better functioning of the government. In some countries, freedom of political expression, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, are considered to ensure that voters are well informed, enabling them to vote according to their own interests.

Let us Discuss These Five Principles in Further Detail

Sovereign: In short, being sovereign or sovereignty means the independent authority of a state. The country has the authority to make all the decisions whether it be on internal issues or external issues, without the interference of any third party.

Socialist: Being socialist means the country (and the Govt.), always works for the welfare of the people, who live in that country. There should be many bribes offered to the needy person, basic requirements of them should be fulfilled by any means. No one should starve in such a country.

Secular: There will be no such thing as a state religion, the country does not make any bias on the basis of religion. Every religion must be the same in front of the law, no discrimination on the basis of someone’s religion is tolerated. Everyone is allowed to practice and propagate any religion, they can change their religion at any time.

Republic: In a republic form of Government, the head of the state is elected, directly or indirectly by the people and is not a hereditary monarch. This elected head is also there for a fixed tenure. In India, the head of the state is the president, who is indirectly elected and has a fixed term of office (5 years).

Democratic: By a democratic form of government, means the country’s government is elected by the people via the process of voting. All the adult citizens in the country have the right to vote to elect the government they want, only if they meet a certain age limit of voting.

Merits of Democracy:

better government forms because it is more accountable and in the interest of the people.

improves the quality of decision making and enhances the dignity of the citizens.

provide a method to deal with differences and conflicts.

A democratic system of government is a form of government in which supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodic free elections. It permits citizens to participate in making laws and public policies by choosing their leaders, therefore citizens should be educated so that they can select the right candidate for the ruling government. Also, there are some concerns regarding democracy- leaders always keep changing in democracy with the interest of citizens and on the count of votes which leads to instability. It is all about political competition and power, no scope for morality.

Factors Affect Democracy:

capital and civil society

economic development

modernization

Norway and Iceland are the best democratic countries in the world. India is standing at fifty-one position.

India is a parliamentary democratic republic where the President is head of the state and Prime minister is head of the government. The guiding principles of democracy such as protected rights and freedoms, free and fair elections, accountability and transparency of government officials, citizens have a responsibility to uphold and support their principles. Democracy was first practised in the 6 th century BCE, in the city-state of Athens. One basic principle of democracy is that people are the source of all the political power, in a democracy people rule themselves and also respect given to diverse groups of citizens, so democracy is required to select the government of their own interest and make the nation developed by electing good leaders.

FAQs on Democracy Essay for Students in English

1. What are the Features of Democracy?

Features of Democracy are as follows

Equality: Democracy provides equal rights to everyone, regardless of their gender, caste, colour, religion or creed.

Individual Freedom: Everybody has the right to do anything they want until it does not affect another person’s liberty.

Majority Rules: In a democracy, things are decided by the majority rule, if the majority agrees to something, it will be done.

Free Election: Everyone has the right to vote or to become a candidate to fight the elections.

2. Define Democracy?

Democracy means where people have the right to choose the rulers and also people have freedom to express views, freedom to organise and freedom to protest. Protesting and showing Dissent is a major part of a healthy democracy. Democracy is the most successful and popular form of government throughout the globe.

Democracy holds a special place in India, also India is still the largest democracy in existence around the world.

3. What are the Benefits of Democracy?

Let us discuss some of the benefits received by the use of democracy to form a government. Benefits of democracy are: 

It is more accountable

Improves the quality of decision as the decision is taken after a long time of discussion and consultation.

It provides a better method to deal with differences and conflicts.

It safeguards the fundamental rights of people and brings a sense of equality and freedom.

It works for the welfare of both the people and the state.

4. Which country is the largest democracy in the World?

India is considered the largest democracy, all around the world. India decided to have a democratic Govt. from the very first day of its independence after the rule of the British. In India, everyone above the age of 18 years can go to vote to select the Government, without any kind of discrimination on the basis of caste, colour, religion, gender or more. But India, even being the largest democracy, still has a long way to become perfect.

5. Write about the five principles of Democracy?

There are five key principles that are followed in a democracy. These Five Principles of Democracy of India are -  secular, sovereign, republic, socialist, and democratic. These five principles have to be respected by every political party, participating in the general elections in India. The party which got the most votes forms the government which represents the democratic principle. No discrimination is done on the basis of religion which represents the secular nature of democracy. The govt. formed after the election has to work for the welfare of common people which shows socialism in play.

Democratic Governance Concept Essay

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Introduction

Plan of action to consolidate and spread the values of democratic governance.

Democratic governance is based on legitimacy, order, stability, accountability, and transparency. It mainly involves promoting durable governance; this includes introducing of politics participation, a stable society, and freedom of media. In addition, democratic governance promotes the involvement of women and other minority groups in government levels and in society levels as well. Democratic governance also involves working hard to ensure that children’s rights and human rights are in place and followed to the later. A state that practices democratic governance establishes policies that are sustainable beyond government changes, which are capable of resolving any conflicts within the state in an orderly and legal manner.

These policies should be imposed in the right manner and are capable of fighting corruption and dictatorship; indeed, in a democratic state, criticism should not be shunned by the government (Frank, 1992). Most countries globally try to exercise democratic governance especially to curb poverty. Some of the non-governmental organizations that contribute to the democratic governance include the United Nations development programme, which promotes participation, and effectiveness in member countries.

Such organizations assist countries to improve on their justice levels and the public administration. However, “good governance should be democratic in both an institutional and social sense; it should also include individual liberties, human rights, economic progress, and social justice” (Carty, n.d, pp 2). The presence of United States military in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan represent a democratic future, since these troops promote peace and harmony in the three countries. It is through the peaceful environment that the United States government is able to promote governance in such countries, thus helping the country to recover by promoting peace, reviving the country’s economy, as well as creating a democratic government.

According to Morgan (2011), “united states is fighting three wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, while struggling under huge budget deficit and national debt.” The United States proves to be a main player in the promotion of democratic governance in countries where conflict dictatorship and war is involved. In this case, the US has used millions of dollars in order to sustain the troops based in Iraq; this has however met critics from the US citizen, who argue that such money should be invested in their country for development purposes, rather than in the war hit countries. For instance, the United States is spending almost $550 for the military operations in Libya alone, which is a large sum of cash that could be utilized to other major issues of development in the US.

However, the United States president noted that, if the US military was to overthrow the current Libyan president, Gadaffi, by force, this would only mean that the military lives would be endangered, which should not be the case. The Afghanistan military operation for a year cost $110 billion, meaning that approximately $300 million is used in a day. In addition, in 2008, Iraq military operation cost the United States approximately, $ 140 billion, which adds up to $383 million in a day. However, this year there is a reduction of the troops sent to Iraq, which will be approximately 100,000, hence a reduction in salaries, health costs and allowances. However, this is a wise decision since the United States is incurring a large sum of dollars on the many troops it posts to Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, of which these huge sums of money could have been used on development programmes in the United States (Morgan, 2011).

The current situation in Libya entails the United States first priority to be protecting the Libyan citizens by eliminating any threats to the lives of the innocent civilians. The US government has however declared that Libya is a no fly zone and has put in place diplomatic and political tools. They have also freezed president Gadaffi’s assets, this are some of the strategies that the US hopes that will lead to the stepping down of Gaddafi. However, one of the fundamental values that the United States government has applied in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya is the protection of innocent human life by ensuring that they do not make any drastic decision that may comprise the lives of civilians. Such actions by the United States enhance democratic governance.

The right to democracy is the right for people to participate and to be consulted in the process of making political choices (Frank, 1994, pp 73). In fact, the United States government has tried to practice democratic governance as a way of solving conflict in war-torn and conflict-hit countries. Though these involvements have cost the United States a fortune, some fruits have been yielded due to these engagements. Democratic governance however cannot work without its values; hence, it is appropriate for the adoption of values in any governance.

The United States should hence involve the non- profitable and non-governmental institution in its journey to effective governance. Such institutions may include, the United Nations development programme (UNDP), which supports and promotes human rights by supporting programmes aimed at building institutions, promoting and protecting human rights, and engaging in human right practices in member nations. UNDP provides support, advice, and guidance tools, when dealing with the governments that are interested in promoting human rights.

According to the Africa – EU partnership, another human rights organization, on the issue of democratic governance and human rights (2011), its main aim is to work with countries and implement programmes that tackle corruption, prevent torture, and promote human rights. This partnership enhances the promotion of human rights by funding projects that are geared towards protecting innocent lives globally. In addition, it also focuses on promoting awareness of the African peer mechanism and supporting the African charter on democracy, elections, and ethics. However, “a good government is associated with democratic governance in that strong institutions help legitimate and strengthen the system they serve and strengthen; functioning democracy helps provide the transparency and accountability to enable government to be more relevant and attendant to the society” (Carty, n.d, pp 4).

According to Sen. A, (1999, pp 6), there are various functions of democracy; first, countries that practice democracy have the political freedom which results to human freedom. Democracy ensure that both civil and political rights are exercised, thus promoting social lives of citizens of a particular country. In addition, democracy promotes the listening of citizen’s claims and agendas regarding their political views. Democracy also promotes socialization in a society such that, citizens of a particular country are able to learn from each other, hence enabling the society to be able to create its values and major priorities.

In addition, the main plan of action that should be implemented in order to consolidate and spread the values of democratic governance should involve the United States working hand in hand with non-governmental organizations like the United Nations and European Union in supporting and promoting human right initiative and programmes. In addition, the national democratic institute (NDI) is another non- profitable organization, which is geared towards working with democratic institutions globally on improving the lives of citizens through citizen’s participation, openness, and accountability. While working together with such organizations, there is a possibility for the enactment of democratic governance to be fast and effective, and this plan will save on the many millions that United States is spending on its military troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

Secondly, the United States should find other means of promoting the democratic governance in the war-affected areas, apart from sending its military troops to life-risking missions. The United States can try to hold peace talks with the affected countries’ representatives and find measure that will curb conflicts and ruthless leadership. Implementing human rights institutions in different countries could also help in solving problems of bad governance. Since these institutions will act as a link between the United States government and the affected countries, this will be an effective method of ensuring that democratic governance is practiced to the fullest. The main aim of democratic governance is to enhance effective leadership of a country by curbing dictatorship and promoting peace, enhancing political freedom and promoting human rights of all citizens of a state.

Democratic governance is a process that involves participation of both the government of a state and the citizens of that state. In a democratic state, issues of dictatorship and misuse of power are rare. The government normally concentrates on welfare of its citizen, ensuring that human rights policies are implemented and followed. However, in war-hit areas, democratic governance may be promoted by major countries such as the United States, which send its troops to these countries to promote peace and protect the lives of innocent citizens of the affected countries. United States is however spending billions of dollars in trying to promote peace in countries like Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. However, too much involvement of the United States to these countries is costing the country in terms of money and its own development, rather than focusing on issues such as education, health, and poverty.

Nevertheless, democratic governance can be promoted in the affected countries by cooperation between the United States, the great seven nations, and the non-governmental organizations like the United Nations. Finally, it is important to note that the democratic governance of any country involves citizens of that country and its government respectively. A nation which has good governance should be capable of promoting peace throughout its territories, support and promote human rights of its citizens, and ensure that there is room for its citizen’s expression in terms of politics. The right of speech and media press should also be encouraged by the government but not shunned, as a good democratic nation always listens to its citizens, and sometimes, uses those critics to govern and lead the country in a better way.

Carty, W. and Rizvi, G. (N. D). The Legitimacy Challenge for Good Government and Democratic Governance: The Imperative to Innovate. Web.

Democratic Governance . (N.d). National democratic institute (NDI). Web.

Democratic governance and human rights. (2011). African and Europe Partnership. Web.

Frank, T. (1994). Democracy as a human right . Web.

Frank, T. (1992). The Emerging Right to Democratic Governance. The American Journal of International Law , Vol. 86, No. 1, pp. 46-91. Web.

Morgan, D. (2011). Washington. Web.

Sen, A. (1999). Democracy as a Universal Value . Journal of Democracy, Volume 10, Number 3, pp. 3-17. University press publishers. Web.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Democratic Theory

Introduction, general overviews.

• Reference Works and Bibliographies
• Classical Philosophy and Democracy
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• Post-Revolutionary Democratic Thought
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Democratic Theory by Michael Laurence LAST REVIEWED: 22 February 2018 LAST MODIFIED: 22 February 2018 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756223-0162

Democratic theory is an established subfield of political theory that is primarily concerned with examining the definition and meaning of the concept of democracy, as well as the moral foundations, obligations, challenges, and overall desirability of democratic governance. Generally speaking, a commitment to democracy as an object of study and deliberation is what unites democratic theorists across a variety of academic disciplines and methodological orientations. When this commitment takes the form of a discussion of the moral foundations and desirability of democracy, normative theory results. When theorists concern themselves with the ways in which actual democracies function, their theories are empirical. Finally, when democratic theorists interrogate or formulate the meaning of the concept of democracy, their work is conceptual or semantic in orientation. Democratic theories typically operate at multiple levels of orientation. For example, definitions of democracy as well as normative arguments about when and why democracy is morally desirable are often rooted in empirical observations concerning the ways in which democracies have actually been known to function. In addition to a basic commitment to democracy as an object of study, most theorists agree that the concept democracy denotes some form or process of collective self-rule. The etymology of the word traces back to the Greek terms demos (the people, the many) and kratos (to rule). Yet beyond this basic meaning, a vast horizon of contestation opens up. Important questions arise: who constitutes the people and what obligations do individuals have in a democracy? What values are most important for a democracy and which ones make it desirable or undesirable as a form of government? How is democratic rule to be organized and exercised? What institutions should be used and how? Once instituted, does democracy require precise social, economic, or cultural conditions to survive in the long term? And why is it that democratic government is preferable to, say, aristocracy or oligarchy? These questions are not new. In fact, democratic theory traces its roots back to ancient Greece and the emergence of the first democratic governments in Western history. Ever since, philosophers, politicians, artists, and citizens have thought and written extensively about democracy. Yet democratic theory did not arise as an institutionalized academic or intellectual discipline until the 20th century. The works cited here privilege Anglo-American, western European, and, more generally, institutional variants of democratic theory, and, therefore, they do not exhaust the full range of thought on the subject.

A number of works have been published that provide overviews of the different historical and contemporary forms of democratic thought. Written by one of the most renowned democratic theorists in the United States, Dahl 2000 offers a brief and highly readable introduction to democratic thought that brings together normative and empirical strands of research. Crick 2002 offers another brief and accessible guide to the various traditions of democratic thought, while Cunningham 2002 presents a more comprehensive survey of the different currents of democratic theory and their historical developments. The text is notable for its discussion of theories of deliberative democracy and theories of radical pluralism, two of the more recent and popular trends in democratic theory. Held 2006 provides one of the most popular overviews of the various models of democracy coupled with a critical account of what democracy means in light of globalization. Another critical account of the field of contemporary democratic theory is offered by Shapiro 2003 , while Keane 2009 provides a historical narrative of sweeping scope that tells the story of democratic governments and ideals as they have developed and transformed since classical Greece. Dryzek and Dunleavy 2009 focuses on theories of the liberal democratic state, while Christiano 2008 provides an introductory exploration of normative democratic thought. Dunn 1992 offers a collection of essays written by leading political theorists that charts the development and contemporary significance of the idea of democracy.

Christiano, Tom. “ Democracy .” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2008.

An introductory survey of some of the major debates in the field of normative democratic theory. Emphasis is placed on the tasks of defining democracy, articulating the moral foundations of democracy, and explaining the requirements of democratic citizenship in large societies.

Crick, Bernard. Democracy: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

A brief guide to the history of the major traditions of democratic thought from ancient Greece to the present. Included are discussions of some of the major issues surrounding republicanism, populism, democratic citizenship, and the conditions required for the institution of a democracy.

Cunningham, Frank. Theories of Democracy: A Critical Introduction . London: Routledge, 2002.

Presents a summary of some of the major problems that confront democracies in the real world followed by a comprehensive discussion of historical and current paradigms of democratic thought.

Dahl, Robert. On Democracy . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

A brief but highly accessible and informative guide to the field of democratic theory written with both scholars and the general public in mind.

Dryzek, John, and Patrick Dunleavy. Theories of the Democratic State . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

DOI: 10.1007/978-0-230-36645-9

An overview of the dominant contemporary approaches to understanding the modern liberal democratic state.

Dunn, John, ed. Democracy: The Unfinished Journey; 508 BC to AD 1993 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Consists of a collection of essays that traces the historical development and contemporary significance of the concept of democracy. The assumption is that to understand contemporary democratic life, we must first grasp the dynamic history and emergence of democratic ideas and practices.

Held, David. Models of Democracy . 3d ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

First published in 1987 and widely adopted as a text of choice for university courses in democracy and governance throughout North America. Provides an introduction to the central theories of democracy from classical Greece to the present. Places special emphasis on the challenges that globalization poses for democratic governance.

Keane, John. The Life and Death of Democracy . New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.

A comprehensive and highly accessible historical account of the origins and development of democratic government and ideals.

Shapiro, Ian. The State of Democratic Theory . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

A critical survey of the state of contemporary democratic theory. Brings together the normative literature on democracy with debates from empirical political science and offers overviews of the literature concerning transitions to democracy, maintaining democracy, and democracy and distribution.

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Essay on Democracy in 100, 300 and 500 Words

• Updated on  
• Jan 15, 2024

The oldest account of democracy can be traced back to 508–507 BCC Athens . Today there are over 50 different types of democracy across the world. But, what is the ideal form of democracy? Why is democracy considered the epitome of freedom and rights around the globe? Let’s explore what self-governance is and how you can write a creative and informative essay on democracy and its significance. 

Today, India is the largest democracy with a population of 1.41 billion and counting. Everyone in India above the age of 18 is given the right to vote and elect their representative. Isn’t it beautiful, when people are given the option to vote for their leader, one that understands their problems and promises to end their miseries? This is just one feature of democracy , for we have a lot of samples for you in the essay on democracy. Stay tuned!

Can you answer these questions in under 5 minutes? Take the Ultimate GK Quiz to find out!

This Blog Includes:

What is democracy , sample essay on democracy (100 words), sample essay on democracy (250 to 300 words), sample essay on democracy for upsc (500 words).

Democracy is a form of government in which the final authority to deliberate and decide the legislation for the country lies with the people, either directly or through representatives. Within a democracy, the method of decision-making, and the demarcation of citizens vary among countries. However, some fundamental principles of democracy include the rule of law, inclusivity, political deliberations, voting via elections , etc. 

Did you know: On 15th August 1947, India became the world’s largest democracy after adopting the Indian Constitution and granting fundamental rights to its citizens?

Must Explore: Human Rights Courses for Students 

Must Explore: NCERT Notes on Separation of Powers in a Democracy

Democracy where people make decisions for the country is the only known form of governance in the world that promises to inculcate principles of equality, liberty and justice. The deliberations and negotiations to form policies and make decisions for the country are the basis on which the government works, with supreme power to people to choose their representatives, delegate the country’s matters and express their dissent. The democratic system is usually of two types, the presidential system, and the parliamentary system. In India, the three pillars of democracy, namely legislature, executive and judiciary, working independently and still interconnected, along with a free press and media provide a structure for a truly functional democracy. Despite the longest-written constitution incorporating values of sovereignty, socialism, secularism etc. India, like other countries, still faces challenges like corruption, bigotry, and oppression of certain communities and thus, struggles to stay true to its democratic ideals.

Did you know: Some of the richest countries in the world are democracies?

Must Read : Consumer Rights in India

Must Read: Democracy and Diversity Class 10

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “democracy is the government of the people, by the people and for the people.” There is undeniably no doubt that the core of democracies lies in making people the ultimate decision-makers. With time, the simple definition of democracy has evolved to include other principles like equality, political accountability, rights of the citizens and to an extent, values of liberty and justice. Across the globe, representative democracies are widely prevalent, however, there is a major variation in how democracies are practised. The major two types of representative democracy are presidential and parliamentary forms of democracy. Moreover, not all those who present themselves as a democratic republic follow its values.

Many countries have legally deprived some communities of living with dignity and protecting their liberty, or are practising authoritarian rule through majoritarianism or populist leaders. Despite this, one of the things that are central and basic to all is the practice of elections and voting. However, even in such a case, the principles of universal adult franchise and the practice of free and fair elections are theoretically essential but very limited in practice, for a democracy. Unlike several other nations, India is still, at least constitutionally and principally, a practitioner of an ideal democracy.

With our three organs of the government, namely legislative, executive and judiciary, the constitutional rights to citizens, a multiparty system, laws to curb discrimination and spread the virtues of equality, protection to minorities, and a space for people to discuss, debate and dissent, India has shown a commitment towards democratic values. In recent times, with challenges to freedom of speech, rights of minority groups and a conundrum between the protection of diversity and unification of the country, the debate about the preservation of democracy has become vital to public discussion.

Did you know: In countries like Brazil, Scotland, Switzerland, Argentina, and Austria the minimum voting age is 16 years?

Also Read: Difference Between Democracy and Dictatorship

Democracy originated from the Greek word dēmokratiā , with dēmos ‘people’ and Kratos ‘rule.’ For the first time, the term appeared in the 5th century BC to denote the political systems then existing in Greek city-states, notably Classical Athens, to mean “rule of the people.” It now refers to a form of governance where the people have the right to participate in the decision-making of the country. Majorly, it is either a direct democracy where citizens deliberate and make legislation while in a representative democracy, they choose government officials on their behalf, like in a parliamentary or presidential democracy.

The presidential system (like in the USA) has the President as the head of the country and the government, while the parliamentary system (like in the UK and India) has both a Prime Minister who derives its legitimacy from a parliament and even a nominal head like a monarch or a President.

The notions and principle frameworks of democracy have evolved with time. At the core, lies the idea of political discussions and negotiations. In contrast to its alternatives like monarchy, anarchy, oligarchy etc., it is the one with the most liberty to incorporate diversity. The ideas of equality, political representation to all, active public participation, the inclusion of dissent, and most importantly, the authority to the law by all make it an attractive option for citizens to prefer, and countries to follow.

The largest democracy in the world, India with the lengthiest constitution has tried and to an extent, successfully achieved incorporating the framework to be a functional democracy. It is a parliamentary democratic republic where the President is head of the state and the Prime minister is head of the government. It works on the functioning of three bodies, namely legislative, executive, and judiciary. By including the principles of a sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic republic, and undertaking the guidelines to establish equality, liberty and justice, in the preamble itself, India shows true dedication to achieving the ideal.

It has formed a structure that allows people to enjoy their rights, fight against discrimination or any other form of suppression, and protect their rights as well. The ban on all and any form of discrimination, an independent judiciary, governmental accountability to its citizens, freedom of media and press, and secular values are some common values shared by all types of democracies.

Across the world, countries have tried rooting their constitution with the principles of democracy. However, the reality is different. Even though elections are conducted everywhere, mostly, they lack freedom of choice and fairness. Even in the world’s greatest democracies, there are challenges like political instability, suppression of dissent, corruption , and power dynamics polluting the political sphere and making it unjust for the citizens. Despite the consensus on democracy as the best form of government, the journey to achieve true democracy is both painstaking and tiresome. 

Did you know: Countries like Singapore, Peru, and Brazil have compulsory voting?

Must Read: Democracy and Diversity Class 10 Notes

Democracy is a process through which the government of a country is elected by and for the people.

Yes, India is a democratic country and also holds the title of the world’s largest democracy.

Direct and Representative Democracy are the two major types of Democracy.

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Democracy: A Very Short Introduction

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Democracy: A Very Short Introduction shows the distinction between the shared concept of democracy and different conceptions or instances of democracy. The key idea of democracy is that those governed—the demos —have a say in the government. However, until the 19th century, different conceptions of democracy did not extend to democratic society, resulting in the exclusion of many groups and individuals. The ideas of social and political thinkers including Plato, Aristotle, J. S. Mill, Marx, Rawls, and Sen provide the intellectual history of democracy. This VSI explores past and present forms of democratic government and considers traditional and inclusive historical approaches to democracy.

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Introduction

Chapter outline.

The U.S. Constitution , see Figure 2.1 , is one of the world’s most enduring symbols of democracy. It is also the oldest, and shortest, written constitutions of the modern era still in existence. Its writing was by no means inevitable, however. In many ways, the Constitution was both the culmination of American (and British) political thought about government power and a blueprint for the future.

It is tempting to think of the framers of the Constitution as a group of like-minded men aligned in their lofty thinking regarding rights and freedoms. This assumption makes it hard to oppose constitutional principles in modern-day politics because people admire the longevity of the Constitution and like to consider its ideals above petty partisan politics . However, the Constitution was designed largely out of necessity following the failure of the first revolutionary government, and it featured a series of pragmatic compromises among its disparate stakeholders. It is therefore quite appropriate that more than 225 years later the U.S. government still requires compromise to function properly.

How did the Constitution come to be written? What compromises were needed to ensure the ratification that made it into law? This chapter addresses these questions and also describes why the Constitution remains a living, changing document.

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Introduction: Transition to Democracy

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At a Glance

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A New Start for South Africa  |  A New Constitution  |  Seeking Truth and Justice  |  Symbolism, Sports, and Unity  |  The Persistence of Economic Inequality  |  Education  |  Challenging the “Rainbow Nation”: Xenophobia Against Migrants  |  The Shadow of Apartheid: Economics and Health  |  The Marikana Miners' Strike and Massacre  |  Looking Forward 

As negotiations between the National Party and the ANC became public in the early 1990s, South Africans began to imagine a democratic future. Leaders of the anti-apartheid struggle sought to create a government that reflected the country’s diversity, transforming a state long committed to white supremacy into what many began to describe as a “rainbow nation.” Yet the long history of racism and violence that reached a pinnacle during the 40 years of apartheid left many deep legacies and problems. The population remained physically segregated along racial lines, economic inequality was among the worst in the world, and violence had become endemic. Under apartheid, the majority of the South African population viewed the government as a source of disorder, restriction, and violence. Even the election of Nelson Mandela, a widely respected and trusted leader, did not transform people’s attitudes overnight.

As the people of South Africa pushed to rebuild their country, they faced the daunting challenge of addressing the legacies left by apartheid: How could a divided people achieve unity? How could the country’s groups retain their identities while finding new ways to live together and mix peacefully? What would the role of the minority white community be in the new South Africa? How could a population of black South Africans who had suffered for so long finally begin to heal? What should be done about the crimes that had occurred under apartheid? Who should be held accountable? Should the offenders be punished? How could opportunities be created for the millions of people who had been held down by an oppressive state for so long?

South Africans entered the post-apartheid era with newfound empowerment, a visionary leader, and the goodwill of millions of people from around the world. As discussed in this chapter, a democratic and multiracial South Africa has confronted many of the legacies of apartheid and undergone some very important positive transformations—but the country continues to face serious challenges.

A New Start for South Africa

On April 27, 1994, millions of South Africans voted in the country’s first fully democratic elections. As discussed in Chapter 3, the black community was still reeling from government-sponsored violence during the period of transition, but in spite of this, the elections were largely peaceful. For the majority of the population, this was their first opportunity to vote. In the reading  South Africa’s First Nonracial Democratic Election , one such voter reflects on the way he processed this change and what the act of voting came to mean. More than 85% of those eligible participated, many standing in line for hours for the chance to choose their own government; the first free and fair elections in South Africa felt like a celebration and a great event for the citizens of the country.

1994 Elections

Long lines edge the William Nicol Highway, as people wait to vote during the general elections on April 27, 1994 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In the end, the ANC won 62.7% of the vote, winning 252 seats in the 400-person National Assembly. The National Party won 20.4% of the vote with 82 seats, and the Inkatha Freedom Party won 10.5% of the vote with 43 seats. People did not vote directly for president because South Africa follows a parliamentary system. Instead, people chose a political party that was awarded seats in the National Assembly on a proportional basis. As the majority party in the National Assembly, the ANC chose Nelson Mandela as president.

On May 10, 1994, in a ceremony that filled people across South Africa and around the world with hope, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president. He was not only South Africa’s first black president but also the first president chosen in competitive, free, and fair elections. In his inaugural address, Mandela declared:

We have triumphed in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of the millions of our people. We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity—a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world. . . . The time for the healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us. . . . 1

A New Constitution

Work on a permanent constitution began on May 9, 1994, almost immediately after the transition to democratic rule. The interim document required that the Constitutional Assembly, made up of the 400 members of the National Assembly and 90 members of the National Council of Provinces, approve a constitution by a two-thirds majority. With this structure, the National Party could not veto changes, as it accounted for just over 20% of the legislature. Additionally, the ANC could not make changes on its own; it would need to work with other parties. Most of the drafting of the constitution was done by a constitutional committee made up of 44 members of parliament drawn proportionally from the seven largest political parties. A Constitutional Court oversaw the drafting of the document, ensuring that it complied with the 34 principles that could not be eliminated from the interim constitution, due to terms negotiated during the transition.

During this process, politicians debated the relationship between provincial and central governments, the guarantee of representation for minority parties, land reform, the death penalty, and limits on speech. 2  Cyril Ramaphosa, a veteran of the ANC who would later become president of South Africa, presided as chair of the Constitutional Assembly. Roelf Meyer, a member of parliament since 1979, was lead negotiator for the National Party. Meyer hoped to create a permanent power-sharing arrangement to guarantee National Party control over legislation, thus allowing the white population continuing disproportionate political influence. Meyer was unsuccessful in this goal; the day after parliament approved the new constitution, Meyer’s party withdrew from the Government for National Unity, where they had held several ministerial posts and de Klerk had served as deputy president. 3

During the drafting process, the government began a massive outreach program modeled on the Freedom Charter process to gain insight from the public on what they wanted included in the constitution. The program involved over 400 community workshops and garnered two million letters and petitions from the public. “It was the first time in our history that politicians have gone to the people without playing politics or asking for votes,” observed Hassen Ebrahim, chief executive of the Constitutional Assembly. “I hope it's a lesson that will be pursued in our politics.” When a series of nine big public meetings were held early in 1995, one petitioner advocated for a constitutional right to more libraries, and a memorandum appended to the final constitution described it as “the collective wisdom of the South African people.” 4

The final constitution was approved by the Constitutional Assembly on May 8, 1996. After a period of revision, it was certified by the Constitutional Court on December 4, 1996, and approved by President Mandela on December 10. 5  The Assembly chose this date because it had been recognized in 1950 by the United Nations as Human Rights Day. The presidential signing ceremony took place in Sharpeville, recalling one of the seminal events in the struggle against apartheid. At the ceremony, Mandela declared, “Out of the many Sharpevilles which haunt our history was born the unshakeable determination that respect for human life, liberty and well-being must be enshrined as rights beyond the power of any force to diminish. These principles were proclaimed wherever people resisted dispossession, defied unjust laws, or protested against inequality. They were shared by all who hated oppression, from whomsoever it came and to whomsoever it was meted.” 6

The preamble of the constitution acknowledges the suffering and injustice of the past while conveying a hope for a just, democratic, and united future. To emphasize this commitment, the word  democratic  appears three times within the preamble itself. The constitution continues in 14 thematic chapters, written in accessible prose and translated into the 11 official South African languages. These chapters focus on such topics as basic rights, elections, the composition of legislative bodies, the organization and function of courts of law, national finance, and national security. The constitution also upholds the rights of distinctive ethnic communities (those sharing “a common cultural and language heritage”) to self-determination (article 235), the recognition of traditional leaders (articles 211 and 212), and the obligations of different organs of state to “preserve the peace” and “co-operate with one another” (article 41). The first chapter of the constitution states:

The Republic of South Africa is one, sovereign, democratic state founded on the following values: a. Human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms. b. Non-racialism and non-sexism. c. Supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law. d. Universal adult suffrage, a national common voters roll, regular elections and a multi-party system of democratic government, to ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness. 7

The South African constitution is widely recognized as including the most extensive human rights guarantees of any constitution in the world, as it places its list of 32 rights before any mention of the structure of government. 8  This section is a careful monument to the achievement of those who campaigned for equality. Included among the rights guaranteed by South Africa’s constitution are equality, freedom from discrimination (including bigotry based on sexual orientation or age), a right to human dignity, freedom of religion and expression, and the right to form and join trade unions. Chapter 9 of the constitution, which defines equality before the law, specifies a long list of protected categories: “The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.” 9  This provision made South Africa the first constitution in the world to guarantee gay and lesbian rights, which offered new freedoms and led to other important legal gains, as described in the reading  The Equality Clause: Gay Rights and the Constitution .

Many of the provisions in the constitution’s bill of rights are direct responses to practices of the apartheid state. For example, the apartheid state commonly detained individuals it suspected of opposing apartheid without charging them, and many of these individuals were tortured. In response, Article 12 of the constitution guarantees “freedom and security of the person.” It states that people cannot be arbitrarily detained and that they have a right “to be free from all forms of violence from either public or private sources” and a right “not to be tortured in any way.” 10  Article 35 outlines in great detail the rights of those arrested, accused, or detained. No law can protect people from harm, but here is a body of laws whose enforcement will ensure that the horrors of the past are not repeated. The reading  The South African Constitution  offers a closer look at the constitution’s preamble, which frames these ideas, and the bill of rights—perhaps the most comprehensive in the world.

Seeking Truth and Justice

In the negotiations for transition, one major debate centered around accountability for the violence used to enforce apartheid. The ANC leadership wanted to publicize the facts of apartheid violence and bring perpetrators to justice, but de Klerk had promised amnesty to the security forces. A compromise was conceived by Dullah Omar, a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, who became the minister of justice following the 1994 elections. Omar proposed public hearings that would allow open discussion of the violence surrounding apartheid. These hearings would include the possibility of amnesty for those who fully disclosed their crimes and could prove that they had a political motive.

• 1 Nelson Mandela, “ Nelson Mandela’s 1994 Inauguration Speech ” (transcript), Pretoria, South Africa, May 10, 1994), BET website.
• 2 “Making the Constitution: South Africa,” The Economist, January 13, 1996, 42.
• 3 Padraig O’Malley, “ Full House ,” O’Malley: The Heart of Hope website, “Post Transition (1994–1999): Constitution Making” section, Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, accessed July 21, 2015.
• 4 Padraig O’Malley, “ A Very Distant Deadline ,” O’Malley: The Heart of Hope website, “Post Transition (1994–1999): Constitution Making” section, Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, accessed July 21, 2015; “ Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996—Explanatory Memorandum ,” South African Government website, accessed July 22, 2015.
• 5 Recent Developments, “Making the Final Constitution in South Africa,” Journal of African Law 41, no. 2 (1997): 246–47; “ The Certification Process ,” Constitutional Court of South Africa website, accessed July 21, 2015.
• 6 “ Speech by President Nelson Mandela at the Signing of the Constitution ,” Polity.org, accessed July 21, 2015.
• 7 Government of South Africa, “ Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 ,” South African Government website.
• 8 Ian Millhiser, “ What Americans Can Learn from the Constitution Nelson Mandela Signed ,” December 6, 2013, ThinkProgress website, accessed July 21, 2015.
• 9 Millhiser, “ What Americans Can Learn from the Constitution Nelson Mandela Signed .”
• 10 Constitution of South Africa, Chapter 2: Bill of Rights , Department of Justice and Constitutional Development of South Africa website, accessed May 23, 2018.

Ntsiki Biko Consoles her Mother-in-Law Alice Biko

Nontsikelelo 'Ntsikie' Biko (L), widow of South African civil rights activist Steve Biko, consoles his mother Alice (R) during the investigation into his death from beatings administered by the South African Security Police.

In 1995, the new parliament established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC investigated and recorded gross violations of human rights committed in South Africa and beyond its borders between 1960 and 1994. The TRC focused on both supporters and opponents of apartheid, allowing the process to appear balanced and fair. Perpetrators of human rights violations could provide testimony and apply to the Amnesty Committee, one of three TRC committees. Victims were also encouraged to submit testimonies to the Human Rights Violations Committee. Once such testimony had been corroborated, some victims were eligible for reparations, or financial payments from the government, which were administered by the Reparations Committee. The organizers explained, “These measures cannot bring back the dead, or adequately compensate for pain and suffering, but they can improve the quality of life for victims of gross human rights violations and/or their dependents.” 1

Omar emphasized that in his view, the aim of the TRC was not forgiveness: “Forgiveness is a personal matter. However, bitterness can only exacerbate tensions in society. By providing victims a platform to tell their stories and know the destiny of their loved ones, one can help to achieve a nation reconciled with its past and at peace with itself.” 2  The TRC mandate said that “to achieve unity and morally acceptable reconciliation, it is necessary that the truth about gross violations of human rights must be: established by an official investigation unit using fair procedures; fully and unreservedly acknowledged by the perpetrators; made known to the public, together with the identity of the planners, perpetrators, and victims.” 3  Amnesty would be granted only to those who applied for it and fully disclosed their misdeeds. The crimes were then judged in proportion to their political aims. Rulings on amnesty were made by the commission.

In typical prosecutions, the focus is usually on perpetrators. At the TRC hearings, the co-chairs, archbishop Desmond Tutu and Alex Boraine, focused on the victims, their families, their suffering, and the crimes committed against them as human beings. As Boraine, who served as vice president of the commission, said at an international conference, “To ignore what happened to thousands of people who were victims of abuse under apartheid is to deny them their basic dignity. It is to condemn them to live as nameless victims with little or no chance to begin their lives over again.”

The ANC and most black South Africans wanted to bring perpetrators to justice, but because de Klerk, who in the early 1990s was still president, had promised his security forces amnesty, a compromise was reached. Perpetrators would be granted amnesty, as individuals, but only if they met two criteria: 1) they publicly told the full truth about what they had done, and 2) their deeds had been carried out for a political purpose. To encourage perpetrators to come forward, the state had the power to charge with crimes those who had not received amnesty.

In court-like proceedings, the TRC began taking evidence in 1996. For two years, the commission chair collected testimony from both victims and perpetrators and held hearings throughout the country, many focused on specific instances of violence. 4  Over 7,000 people applied for amnesty, and over 21,000 people submitted victim statements. Some 2,500 perpetrators of political crimes came before the commission, a small percentage relative to the number of people who committed crimes and the mass violence that occurred. Televised public hearings and radio coverage gave victims the opportunity to share their stories publicly. Some were able to confront the worst of apartheid’s agents. Thousands of victims and survivors were also allowed to air their grievances. 5

The entire South African community was able to follow the proceedings. A weekly television show summarized the testimony in the TRC hearings of the previous week, allowing a wide audience to learn about the various crimes that had occurred during the apartheid era. Importantly, radio, a medium used by the majority of South Africans, also carried the hearings, as did newspapers and other print media. In addition, there was a dedicated website that posted transcripts. These efforts were not just about sharing the TRC’s work; they were also explicitly aimed at creating transparency, a crucial element of democracy. For the first time, South Africans were allowed to see such processes at work. Unlike prior truth commissions in other countries, which often amounted to back-room amnesty deals, the South African TRC became both a process by which the young democracy could address the violent past and a medium for democratization.

• 1 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “ A Summary of Reparation and Rehabilitation Policy, Including Proposals to Be Considered by the President ,” Republic of South Africa, Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, accessed July 31, 2015.
• 2 Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New York: Times Books, 1999), 9.
• 3 “ Explanatory Memorandum to the Parliamentary Bill ,” South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, accessed June 26, 2016.
• 4 Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, “Truth and Justice: Unfinished Business in South Africa,” Traces of Truth website, accessed 4 June 4, 2015.
• 5 Therese Abrahamsen and Hugo van der Merwe, “ Reconciliation through Amnesty? Amnesty Applicants’ Views of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission ,” Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, accessed July 31, 2015.

Archbishop Tutu and the Chasm

Standing at the edge of a cliff labeled ‘Truth,’ Archbishop Desmond Tutu clutches a blank map. Behind him stand a perpetrator, a victim, and members of the media. A deep chasm separates them from the cliff labeled ‘Reconciliation.’

Giving a voice to victims was one of the most important aspects of the TRC. Across the country, victims came forward in town halls to speak of the atrocities they had personally faced or to speak for their loved ones who had been killed or who had disappeared. Many acknowledged the importance of finally having a space to discuss their personal histories. Mzukisi Mdidimba, who was beaten by police at the age of 15 while in solitary confinement, spoke of what it meant that his story had finally been told. He remarked, “When I have told stories of my life before, afterward I am crying, crying, crying . . . This time, . . . I know [that] what they have done to me will . . . be all over the country. I still have some sort of crying, but also joy inside.” 1  The reading The  Truth and Reconciliation Commission  includes an extended example of TRC victim testimony, from the wife of a political leader murdered by security police in 1985.

At the conclusion of the hearings, the TRC compiled a six-volume report of its findings and submitted it to President Mandela in October 1998. In total, there were 1,188 days of hearings; 7,112 people petitioned for amnesty, 5,392 were refused, and 849 were granted amnesty. Two more volumes were submitted later that assessed the work of the TRC. These later reports focused on the cases that the TRC had not been able to investigate sufficiently and provided recommendations for the future. 2  Critics of the TRC have claimed that the process did not succeed in bringing reconciliation to South Africa because the hearings focused too much on individual cases while failing to look at the broad system of inequality, because victims who participated in the process received too little emotional support, and because the reparations were very slow in coming and were ultimately far too small. The reading  Examining Weaknesses of the TRC  elaborates on some of these criticisms. In an analysis of the TRC, Graeme Simpson writes:

There is a grave risk that out of the testimonies and confessions of a few, a truth will be constructed that disguises the way in which black South Africans, who were systematically oppressed and exploited under apartheid, continue to be excluded and marginalised in the present. The sustained or growing levels of violent crime and antisocial violence, which appear to be new phenomena associated with the transition to democracy, are in fact rooted in the very same experiences of social marginalisation, political exclusion and economic exploitation that previously gave rise to the more ‘functional’ violence of resistance politics. 3

In their 2017 Reconciliation Barometer, the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation reported that “most South Africans feel that reconciliation is still needed, and that the TRC provided a good foundation for reconciliation in the country.” Reconciliation may take the form of an ongoing process rather than something fully achievable—one that must reach deep and wrestle with a public or national morality, according to the bishop in the reading  A Need for a Moral Bottom Line . The commissioners of the TRC often said that in order to build a more unified society, first truth is necessary, and only then can come reconciliation. This approach is known as restorative justice, as distinct from retributive justice. The latter is the more common approach for prosecutions and trials and was the model for the Nazi war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg.

The TRC is widely viewed as a success, although an imperfect one. Many countries have since used the TRC as a model for addressing their own painful recent pasts, including Peru, Sierra Leone, and Canada, which held a truth commission to deal with the legacy of abuses against First Peoples. In the US, the city of Greensboro, North Carolina, held a TRC in order to respond to the killing of five anti-Klan demonstrators in 1979. And in Maine, the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth & Reconciliation Commission held hearings to learn the truth about what happened to Wabanaki children and families involved with the state’s child welfare system.

What else did the TRC achieve? One notable accomplishment was a contribution to the prevention of deniability, something all countries must consider in the wake of mass violence. By building a historical record based on testimony and investigation of massive human rights violations committed during apartheid, the TRC placed apartheid at the center of South Africa’s history. South Africa further emphasized a focus on the past and historical memory through early post-apartheid efforts to create institutions like the District Six Museum, the Apartheid Museum, and the site of the Constitutional Court, which was once one of South Africa’s most notorious prisons.

Symbolism, Sports, and Unity

To make this new South Africa successful, President Mandela understood that he needed to bring people along on this journey into the unknown by appealing to what mattered to them. He needed to help all South Africans see him as  their  president and to feel as if they were part of the new South Africa. While in prison, Mandela had recognized the importance of bonding with Afrikaners through their culture. What could be better as a means of bonding than sports? The love that many Afrikaners had for rugby offered a perfect opening. In 1995, South Africa was scheduled to host the Rugby World Cup. Until that time, rugby in South Africa had been seen as a sport for white people. Many black South Africans viewed Afrikaner support for rugby as another lingering legacy of apartheid; some even rooted against the national team, partly because very few black players took the field for the Springboks, the South African national team.

• 1 Susie Linfield, “ Trading Truth for Justice? Reflections on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission ,” Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum , accessed May 23, 2018.
• 2 “ Amnesty Hearings and Decisions ,” Truth and Reconciliation Commission website.
• 3 Graeme Simpson, “ Repairing the Past: Confronting the Legacies of Slavery, Genocide, & Caste ,” Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale University, New Haven, CT, October 27–29, 2005.

All White Community in South Africa Holds Onto Its Past

A family dressed in traditional Afrikaner clothing pose during a holiday celebration commemorating ‘the Battle of Blood River,’ on December 16, 2003 in Orania, Northern Cape province, South Africa.

Prior to 1994, many anti-apartheid activists had supported a boycott on South African sports as a tool of the anti-apartheid movement, infuriating Afrikaners. When the Springboks toured New Zealand in 1981, for example, many New Zealanders protested. This inspired activists to pressure New Zealand to cancel plans to play in South Africa, a campaign that prevailed in 1985. An international boycott of South African rugby began shortly thereafter.

Mandela, who needed the support of Afrikaners as he prepared to negotiate with de Klerk, saw an opportunity. He decided that bringing an end to the Springboks rugby boycott would help with his larger project. The South African team once again faced New Zealand in August 1992. Although the stadium had prohibited apartheid symbols at the game, the national anthem, “Die Stem,” seen by many black South Africans as another symbol of apartheid, was boisterously sung and the old flags were waved. Mandela, however, did not give up hope that sports could be used to help bring South Africa’s people together. In June 1994, with the Rugby World Cup scheduled to begin the following May, Mandela met with Francois Pienaar, the Springboks’ captain, to convey his determination to do all he could to help bring the trophy home. After the meeting, Pienaar and his teammates were convinced that one thing they could do to help build bridges was to learn the new South African national anthem, “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.” Pienaar recalls, “As a matter of historical fact, the Springboks weren’t reluctantly forced to sing the new anthem,  Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika , with the Xhosa words . . . It was something we badly wanted to do ourselves and we organised our own singing lessons before the World Cup. I loved singing it—what an anthem—though I was so emotional in the final I just couldn’t get any words out and had to bite my lip hard to stop cracking up.” 1  Also symbolic of growing tolerance was the song “Shosholoza,” translated as “make way,” “move forward,” or “travel fast,” which was originally sung by the black migrant workers who worked in the gold mines around Johannesburg. It was the longtime anthem at soccer matches, where spectators were mostly black, but was adopted as the new Rugby World Cup song.

Before the first match of the 1995 Rugby World Cup in Cape Town, Mandela made a surprise visit to the startled Springboks team. He explained to them the great service they would be doing for their country by promoting unity. When he finished, the players offered Mandela a green Springboks cap, which he immediately put on. Pienaar later recalled how, at that moment, Mandela won the team’s hearts. In the match, the Springboks were unbeatable: first they overwhelmed the reigning champions, Australia, and then they beat Canada and then France in the semifinal. On the day of the final against New Zealand, Mandela telephoned Pienaar to wish the Springboks good luck. The green jersey and cap that Mandela decided to wear that day, for so long closely associated with apartheid, now symbolized a bond between white and black South Africans.

Only a year after assuming office, Mandela stepped onto the Ellis Park Stadium field before a hushed crowd. As the players prepared to run down the tunnel to the field, they could hear the largely Afrikaner crowd slowly begin to chant and eventually erupt into deafening cheers. The former captain of the Springboks described the scene that greeted him:

I walked out into this bright, harsh winter sunlight and at first I could not make out what was going on, what the people were chanting. Then I made out the words. This crowd of white people, of Afrikaners, as one man, as one nation, they were chanting, ‘Nel-son! Nel-son! Nel-son!’ Over and over . . . and, well, it was just . . . I don’t think I’ll ever experience a moment like that again. It was a moment of magic, a moment of wonder. It was the moment I realised that there really was a chance this country could work. 2

Kobie Coetsee, minister of justice and prisons, later said, “It was the moment when my people, his adversaries, embraced Mandela.” 3

Two hours later, with a word of gratitude, saying, “Thank you for what you have done for our country,” Mandela proudly shook Pienaar’s hand and handed him the trophy, sealing a bond between white and black South Africans. The Springboks captain is said to have replied, “No, Mr. President. Thank you for what you have done.” Coming at the start of an era in which the country would be seeking some shared sense of national identity—a unique and ongoing challenge, as discussed in the reading  Creating a Shared Identity for a Democratic South Africa —such a show of unity carried particular weight.

The Persistence of Economic Inequality

Apartheid left a particularly challenging legacy of vast economic gaps between the historically white rich and the mostly black poor. At the most fundamental level, apartheid was a system designed to protect the economic interests of whites and subsidize their lifestyle by limiting competition and suppressing the wages of black South Africans. Government services for whites were extensive, while those for blacks were quite limited. While whites received free education in excellent government schools and world-class healthcare in government hospitals, expenditures on education and health for black South Africans was minimal, resulting in poor schools and substandard healthcare.

As discussed in Chapter 3, South Africa’s political transition was negotiated on the central compromise that it include an agreement to allow whites to maintain their economic position. The National Party was willing to transfer political power to the majority only if whites were allowed to retain control of their land and industries. Some critics of this compromise have argued that the failure to confront the economic consequences of white domination has meant that the transition was only a political one and ultimately failed to end the apartheid economic system. Steven Friedman, a white South African journalist and scholar, later wrote, “While there is no doubting the profound changes which the end of apartheid has produced, it could well be argued that . . . the transition did not encompass the fundamental shift in social and economic power relations which the end of apartheid was meant to produce.” 4

The economic alternatives available to the ANC were limited not simply by the negotiated settlement but also by domestic and international economic constraints. Levying too steep of a tax on the rich population would predictably have driven them to move their wealth outside of South Africa, undermining the economy. The ANC was further constrained by the necessity of attracting critical foreign investment. South Africa shifted to majority rule at a time when the concept of “neoliberal” economics was at its height internationally. Neoliberalism holds that economies do best when the role of government in the economy is limited. Advocates of neoliberalism argue for eliminating restrictions on imports, opening the economy up to international investment, and cutting back on social services. The new ANC-led government thus faced considerable international pressure to limit government spending at the very time when the new leaders were hoping to vastly expand the provision of services to the country’s poor. 5

In 1994, the ANC proposed its first economic policy, called the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). This policy focused on trying to redistribute wealth to the country’s poor, particularly through building infrastructure—providing housing, water, electricity, schools, and hospitals. Yet the success of RDP was limited by budget constraints; the regime did not raise the money that it needed to follow through on its promises. In 1996, RDP was replaced by a new policy: Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR). Although the name included the word “redistribution,” GEAR was in fact a more neoliberal economic program focused primarily on attracting international investment and expanding the South African economy, in the belief that economic growth would ultimately benefit all South Africans. The government continued to invest in developing the infrastructure, but its main focus was on economic growth. 6

While the South African economy has experienced growth and policies have had some success in reducing poverty, the gap between the rich and poor has actually increased. The economic gap continues to fall largely along racial lines. Scholar Elke Zuern writes:

The World Bank reported . . . that the top 10 percent of the population receives 58 percent of the country’s income, while the bottom 50 percent receives less than 8 percent. . . . From 1995 to 2008, white mean per capita income grew over 80 percent, while African income grew by less than 40 percent. Poverty remains overwhelmingly black: In the poorest quintile of households, 95 percent are Africans. Members of this segment of the population struggle to feed their families, allocating more than half of their total expenditure just to food. At the other end of the scale, almost half of the wealthiest 20 percent of households are white, even though whites make up less than 10 percent of the total population. 7

Affirmative action policies have helped to open up employment opportunities for Africans, “coloureds,” and Indians, but these policies have above all benefited those with higher education, who have taken over many government jobs and have gained opportunities as doctors, lawyers, and teachers. The policy of Black Economic Empowerment, adopted by the government in 2007, encouraged businesses to open up opportunities for investment by members of formerly disadvantaged groups. Again, however, these policies primarily helped those who already had some means; the poorest black South Africans did not have the capital to invest in businesses. With legal segregation eliminated, many of the Africans, Indians, and coloureds who could afford to do so moved into formerly white neighborhoods. Today, white South Africans remain the wealthiest population and the poorest are overwhelmingly black South Africans. 8  As a result of the economic polarization there, writer and journalist Hein Marais portrays South Africa as a “two-nation society,” where a wealthy nation and a poor nation exist together side by side in the same territory. 9

Article 29 of the 1996 constitution of the Republic of South Africa declared that “everyone has the right to a basic education” and that schools could no longer discriminate on the grounds of race. The new democracy was determined to go far beyond the bare-bones, far-too-basic schooling that black South Africans had long received. Education had been one of the tools of apartheid, with unequal schools teaching a curriculum that supported the policies and historical narratives of white supremacy. While the central government had previously determined what type of curriculum and what language of instruction would prevail in all of the nation’s schools, under the new constitution, those questions would be determined by local considerations. 10  Still, a massive centralized apparatus—divided in 2009 into a Department of Basic Education and a Department of Higher Education and Training—came to sit atop nine provincial offices of education; education now receives a larger slice of the national budget than does any other sector. 11

While education has seen improvement in some areas, it remains one of the great challenges faced by the government. To undo the damage done by apartheid to the educational system, teachers would need more than money. They would need improved school buildings, new curricula, and better training, as great gaps exist between the facilities serving the rich and the poor. As a senior lecturer at the University of South Africa pointed out, “Almost 80% of schools in the black townships in rural and farm areas have neither basic infrastructure, such as decent classrooms and libraries, nor basic services including clean running water and electricity. They don’t have the required number of qualified teachers or functioning school governing bodies. They report pass rates of less than 30% on required school exit exams. Media reports have highlighted the plight of primary school children who were learning under trees in rural areas of Limpopo province.” 12  Students in primary school continue to perform poorly on tests of literacy and numeracy, and far too many students lack textbooks. Only 12% of black South Africans go to college.

Since apartheid was dismantled, South Africa has seen at least four waves of curriculum reform. First, in keeping with the National Education Policy Investigation, offensive language and content—particularly concepts that reflected and promoted the racist ideas behind apartheid—were purged. Some critics argue that despite good intentions, this was at best a halfhearted effort aimed at furthering reconciliation. Then, during the late 1990s, “values” became the key term, and reformers looked for ways to open the curriculum to include a reflection on ethics—ostensibly the basis of a true democracy. 13

In 1997, while the Truth and Reconciliation Commission continued its work, the Department of Education initiated a major curriculum reform called Curriculum 2005. While some lauded the efforts, critics now point to the short shrift given to history under this plan, and some decry the curriculum as “advocating collective amnesia” for the crimes of apartheid. 14

The appointment of Kader Asmal to the post of minister of education in 1999—a role he would hold until 2004—marked a break with precedent. Asmal had been involved in designing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and he had strong feelings about the need to come to grips with the past. Under Asmal, a working group from the Department of Education produced a report titled  Manifesto on Values, Education and Democracy  (2001). Among the principles underlined early in the report was “putting history back into the curriculum.” This was “essential in building the dignity of human values within an informed awareness of the past, preventing amnesia, checking triumphalism,” and more. 15  The education department set up a specific Race and Values Directorate whose task was to ensure that the curriculum and classrooms became spaces where values and democratic citizenship were addressed. The  Manifesto on Values, Education and Democracy  shaped the Revised National Curriculum Statement that began to be rolled out in schools across the country in 2003. Four years later, Johan Wassermann, the head of the Department of History and Social Studies Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, lauded the new content in history books for including “a range of different voices that were silenced in the past.” He believed that the new curriculum would provide students with the opportunity to “see the world through the eyes of someone else. What does it mean to have been a policeman and also a protester during the 1976 Soweto uprising? You are attempting to understand, as opposed to saying that this side is bad and that side is good.” 16  These lessons are part of the ongoing challenge for nations in facing the most difficult moments of their histories—lessons that are both more urgent and, in some ways, more difficult in countries where the wounds of the past are still fresh. For a sense of how South Africans discuss educational and other forms of inequality, see the Antjie Krog reading,  Overcoming the Past and Becoming a Single Nation .

Challenging the “Rainbow Nation”: Xenophobia Against Migrants

Since 1994, migration into South Africa has increasingly become an additional challenge facing the country. The exact number of migrants is unclear, as many arrive undocumented. It is estimated that between 1 and 3 million refugees have come to South Africa from other African countries seeking work and opportunity; many have fled violence and persecution in their country of origin. This influx of refugees and immigrants has led to an increase in xenophobia and, especially in townships, xenophobic violence. Townships are ripe grounds for the development of xenophobia, as these are areas where the majority of people live in difficult conditions and where poor newcomers will first try to find homes.

Xenophobia in South Africa has been attributed to many root causes, including fear, frustration with the pace of change, and a culture of violence that is a legacy not only of apartheid but of the transition itself. There is very little evidence to show that the influx of refugees has led directly to an increase in South African unemployment or decreased access to housing. In spite of a lack of evidence, however, many poor and unemployed South Africans believe that migrants will take or compete for jobs and resources.

The violence against migrants has been horrific. On May 18, 2008, in an East Rand township called Ramaphosa, anti-African sentiments erupted in violence. As a mob attacked a group of immigrants, one man was set ablaze. His scorched body was not identified for two weeks. Pictures of the burning man, who was finally identified as Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave of Mozambique, hit media outlets the next day. More xenophobic violence against immigrants from African countries ensued. Thousands were forced from their homes. The message was loud and clear. 17  Nhamuave and other foreigners who came in search of work, even for meager salaries, were not welcome in South Africa. 18

• 1 Brendan Gallagher, “ Former South Africa captain Francois Pienaar recalls the day no one fluffed his lines ,” The Telegraph , January 29, 2010.
• 2 Quoted in John Carlin, Invictus: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation (London: Penguin Books, 2008).
• 3 Quoted in Peter Hain, Mandela (London: Hachette, 2010).
• 4 Steven Friedman, “Before and After: Reflections on Regime Change and Its Aftermath,” Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa no. 75 (2011): 4–12.
• 5 Michael MacDonald, “The Political Economy of Identity Politics,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Fall 2004.
• 6 MacDonald, “The Political Economy of Identity Politics.”
• 7 Elke Zuern, “Why Protests Are Growing in South Africa,” Current History vol. 112 (May 2013): 175.
• 8 Zuern, “Why Protests Are Growing in South Africa.”
• 9 Hein Marais, South Africa, Limits to Change: The Political Economy of Transition (Zed Books, 2001).
• 10 Kristin Henrard, “Post-apartheid South Africa: Transformation and Reconciliation,” World Affairs 166, no. 1 (2003): 42.
• 11 In 2015, for instance, education received just under 20% of the 1.35-trillion-rand budget (a bit more than 107 billion US dollars); Budget Review 2015 , Republic of South Africa, National Treasury website.
• 12 Moeketsi Letseka, “South African Education Has Promises to Keep and Miles to Go,” Phi Delta Kappa no. 94 (March 1, 2013): 74–75.
• 13 Simeon Maile, “The Absence of a Home Curriculum in Post-apartheid Education in South Africa,” International Journal of African Renaissance Studies 6, no. 2 (2011): 104.
• 14 Gail Weldon, “A Comparative Study of the Construction of Memory and Identity in the Curriculum in Societies Emerging from Conflict: Rwanda and South Africa,” PhD dissertation, University of Pretoria, 2009, 150.
• 15 Republic of South Africa Department of Higher Education and Training, “ Manifesto on Values, Education and Democracy, Republic of South Africa ,” accessed July 26, 2015.
• 16 Latoya Newman, “History That Embraces Africa,” The Mercury (South Africa), November 30, 2007, 12.
• 17 Glynnis Underhill and Sibonile Khumalo, “ No Justice for Burning Man ,” Mail and Guardian, July 30, 2010, accessed June 4, 2015.
• 18 Stephen Bevan, “ The Tale of the Flaming Man Whose Picture Woke the World Up to South Africa’s Xenophobia ,” Daily Mail online, June 9, 2008, accessed June 4, 2015.

Aftermath of the Ramaphosa Riots

A child pushes a trolley cart through burnt debris after violent xenophobic clashes at the Ramaphosa informal settlement on the outskirt of Johannesburg on May 21, 2008.

Many South Africans questioned why foreigners were the target of such violence after remarkable strides had been made to overcome decades of racial hatred. For some, the violence pointed to a need to address hatred and anti-migrant prejudice as well as the profound lingering inequality in South Africa. The persistent xenophobia also shed light on the need to continue the work of confronting the past, particularly the sensitive issues of the violence of the 1980s and the transition. Notably, many South Africans were pained by the violence, protested against it, and spoke about how the very people who were targeted in these attacks were from countries that had harboured South African refugees during the struggle against apartheid.

Migrant labor remains an integral part of South Africa’s economy, and studies have shown that migrants bring valuable skills into the country. The Consortium for Migrants and Refugees in South Africa, a collection of social service and activist organizations, argued in a public letter that the roots of the xenophobic violence were largely political:

Research conducted by the Forced Migration Studies Programme (FMSP) at Wits University has shown that the trigger for violence against foreign nationals or other ‘outsiders’ is primarily about competition for both formal and informal political power as well as economic power. Xenophobic violence in most cases has thus been the result of local leaders mobilising people to attack foreign nationals or other ‘outsiders’ as a means of strengthening their power in the local area. . . . Whilst it is widely acknowledged that immigration reform is needed to improve South Africa’s management of migration in order to better utilise migration as a development tool, we need to be extremely cautious in suggesting that illegal or irregular migration is the primary cause of xenophobic violence . . . . Tackling xenophobic violence and violence against other ‘outsiders’ is more about strengthening structures of governance and rule of law than tackling irregular migration. 1

• 1 Duncan Breen, Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (CoRMSA), “Causes of Xenophobic Violence,” July 21, 2009.

Demonstrations Against Xenophobia in Cape Town

Groups of people hold banners and chant slogans during an anti-xenophobia demonstration in Khayelitsha region of Cape Town, South Africa on April 27, 2015 as a reaction to widespread anti-foreigner protests and violence.

The Shadow of Apartheid: Economics and Health

The 1994 elections that brought majority rule to South Africa and made Nelson Mandela president inspired great optimism in many people, both inside and outside the country. The new political system included impressive democratic structures, a new constitution, guaranteed minority representation, and strong legal protections of human rights. People enjoyed new freedoms of speech, movement, and assembly. With the majority black population finally in control of political institutions that had been used for decades to oppress and keep them in poverty, people hoped that new opportunities would open up for all people, leading to a redistribution of the country’s wealth.

View of Johannesburg

A view of Johannesburg and its northern suburbs as seen from the top floor of the Carlton Centre, depicting the city’s modern infrastructure.

The economic legacies of apartheid, however, have proven difficult to overcome. In negotiations, as mentioned, the former government insisted on many protections for the white minority population, including the guarantee that white wealth would be protected. In 1994, shortly after Mandela’s election, the government passed the Restitution of Land Rights Act, a law that would allow individuals whose land was taken through discriminatory legislation dating back to 1913 to apply to have their land restored. But the bill faced strong opposition from both the right wing and the Inkatha Freedom Party, and in the end it had very little impact. When the parliament passed an amendment to the law in 2014 that sought to make it easier to reclaim stolen land, the Constitutional Court declared the amendment unconstitutional. The vast majority of South Africa’s most fertile farmland remains in the hands of white owners.

Improving the quality of housing for the black South Africans and correcting the gross inequalities in the education and health systems also proved to be daunting challenges. A significant portion of the population lived in temporary dwellings such as shacks or shantytowns, a problem that persists, as explored in the reading  The Housing Clause in the South African Bill of Rights: The Continuing Struggle . The terrible conditions of schools and hospitals serving black communities meant that massive investments were needed, but the government was limited in how heavily it could tax the country’s wealthy (mostly white) population. The new government thus hoped that foreign investment could expand the economy and provide the income needed to fund social and economic improvements. These goals have been hard to meet, as investors were very slow to return, fearing instability after the transition. Many companies that had been willing to invest in South Africa when it was controlled by whites were initially unwilling to do so once black South Africans took power.

As a result, although the country has enjoyed steady economic growth and the income of the very poor has risen, gaps between rich and poor remain severe. Despite the promotion of a black middle class through initiatives such as the Black Economic Empowerment program, the majority of the country’s businesses are still owned by whites. Healthcare and education are more equitable than before, but millions of black South Africans still live in abject poverty. The freedom of movement that came with apartheid has meant that millions of people have migrated into urban areas, where the government’s program to build thousands of new homes has simply not been able to keep up with demand.

Although social programs have been implemented to improve the standard of living for South Africa’s poor, some argue that black laborers remain vulnerable to exploitation. This is especially true in the mining industry, which relies on a large number of migrant workers. According to 2015 reports, “[w]hites comprised 81 per cent of the highest income earners, Africans 10 per cent, Indians 5 per cent and Coloureds 4 per cent. Thus income inequality, always cited by critics of apartheid as one of the most important indicators of the effects of white supremacy, remains among the highest in the world in post-apartheid South Africa despite massive economic expansion.” Many mine workers continue to find employment miles from their families, living in squalid makeshift homes.

In addition, the World Bank recently reported that life expectancy at birth in South Africa is only slightly more than 60 years. 1  South Africa today is home to 5.7 million people who are H.I.V.-positive — more than any other nation, almost one in five adults. 2  According to another report, “In 2011, less than one in six households had adequate access to food, less than one in six individuals belonged to a medical aid scheme . . . and one in three adult South Africans still had no access to a formal financial institution.” 3

Tackling the AIDS crisis in South Africa has proven difficult, not just because of the number of cases and cost of treatment but also because of the attitudes of some leaders. Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor and president from 1999 to 2008, publicly disputed the scientific research into both the causes and treatment of the disease. During that time, South Africa faced an urgent and growing AIDS crisis; research by scientists at Harvard University now suggests that “the South African government would have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people earlier this decade if it had provided antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients and widely administered drugs to help prevent pregnant women from infecting their babies.” 4  When Mbeki lost power, Barbara Hogan was brought in as health minister. She told reporters, “The era of denialism is over completely in South Africa.” 5

The Marikana Miners’ Strike and Massacre

The British-owned Lonmin platinum mine is located in Marikana, about 60 miles northwest of Johannesburg in the North West province. On August 10, 2012, 3,000 workers walked off the job, demanding more pay. The management called it an illegal strike. 6  The miners made approximately 5,000 rand per month in take-home pay (approximately $400 in 2018) and were demanding an increase of 2,500 rand (approximately $200) per month. Over the days that followed, the strike grew increasingly violent and came to include not just the striking parties but also policemen, security personnel from the mine, and an escalating rivalry between the National Union of Mineworkers and the more radical Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). Ten people were killed in the early days of the strike, including two police officers and two security personnel.

On Thursday, August 16, the South African Police Service (SAPS) fired automatic weapons into the crowd of miners who were only a few feet away. Thirty-four people were killed, 78 people were injured, and 259 people were arrested. The SAPS claimed that they were under attack by miners carrying clubs, machetes, and spears. Some of the violence was documented by the media, including some police killings. Video footage showed that many of the strikers did not present a threat to the lives of the police officers. Some were standing too far away, others had no weapons, and still others were shot in the back.

News of what became known as the Marikana massacre quickly spread across South Africa and the world via traditional and social media. Many commentators made connections between the killings and the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, when police killed 69 people. Some have argued that the comparison is not in the details of the Marikana and Sharpeville events but in what they represent: an increasingly violent state and security forces using lethal force against people seeking dignified lives. In the case of Sharpeville, race played a critical role, with primarily white officers killing black South Africans. In the case of Marikana, the police officers were black. Writer Richard Stupart argues:

As events like Sharpeville made it impossible for our parents to claim ignorance about the violence of the apartheid state and the abominable inequality that made such repression necessary, so Marikana has made it impossible for us to claim to the next generation that we were unaware that the majority was being repressed. Predictably, there is outrage at appropriating a memory from our history and throwing it back at the current government. “The current government is vastly different to that of the old South Africa” runs the refrain. But there is a difference between “we are vastly different to the old South Africa” and “we have changed in all respects”. And it is in the respects that the state and nation have not changed that the comparisons to apartheid symbols like Sharpeville burn most incandescent. We are still a nation structured towards the economic exploitation of the majority. The state still uses violence to crush those who wish for a dignified life. 7

In the immediate wake of the massacre and this media attention, President Zuma formed the Marikana Commission of Inquiry and appointed judge Ian Farlam as its head. The commission issued its report in 2015. But little meaningful action has been taken to support the victims, their families, or the improvement of conditions for South African miners. Shortly after he came to office in 2018, President Ramaphosa told the parliament that the government had failed South Africa during the Marikana episode, saying that the tragedy “stands out as the darkest moment in the life of our young democracy.” 8

Looking Forward

South Africa entered 2018 in crisis. The president, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, stood accused of corruption and misconduct charges. Other members of the ANC governing party were known to be caught up in scandals, and the Constitutional Court ruled that the National Assembly had failed to hold President Zuma accountable. In February 2018, Zuma resigned, paving the way for Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, the new head of the ANC, to become president. In his State of the Nation Address, Ramaphosa repeatedly invoked Nelson Mandela, calling on South Africans to continue the journey of transformation that Mandela began for them. Ramaphosa said:

We should honour Madiba [Mandela] by putting behind us the era of discord, disunity and disillusionment. We should put behind us the era of diminishing trust in public institutions and weakened confidence in leaders. We should put all the negativity that has dogged our country behind us because a new dawn is upon us. It is a new dawn that is inspired by our collective memory of Nelson Mandela and the changes that are unfolding. As we rid our minds of all negativity, we should reaffirm our belief that South Africa belongs to all who live in it. For though we are a diverse people, we are one nation. There are 57 million of us, each with different histories, languages, cultures, experiences, views and interests. Yet we are bound together by a common destiny. 9

Ramaphosa ended his speech with an appeal to memory and a call to action—a call for South Africans to make history together, to find opportunity for renewal and progress in the coming period of change. He concluded:

We have done it before and we will do it again — bonded by our common love for our country, resolute in our determination to overcome the challenges that lie ahead and convinced that by working together we will build the fair and just and decent society to which Nelson Mandela dedicated his life. As I conclude, allow me to recall the words of the late great Bra Hugh Masekela [a legendary South African jazz musician]. In his song, ‘Thuma Mina’, he anticipated a day of renewal, of new beginnings. He sang: “I wanna be there when the people start to turn it around When they triumph over poverty I wanna be there when the people win the battle against AIDS I wanna lend a hand I wanna be there for the alcoholic I wanna be there for the drug addict I wanna be there for the victims of violence and abuse I wanna lend a hand Send me.” 10

Parliament responded with a standing ovation and by breaking into song.

In the days following the speech, journalists and commentators celebrated and critiqued it, and many pointed to the new feeling of hope in the air. They also addressed how close South Africa’s democracy came to the brink of disaster and turned a necessary spotlight on the essential roles that fundamental institutions—and the individuals within them—played in protecting liberal democracy, including a free press, an independent judiciary, and a strong civil society.

• 1 The World Bank, “Life expectancy at birth total (years),” World Bank Open Data website, accessed June 2018.
• 2 Celia W. Dugger, “ Study Cites Toll of AIDS Policy in South Africa ,” New York Times , November 25, 2016.
• 3 “South African Economic Outlook,” Câmara de Comércio Luso-Sul Africana website, accessed May 23, 2018.
• 4 Celia W. Dugger, “ Study Cites Toll of AIDS Policy in South Africa ,” New York Times , November 25, 2016.
• 5 Dugger, “ Study Cites Toll of AIDS Policy in South Africa .”
• 6 It was formally an unprotected industrial action; see “ Marikana Commission of Inquiry: Report on Matters of Public, National and International Concern Arising out of the Tragic Incidents at the Lonmin Mine in Marikana, in the North West Province ” (South Africa Human Rights Commission), 55. For more information, see also “ Marikana Massacre 16 August 2012,” South African History Online website; Greg Nicolson, “ Marikana Report: Key Findings and Recommendations ,” Daily Maverick , June 26, 2015; Nick Davies, “ Marikana Massacre: The Untold Story of the Strike Leader Who Died for Workers’ Rights ,” The Guardian , May 19, 2015.
• 7 Richard Stupart, “Why Marikana Is Our Sharpeville,” African Scene , August 23, 2012.
• 8 Jan Gerber, “ Ramaphosa Promises 'Healing, Atonement' For Marikana ,” Huffington Post , February 21, 2018.
• 9 “ Read Cyril Ramaphosa's first state of the nation address ,” Times Live , February 16, 2018.
• 10 “ Read Cyril Ramaphosa's first state of the nation address ,” Times Live .

How to Cite This Reading

Facing History & Ourselves, “ Introduction: Transition to Democracy ,” last updated August 3, 2018. 

This reading contains text not authored by Facing History & Ourselves. See footnotes for source information.

Essay on Election and Democracy for Students and Children

500 words essay on election and democracy.

A democratic government is said to be the best kind of government. It ensures the active participation of the people where the citizens get the chance to choose their government. The candidate or party whom the people choose is through elections.

Therefore, we see how elections play a pivotal role in a democracy. The party which secures the highest number of votes in the election process forms the government for the next term. That is why we see how elections are greatly crucial for a democracy.

Election Process in a Democracy

The election process in a democracy is usually similar in most ways. It is responsible for shaping the government of a democracy. Elections are conducted at regular intervals. In a democracy like India, they take place every five years. A committee is set to monitor the whole electoral procedure from the voters’ list to the results.

During the election process, various parties enroll themselves to contest in the elections. After thorough campaigning and more, dates are decided on which voting happens. People turn up in great numbers to cast their votes to make their candidate or party win.

Most importantly, in a democracy, the election process follows the method of a secret ballot. It is very beneficial for maintaining the fairness of the contest. Moreover, they also protect the privacy and safety of the voter as they are not liable to answer to anyone regarding their vote. It is one of the fairest ways to decide who wins the election.

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Importance of Election in Democracy

The election procedure just shows how important and crucial it is for a democracy. The process is very grand and takes place on a great level. As it requires a lot of work and attention, there are certain people who specifically get the responsibility of handling and managing the entire process.

Elections form the basis of democracy. They are very important as they help the people in getting a chance to contest the elections. It allows people to get a fair chance to work for their country and make a brighter future. Moreover, it also ensures that any person can become a part of the government without any discrimination on the basis of caste, creed, sex, religion or more.

Most importantly, elections entrust a big responsibility on the shoulders of the citizens. It helps in empowering the citizens of a democracy. You see that when a person earns the right to vote, they choose their government responsibly as they realize the power that lies within their hands.

Above all, the election process ensures fair play. They are a great way of preventing dishonest people from rigging the procedure. In short, fair and regular elections are a vital part of a democratic government. Similarly, they empower the common citizens of the nation to elect their government and also change it after a period of time to ensure everyone works for the best in the country.

FAQs on Election and Democracy

Q.1 What is the election process in a democracy?

A.1 The election process takes place at a regular period of time. People cast their vote to whomever they think id serving of being in power. Thus, the party with the majority of votes wins and serves the term.

Q.2 Why are elections important in a democracy?

A.2 Elections form the basis of any democracy. It ensures that the power resides within the people. It also ensures fair play and stops any unfair means from taking place. They are important to strengthen the essence of democracy.

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Democracy Essay

Democracy is derived from the Greek word demos or people. It is defined as a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people. Democracy is exercised directly by the people; in large societies, it is by the people through their elected agents. In the phrase of President Abraham Lincoln, democracy is the “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” There are various democratic countries, but India has the largest democracy in the world. This Democracy Essay will help you know all about India’s democracy. Students can also get a list of CBSE Essays on different topics to boost their essay-writing skills.

500+ Words Democracy Essay

India is a very large country full of diversities – linguistically, culturally and religiously. At the time of independence, it was economically underdeveloped. There were enormous regional disparities, widespread poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and a shortage of almost all public welfare means. Since independence, India has been functioning as a responsible democracy. The same has been appreciated by the international community. It has successfully adapted to challenging situations. There have been free and fair periodic elections for all political offices, from the panchayats to the President. There has been a smooth transfer of political power from one political party or set of political parties to others, both at national and state levels, on many occasions.

India: A Democratic Country

Democracy is of two, i.e. direct and representative. In a direct democracy, all citizens, without the intermediary of elected or appointed officials, can participate in making public decisions. Such a system is only practical with relatively small numbers of people in a community organisation or tribal council. Whereas in representative democracy, every citizen has the right to vote for their representative. People elect their representatives to all levels, from Panchayats, Municipal Boards, State Assemblies and Parliament. In India, we have a representative democracy.

Democracy is a form of government in which rulers elected by the people take all the major decisions. Elections offer a choice and fair opportunity to the people to change the current rulers. This choice and opportunity are available to all people on an equal basis. The exercise of this choice leads to a government limited by basic rules of the constitution and citizens’ rights.

Democracy is the Best Form of Government

A democratic government is a better government because it is a more accountable form of government. Democracy provides a method to deal with differences and conflicts. Thus, democracy improves the quality of decision-making. The advantage of a democracy is that mistakes cannot be hidden for long. There is a space for public discussion, and there is room for correction. Either the rulers have to change their decisions, or the rulers can be changed. Democracy offers better chances of a good decision. It respects people’s own wishes and allows different kinds of people to live together. Even when it fails to do some of these things, it allows a way of correcting its mistakes and offers more dignity to all citizens. That is why democracy is considered the best form of government.

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Essay on Government

Students are often asked to write an essay on Government in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Government

What is government.

Government is a group of people who make decisions and laws for a country. They are responsible for providing services like education, healthcare, and security to the public.

Types of Government

There are different types of governments, such as democracy, monarchy, dictatorship, and communism. In a democracy, people choose their leaders through voting.

Roles of Government

Governments have many roles. They protect citizens, make laws, and manage the economy. They also provide public services like schools and hospitals.

Importance of Government

Government is important because it maintains order, protects citizens, and provides necessary services. Without it, society would be chaotic.

250 Words Essay on Government

Introduction.

The term ‘Government’ fundamentally signifies the governing body of a nation or state that exercises authority, controls, and administers public policy. It is the political direction and control exercised over the actions of the members, citizens, or inhabitants of communities, societies, and states.

The Role of Government

The government plays a crucial role in society by ensuring the smooth functioning of the nation. It is responsible for maintaining law and order, protecting citizens’ rights, and providing public services. The government also shapes the economy by implementing policies that either stimulate or slow down economic growth.

Governments can be categorized into several types based on their structure and the extent of power they exercise. These include democracy, where power is vested in the people; monarchy, where power is held by a single ruler; and autocracy, where a single person holds unlimited power.

Government and Democracy

In democratic governments, citizens have the right to elect their representatives who make decisions on their behalf. This system promotes accountability, transparency, and the protection of individual rights. However, democracy’s success hinges on an informed and active citizenry that can hold the government accountable.

In conclusion, the government is a fundamental institution in any society. It plays a pivotal role in maintaining societal order, ensuring the welfare of its citizens, and driving the nation’s growth and development. The efficiency of a government is largely determined by its structure, the extent of its powers, and the level of citizen participation.

500 Words Essay on Government

Introduction to government.

The government’s primary role is to safeguard the rights and freedoms of its citizens. This involves ensuring the security of the people, maintaining law and order, and providing public goods and services. A government has the responsibility to protect its citizens from internal and external threats, which is why it maintains law enforcement agencies and a military.

The government also plays a crucial role in economic regulation and stabilization. By controlling monetary and fiscal policies, it can influence the country’s economic trajectory, ensuring growth, stability, and equity. Furthermore, the government is responsible for the provision of public goods and services such as education, healthcare, infrastructure, and social welfare programs.

Forms of Government

In between these extremes, there are numerous variations, such as constitutional monarchies, where a monarch shares power with a constitutionally organized government, or oligarchies, where power rests with a small number of people.

The Importance of Good Governance

Good governance is integral to the effective functioning of a government. It is characterized by transparency, accountability, efficiency, and adherence to the rule of law. Good governance ensures that the government’s actions benefit the majority of the population and that public resources are used efficiently and ethically.

Transparency in government actions encourages public participation and holds the government accountable for its decisions. Accountability ensures that those in power can be held responsible for their actions. Efficiency in governance means that resources are used optimally to deliver maximum value to citizens.

Conclusion: The Evolving Role of Government

In today’s rapidly changing world, the role of government is evolving. With the advent of technology and globalization, governments are not just confined to traditional roles but are increasingly involved in areas such as digital infrastructure, climate change, and global health crises.

As we move forward, the challenge for governments worldwide will be to adapt to these changes and continue to serve their citizens effectively. Understanding the nature, role, and complexities of government is crucial for us as we navigate the political landscape of the 21st century.

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Home — Essay Samples — Education — Inequality in Education — Effects of Inequality in Education

Effects of Inequality in Education

• Categories: Inequality in Education

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Published: Jun 13, 2024

Words: 535 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, body paragraph, perpetuation of poverty, exacerbation of social stratification, undermining democratic ideals.

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Doug Chayka

The Rise of the American Oligarchy

What targeting russia’s wayward billionaires revealed about our own..

Tim Murphy January+February 2024 Issue

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When the US targeted Russia’s oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine, the trail of assets kept leading to our own backyard. Not only had our nation become a haven for shady foreign money, but we were also incubating a familiar class of yacht-owning, industry-dominating, resource-extracting billionaires. In the  January + February 2024  issue of our magazine, we investigate the rise of American Oligarchy—and what it means for the rest of us. You can read all the pieces  here .

For the last 18 months one of the most opulent and unnecessary vessels ever constructed has been floating in a narrow channel next to a jungle gym and a fleet of industrial cranes at the Port of San Diego. Built in Germany, and formerly managed by a firm in Monaco and flagged to the Cayman Islands, the superyacht Amadea is 348 feet long, with a helipad, a swimming pool, two baby grand pianos, and a 5-ton stainless steel art-deco albatross that extends outward from the prow like a bird reenacting Titanic . It can accommodate 16 guests and 36 crew, and costs $1 million a month just to maintain. Who, exactly, has been picking up that tab in the past is a matter of some dispute, tangled up in a web of trusts and LLCs, code names and NDAs, and legal proceedings in two countries. But the ship’s current owner is a bit less ambiguous: Congratulations— it’s you .

The Amadea ended up in California after a family vacation gone wrong. In 2022, after a long summer in Italy and the south of France, the ship refueled in ­Gibraltar and crossed the Atlantic, arriving in the ­Caribbean just in time for Christmas. There, according to emails between the ship’s captain and its management company that were later submitted in court by the Department of Justice, deckhands were to be joined by the children and grandchildren of a wealthy Russian national—four adults, three kids, as well as a coterie of bodyguards and nannies. Crew members were preparing for a cruise to Antigua, a sojourn in Mexico, and a visit to the Galapagos. They had picked up new scuba gear for their rarefied passengers.

But a few weeks into the trip, the Amadea abruptly changed its plans. All large boats, from pleasure craft to container ships, are required by the International Maritime ­Organization to signal their location at regular intervals, except in the case of emergencies. When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, the Amadea dropped off the map for days, according to court documents. In Panama, the captain alerted the management company that government inspectors had collected information on the ship’s Russian VIPs. In Mexico, the yacht took on a quarter of a million dollars of diesel fuel and left. The Galapagos were off. The Amadea was heading west.

When the vessel arrived in Fiji, more than 6,000 miles later, local authorities searched the ship at the request of US investigators. Inside, they found what appeared to be a Fabergé egg , and paperwork stating that the yacht belonged to an LLC owned by a trust controlled by a Russian businessman named Eduard Khudainatov. The egg was likely a fake. And according to the US government, the records were too.

Khudainatov, the Justice Department argued in court filings , was a “second-tier oligarch (at best)” who lacked the means to own such a ship. Agents concluded that the Amadea was fleeing to Russia at the behest of Suleiman Kerimov, a billionaire who made a fortune in aluminum and gold, serves as a senator in the Russian parliament, and once tried to build a global soccer powerhouse in Dagestan. Kerimov has been barred from doing business in the US since 2018 , because of his position in Putin’s government. The feds, calling Khudainatov a “straw owner,” seized the ship for violating US sanctions, replaced the crew, and sent it to California.

Khudainatov, who has not been sanctioned by the US, has been appealing the decision ever since. His lawyers—and Kerimov’s—assert that the second-tier oligarch really did spend most of his reported net worth on two of the world’s largest yachts. They even deny that the ship ever went dark; any confusion over its ownership or whereabouts was just a matter of shoddy policing. But in the meantime, the US has been systematically unspooling Kerimov’s wealth. The government added his wife and three kids to its sanctions list, as part of a crackdown on “those who support sanctioned Russian persons.” It targeted a private-­jet company the Kerimovs used, and the yacht managers too. And not long after the Amadea arrived in San Diego, the Treasury Department froze a far more valuable asset with considerably less fanfare: a $1 billion family trust . The Kerimovs had allegedly sought a safe harbor for this asset too, beyond the reach of hostile governments, in a place where for decades the wealth of the world’s ultrarich has pooled in blissful anonymity.

Not Fiji—Delaware.

The capture of the Amadea was perhaps the most spectacular piece of a larger international reckoning. In the nearly two years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US and its allies have blocked, seized, or frozen more than $280 billion in assets from hundreds of sanctioned Russian businessmen, politicians, family members, and fixers. They have taken boats, planes, and helicopters; artwork by Diego Rivera and Marc Chagall ; and some of the most coveted real estate on Earth. By putting the squeeze on what the Treasury Department called Putin’s “enablers,” the thinking goes, these governments can hit him where it hurts, isolate his regime, and pressure Russia to wind down the war.

The Biden administration has embraced these stories of decadent Russians, burning their corrupt spoils in Bond-villain excess. “Let’s get to the juicy stuff—the yachts,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told an audience at (of all places) the Aspen Security Forum in July 2022, where she discussed the work of the DOJ’s Task Force KleptoCapture. The seized ships are not just assets but morality tales—the overripe fruit of a society in which the levers of government have been turned to the enrichment of a few. You are supposed to gawk, less with envy than with an air of self-satisfaction, at people like the Kerimovs, lounging offshore in their teak-floored cocoon, drinking warm milk—according to court records—out of Hermès mugs . In the language of political messaging, “oligarch” is code for Second World and seedy.

But underpinning the sordid Russian saga was an inescapably American one. As investigators pored over bank statements and real estate records, they added new layers to a map journalists and watchdogs have been piecing together for years—of a sometimes underground but often wholly legal international network in which the wealth of autocratic regimes was funneled through the firms, markets, and institutions of places that fashion themselves as the antithesis of Putin’s Russia. Through a labyrinth of corporations, trusts, and false fronts, oligarch money made its way into the hands of nannies in California, fracking firms in Texas, wealth managers in New York, startups in Silicon Valley, and factory workers in the Midwest .

Pay enough attention to this robust American infrastructure of wealth, secrecy, and tax avoidance, and you might find yourself asking an uncomfortable question: If the Amadea is a symbol of a failed political and economic system, what exactly does that make all of our superyachts?

“We talk all the time about Putin and his oligarchic friends,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders told me recently. “But for obvious reasons we don’t talk about oligarchy in the United States.”

Increasingly, though, a wide range of voices on the left and right are speaking in exactly those terms. Steve Bannon has complained that his party had been hijacked by “ oligarchs ” such as Rupert ­Murdoch and hedge-funder Ken Griffin. A bestselling book described Bannon’s former bosses, the Trumps, as American Oligarchs . Donald Trump Jr., for his part, complained that China controls “America’s oligarchs.” A group of congressional Democrats is pushing the OLIGARCH Act to tax and audit the wealth of the richest Americans. “We’re clearly living in the age of the petulant oligarch,” Paul Krugman wrote recently, in reference to Elon Musk. Pick any billionaire with a media company—or any billionaire who’s tried to bankrupt one—and chances are you can find a prominent critic lambasting them in language once reserved for upwardly mobile ex-Soviets.

Some of these voices, like Sanders, are quite serious about how we’ve gotten into this new Gilded Age, and how we can get out of it again. Others are just seriously messed up. But this rhetorical shift is driven by a common awareness that all is not well: The same tools and systems that have made the United States a safe space for the world’s hoarded wealth have frayed our own social contract, broken our domestic politics, and incubated a new class of ultrawealthy barons in its place. It’s the age of American Oligarchy.

America’s oligarchs, like Russia’s, are both the results of a system failure, and active engineers of that failure. They hang in many of the same circles. They dock their boats at the same marinas, compete for the same real estate and works of art, and stash their money under the same couch cushions. Their worlds converge on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, and in the corridors of power. There has been so much Russian oligarchic money sloshing around the United States, in fact, that it is sometimes hard to say where exactly one system ends and another begins.

But there is something new at work here. This American oligarchy offers a twist on the pilfering of the commons that produced Russia’s. It is built on a different kind of resource, not nickel or potash, but you—your data, your attention, your money, your public square. These men (mostly) exult in their almost godlike status over the politicians they fund, the platforms they own, and the industries they’ve effectively monopolized. They are prone to grandiose proclamations about outer space and immortality . But the day-to-day effect of their power is felt less in the glitter than in the gravity it exerts on everything else—the accumulated burden and strain that hardening political and economic inequality puts on public services, on policy, and on the places we live and work. This world ropes you in with its yachts and private jets, but the story of American oligarchy is not just about the spoils. It’s about what everyone else is losing in the process.

Fear of an out-of-control oligarchy was once as American as Appomattox. In the runup to the Civil War, abolitionists routinely condemned the “oligarchs” of the planter class, who used their grip on slave states to dominate national politics until even the courts worked for them. The idea that an aspiring democracy had adopted the wrong Greek political system represented an existential crisis. Campaigning for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Charles Sumner invoked “Slave Oligarchy” more than 20 times in one speech. They had “entered into and possessed the National Government,” he said , “like an Evil Spirit.”

Reconstruction was an attempt, among other things, to break the structures of oligarchy. But in the century that followed, the term took on a now-familiar hue—provincial, elemental, and foreign. “The word captures the archaic, slightly feudal nature of social relations,” the New York Times suggested in 1981, “in countries like El Salvador and Guatemala.” Or it connoted the backroom politics of bureaucrats and bosses . Oligarchy marked a primitive state. It wasn’t something you became. Then, in 1996, Boris Berezovsky went to Davos. 

Boastful and balding, with a background in applied mathematics, Berezovsky was part of the new breed of Russian businessmen, a little bit grifty and a little bit thrifty, who were building huge fortunes as President Boris Yeltsin privatized the former Soviet state. In a bonanza known as “ loans for shares ,” Yeltsin agreed to quietly unload a dozen government-owned companies for cents on the dollar. But the deal would only go through if he won a second term. So between sessions at the World Economic Forum, Berezovsky and his allies hatched a plan to use their wealth and control of the media to save Yeltsin. After the election, Berezovsky took a victory lap. The seven men who had joined forces, he boasted (with more than a little exaggeration), now held 50 percent of Russia’s wealth.

The defining trait of this “new class of oligarchs”—as the postelection coverage dubbed them —was that they seemed to want people to know they were oligarchs. Berezovsky called his system “corporate government.”

This oligarchy could not have existed if Russia were not Russia, but it also bore the imprimatur of Harvard and Wall Street. In the early 1990s, American lawyers, bankers, and academics descended on Moscow to mold the post-Soviet landscape in their image, helping to set up markets, draft laws, and cut deals. The Russian businessmen who thrived in this new system, for their part, “adopted the style and methods of the great robber barons,” the journalist David Hoffman observed in his 2002 book, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia . They studied tycoons like Rupert Murdoch. They were even influenced by a text about the American Gilded Age that had once been used to scare Soviets away from capitalism—Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier , in which the protagonist, Hoffman wrote, “exploited banks, the state, and investors, manipulated the whole stock market and gobbled up companies.”

That form of oligarchy was short-lived. When Putin took office a few years later, he demanded fealty from the moguls, and Berezovsky later died in exile. But if Putin inverted the power structure, the effect was the same: Russia remained a place where an elite few grew rich off a rigged economy, while funneling their money outside the country for safekeeping. Wealthy Russians transferred as much as $150 billion out of the country in the 1990s. By the time Trump took office, Russia’s ultrawealthy were storing 60 percent of their holdings offshore. Much of the money made its way to the same country that helped shape the Russian system in the first place. It was as if an invisible pipeline suddenly switched on.

The spoils of Russia and other countries flowed to the United States not just because of its stability, but because the American political and financial system put up a big flashing sign inviting the world’s wealth hoarders to come and stay a while. Here, they could achieve near-total anonymity if they purchased real estate in cash or routed the transaction through a shell company or a trust—which were increasingly based in decidedly onshore US jurisdictions such as Wyoming and South Dakota . In New York and Miami, gleaming new high-rises sat empty; a penthouse, for the asset-hoarding class, was not a home but a different kind of bank.

This great transnational wealth transfer was eased along by the booming, multitrillion-dollar American private-investment industry. If a foreign investor wanted to put money in a US-based financial institution or publicly traded company, notes Gary Kalman, the executive director of Transparency International US, those shops are required to perform due diligence. But hedge funds, venture capital, and private equity are bound by no such rules and have fought efforts to impose them.

“The reason we haven’t crippled the oligarchs as much as we would like, or the sanctions haven’t been quite as effective as we had hoped,” Kalman told me, “is because a bunch of these assets are hiding, likely in Western democracies, in everything from anonymous companies to anonymous trusts funneled into investment structures that are largely hidden from law enforcement.”

Through shell companies and middlemen, ultrawealthy Russians funneled huge sums of money into American investments. The Delaware trust linked to the Kerimovs pumped $28 million into Silicon Valley firms, according to court records , including a venture capital fund, a self-driving car company, and a “startup temple” for young disrupters that was housed in a San Francisco church previously slated to become a homeless shelter. Roman Abramovich, who bought a state oil company with Berezovsky and later sold it for a 5,100 percent profit, reportedly directed billions of dollars to a boutique investment manager in New York’s Hudson Valley. According to a complaint the Securities and Exchange Commission filed against the company in September for allegedly violating registration rules, the firm managed more than $7 billion in assets for just one client, an unnamed wealthy Russian politician and businessman who made a fortune in privatization and sure sounds a lot like Abramovich. While some of those funds reportedly made their way to heavyweights like the Carlyle Group and BlackRock , Abramovich also backstopped a private ambulance company and a fracking startup, and gave $225 million in seed money to what is now the weed dispensary chain Curaleaf. (Abramovich, who did not respond to a request for comment, has not been accused of wrongdoing by the SEC or sanctioned by the United States.)

A succession of government investigations found that lax regulations also made the American investment and real estate markets magnets for money laundering, but the US was in no rush to tighten its rules. Cashing in on the Russian exodus was a boon for American budgets and American business. Prior to getting elected president, it was practically Donald Trump’s entire job .

Just as telling as the money that was secret was all the money that wasn’t. Aluminum magnate Viktor Vekselberg, a star in the tech sector , made large donations on his own or through his company to MIT, MoMA, and the Clinton Foundation. Others sprinkled their money to the Kennedy Center, the Mayo Clinic, and the Guggenheim. With big parties and large checks, they courted America’s gatekeepers. What is so much money good for, after all, if you can’t buy acceptance?

One night in 2013, Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York City, held a soiree at an Italian restaurant on Park Avenue on behalf of Abramovich and his then-wife, Dasha Zhukova, who would soon unveil plans to turn four adjoining townhouses on the Upper East Side into the city’s largest private home. For months that spring, Abramovich’s 533-foot yacht, Eclipse , had docked on the Hudson, drawing spectators to marvel at its pools and helipads, and wedding-cake deck. Photos of the ship have a surreptitious quality, like a hasty snapshot of a rare woodpecker; a sophisticated network of lasers had reportedly been deployed, to deter the paparazzi.

At the party, according to HuffPost , Jared Kushner rubbed shoulders with Wendi Deng Murdoch and Leonardo DiCaprio. The media mogul Barry Diller, who once warned that corporate consolidation was creating an “oligarchy” in his industry, showed up, and Gayle King too. When it was time to speak, Bloomberg praised the guests of honor for their philanthropy, and announced that he was naming Abramovich an honorary citizen of New York.

The influx of foreign money had been a “godsend,” he later told New York magazine. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?”

Over the last decade, stories of foreign oligarchs have been a pervasive and insidious presence in national politics. But all of this overseas money sloshing around did not corrupt the American system so much as it made unavoidable the ways in which it was already compromised. Affluent arrivistes did not get special treatment per se; they availed themselves of the services that American elites so often do. Oleg Deripaska’s top lobbyist was Bob Dole . His lawyers worked for the pill-pushing Sackler family. Shady foreign officials store their money in Great Plains trusts just like Pritzkers . The great irony of the post-invasion reckoning is that Putin’s billionaires were escaping a country that is not, in fact, much of an oligarchy anymore, for the comforts of a place that increasingly is.

“We need a translator,” Bloomberg quipped at that 2013 event. “Roman’s going to have a heart attack thinking he has to pay taxes.”

But the defining feature of American wealth today is that our oligarchs don’t really have to. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who built one of the world’s largest companies around a loophole in sales taxes and has raked in millions in tax breaks designed for impoverished communities, paid no income tax at all in 2007 and 2011, according to ProPublica — a period in which he owned part of a mountain range. His rival for the title of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, paid nothing at all in 2018 . (In Cameron County, Texas, where SpaceX has scorched a state park and uprooted a beachfront community, Musk’s company will finally begin paying taxes in 2024.) Peter Thiel has used a loophole in the tax code to stash $5 billion in a Roth IRA. While the IRS targets working-class Black Americans, the list of billionaires who have paid no income tax in recent years is long. Bloomberg could have set his special guest straight—after all, the mayor was one of them .

Taxing labor but not wealth starves state coffers to fill personal ones. Instead of public works and universal programs, you get Big Philanthropy—donor networks and foundations that validate monopolistic fortunes under the pretense of disbursing them. Discretionary giving provides America’s ultrawhite ultrawealthy a kind of agenda-setting, extra-political power to go with their agenda-setting political power: Make enough money and you don’t have to fund essential services; you can run your own projects on your own notions of benevolence, remaking entire sectors of public life. From media to public health to elections to city halls, everyone in a jam wants a billionaire to come plug the suspicious billionaire-sized holes in their budgets. Many of the hospital wings and college libraries our oligarchs choose to build are quite nice. Plenty of the programs they choose to fund are quite well intentioned. But the creator of a Hot-or-Not app for Harvard kids pumping $100 million into a school district—as Mark Zuckerberg once did in Newark —does not support a civil society so much as it supplants one.

Such a system has profound consequences for the rest of us. In a 2009 paper , two Northwestern professors singled out the robust American wealth-protection industry—the one those Russians were eagerly taking advantage of—as both a driver and a symptom of this country’s descent into hyper-minority rule. America’s ultrawealthy, they argued, “hire armies of professional, skilled actors” to “labor as salaried advocates and defenders of core oligarchic interests”—lobbyists, lawyers, think-tankers, and consultants. The political system still maintains many of the trappings of a democracy, in part because the ultrawealthy who fund campaigns disagree about a lot of things. But politics functions within the boundaries defined by this cohort.  Another study a few years later put this point more finely: The most determinative factor on whether a policy would become law was how much support it had from “economically elite Americans.” A Supreme Court justice taking a vacation on a billionaire’s yacht isn’t the peak of American oligarchy. That same billionaire using the vacation to reduce his tax bill is.

In 2021, Bezos traveled to the edge of space aboard a vessel called New Shepard . The launch pad, on a ranch in Far West Texas he had purchased with what he called his “winnings,” was not far from the site of another pet project he was building under the guise of a charitable foundation: a $42 million clock inside of a mountain Bezos also owned, which he hoped would last 10,000 years. For a few minutes, 66.4 miles above the Earth, Bezos exalted in his own weightlessness, attempting to catch floating Skittles with his mouth. After landing, still dressed in his custom blue jumpsuit, he took a moment to acknowledge the gravity of the moment. 

He wanted to thank “every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer,” he said . “Because you guys paid for all of this.”

It is uncommon for someone in such a position to describe the balance sheet so plainly—to point with a smile to a ­phallic rocket ship that goes nowhere new and assert that this is what delivery drivers peed in a water bottle for. But this is the nature of oligarchy: Your sweat is their jet fuel.

Perhaps no one has worked harder to make “oligarchy” a feature of American political discourse than Bernie Sanders, the 82-year-old democratic socialist whose two campaigns for president tapped into dissatisfaction with structural inequality. In his most recent book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism , “oligarchy” is the central villain.

Sanders isn’t just throwing out a pejorative. The United States checks all the boxes he’s laid out, he told me—“a system in which a small number of people have enormous power, and they have enormous wealth, and they create a system, which is designed to protect their interests.”

It is not simply about being rich, in this line of thinking. Oligarchy is about people with money using that money to reshape society to their benefit in a way that everyone else feels. Sanders rattles off the basic symptoms: Astronomical inequality. (By one measure , the richest Americans control a greater share of the wealth now than their counterparts did during the Gilded Age.) A political system dominated by ultrawealthy donors and, increasingly, ultrawealthy candidates. And decades of consolidation that has reduced whole industries into a handful of megacorporations.

“You have more concentration of ownership in sector after sector today than we have ever had,” he says. “Whether it is financial services, whether it’s transportation, whether it’s agriculture, whether it’s media, you have fewer and fewer large corporate entities controlling those sectors, and that is one of the reasons we’re able to see an incredible amount of corporate greed taking place in recent years.”

When Sanders and I spoke last spring, Elon Musk was in the early stages of a salt-the-earth takeover of Twitter, which seemed to largely entail firing the people who made it work and tweeting “interesting” about the sort of people who are facing jail time in Romania. It was an example of the market concentration Sanders was talking about—of what happens when a single company owns an entire mode of communication, and then that company is acquired by the world’s oldest 14-year-old boy. But Musk’s behavior underscored something else about the American oligarchy. It’s not just about the money they make, but the ways they make it.

For all the chaos, there was a linear kind of logic to the system that made Russians like Kerimov and Abramovich rich—there is money, of course, in precious metals. The information economy, too, is built on natural resources in the traditional sense. Track the supply chains to their end and you’ll find workers toiling in mines , and power plants burning coal to keep the server farms running. Behind the rise of artificial intelligence is an underclass of “ ghost ” workers, filtering abusive content out of chatbots for a few bucks an hour.

But American oligarchy is extractive on a deeper level than the resources it consumes. You “paid for all of this,” as Bezos put it, not just with your hard-earned cash and your labor, but with a little piece of yourself. Shoshana Zuboff, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, has written about a class she calls the “ information oligarchs .” These tech giants like Google and Meta are driven by what she calls the “extraction imperative”—in which the entire scope of operation was built around harvesting your data and attention for the purposes of selling it or tailoring products. Your time is the precarious foundation of the entire internet economy, the basic unit upon which all else is organized. Reed Hastings, the executive chairman of Netflix, once said that his biggest competitor was sleep .

“Surveillance capitalists know everything about us , whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us ,” Zuboff argues in her 2018 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . “They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us , but not for us .” To Zuboff, this represents a challenge not just to democracies—because of the imposition of a new and unaccountable hierarchy—but also to individual autonomy. There is no alternative technological space to turn to; they own a plane of existence. And the rise of AI, powered by the likes of Zuckerberg, is taking this extraction imperative to new levels—mining vast reams of data and written content so that a machine might better take your job or commodify your identity. Tech companies even have a term for the human inputs they use to build their products: “ data exhaust .” Since last July, dozens of writers have filed suit against both Meta and the Microsoft-backed OpenAI, alleging that their respective machine-learning projects are built, in part, on copyrighted materials. (Meta and OpenAI both claim that their reliance on published works was “fair use.”) Musk, who is developing his own line of brain implants, warned last spring that artificial intelligence could bring about “ civilizational destruction ”—before announcing that he, too, would be launching his own AI venture .

The relationship between government and oligarchy is defined by a kind of groveling—the clacking of a dozen mayors begging Musk to build them a simple tunnel. During the bidding war for Amazon’s second headquarters, hundreds of cities and states debased themselves for a shot at the prize. Dallas offered to build an “ Amazon University ” next to City Hall. A city in Georgia offered to change its name to “Amazon.” It was loans-for-shares in reverse: Bezos wasn’t bidding for the state; he’d developed something so big—and had been allowed to develop something so big—that states were bidding for him. The company once set a goal of raising $1 billion in government incentives in a single year; in oligarchic America, taxes pay you.

Even as they get their way with municipalities, these American oligarchs still harbor fantasies of simply running their own. For years, Reid Hoffman, VC billionaire Marc Andreessen, Laurene Powell Jobs, and a handful of other Silicon Valley heavies quietly bought up a huge swath of Northern California to build an entirely new city—one where they could model, as the New York Times put it, “ new forms of governance .” A Thiel-linked fund has invested in an effort to start a new monarcho-capitalist metropolis somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. Musk, who is building a model community outside Austin while tightening control over his South Texas “Starbase,” fantasizes about one day using SpaceX to colonize Mars—of building an entire society as he sees fit, while extending “ the light of consciousness .” Lurking behind his projects is an often explicitly stated desire to reimagine shared spaces. The never-completed Hyperloop, which Musk promised would transport passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco at 600 miles per hour, was a ploy to stop high-speed rail, according to his first biographer, Ashlee Vance. A critic of public transit, which he says “ sucks ,” Musk envisions a future in which cities will instead devote more and more of their underground and overhead space to his own fleet of self-driving Tesla electric cars, transforming the entire idea of what cities should be. The Musk-owned satellite network, Starlink, controls more than half the satellites in the night sky—giving its owner so much power over communications that he effectively vetoed a Ukrainian military operation. The billionaire’s stewardship of Twitter (which he’s now named X) is uncommonly slapstick compared to the ventures that made him rich, but it does share something essential: He is attempting to commandeer something that was held in common and leave in its place something individualized and worse.

The sum of American oligarchy is not just withering democracy and so much inequality, but a kind of omnipresence: They are something more than rich—oligarchs are the main characters of our timeline. But even as our lives are increasingly subject to the whims of bored kingpins, their spaces are detached from our own. Some can retreat to private islands (Larry Ellison owns Hawaii’s sixth largest). Others live in communities so exclusive that the help has to come from one state away . Embedded in this system is the capacity for escape. They can send their wealth across borders without really moving it. They can choose where they pay taxes, or by which methods they don’t pay them at all. They can insulate themselves from the world they’ve sold for parts. And if all else fails, they can take to the sea.

In the runup to the invasion of Ukraine, Alex Finley, a former CIA officer who is based in Barcelona, began periodically visiting the city’s luxury marina to check on the status of Russian-owned boats. Finley, who had researched the industry for a satirical novel about Putin’s security services, found that vessels that might otherwise spend weeks preparing for a voyage were disappearing overnight. “I went down one day and the Galactica Super Nova was there, and there was no hustle and bustle around it,” she told me, referring to a 230-foot yacht reputed to belong to a Putin-allied Russian petro-billionaire , who was named, a few weeks later, on a UK sanctions list “targeting those who prop up Russian-backed illegal breakaway regions of Ukraine.” “I thought, you’ll see them loading food on it, or they’ll be filling it with gas and water, that type of thing—there was nothing. And then I went down the next day and she was gone.” As oligarch-linked ships made their escape, Finley began tracking their whereabouts using open-source data and writing up their exploits for Whale Hunting , a newsletter dedicated to all things kleptocracy. More than just a novelty, “the yachts are symbols of the corruption which is corroding democracy,” Finley said—and a road map to understanding both the flow of dubious wealth to the West, and the tools that Russian elites deploy to obscure it.

But these days, people aren’t just monitoring the yachts of sanctioned oligarchs. They’re also following the movements of the American ones. While Finley was tracking Putin’s cronies and the Amadea was making its way to San Diego, a long-suffering football fan in Northern Virginia started keeping an eye on the Lady S , the boat belonging to then–Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder. It’s reportedly the first yacht in the world with a 12-seat IMAX theater .

Snyder was a model of what DOJ filings might call a second-tier oligarch—a telemarketing magnate and megadonor who unsuccessfully sued an alt-weekly for $1 million after it caricatured him on its cover. (Snyder promised to use any monetary award to fight homelessness, his lawyers wrote in their complaint —“Mr. Snyder is heavily involved in philanthropy.”) His stewardship of the football team was the embodiment of American capitalism’s perverse gravity—managing to grow his investment sevenfold while presiding over an ever-worsening product that seemed to deliberately insult the people who paid for it. When, in June 2022, the House Oversight Committee asked Snyder to testify about his franchise’s misogynistic culture, the billionaire’s lawyer informed members that the owner had “longstanding plans to be out of the country on business matters.”

Snyder’s unbreakable commitment turned out to be an award show in Cannes for ad-industry execs. Inspired by the Russian yacht-watchers and a Florida college student who had created an account called ElonJet to track Musk’s private planes, the fan decided to look up the Lady S using publicly available data. In the weeks that followed, while the committee unsuccessfully sought to serve the owner with a subpoena, @DanSnydersYacht —the proprietor of which spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of incurring the notoriously vindictive billionaire’s wrath—amassed thousands of followers by tweeting out the whereabouts of the owner’s boat and private jet, as Snyder made his way across the Mediterranean to Israel.

“I think what kind of made it popular…was just, hey, here’s what a billionaire can get away with,” he told me. “If you or I got subpoenaed, we’d be freaking out and have to show up immediately or face consequences. If you’re a billionaire on your yacht, you can dodge a lot of legal consequences for a while.” (Snyder eventually did testify, sans subpoena and via Zoom, where he answered with some variation of I-don’t-recall “ more than 100 times ,” according to the final congressional report.)

There is something kind of subversive about tracking these vessels. It’s a sliver of sunlight in a world that’s designed to keep such things out. But not long after he purchased Twitter, Musk shut down ElonJet. He claimed it had put his family at risk, although the story he first told soon fell apart . The details, in any event, seemed superfluous; that is just what happens when an oligarch buys the platform you use to track the oligarchs.

In the meantime, American oligarchs are eagerly filling the vacuum left by the retreating Russians. The proceeds from sanctioned steel-magnate Dmitry Pumpyansky’s seized yacht went to the bank to whom he owed money— J.P. Morgan . Eric Schmidt paid $67.6 million at auction for a superyacht alleged to belong to a sanctioned Russian fertilizer billionaire—but rescinded the bid after the oligarch’s daughter claimed it was hers all along. Last April, a new boat pulled into the harbor in Mallorca, and tied up at the dock a few hundred feet away from where Viktor Vekselberg’s Tango had been impounded for 13 months. It was Harlan Crow’s Michaela Rose . 

And this past summer, while taxpayers were spending big to maintain the Amadea ’s teak deck, a Dutch shipbuilder put the finishing touches on a 417-foot-long ship for its newest client. The Koru , named for a Maori spiraling pattern, was a gleaming, three-masted sailboat, with room for 18 guests and a swimming pool. The company had designed a 246-foot motor-­powered support yacht to go with it—with its own helipad to boot. In lieu of an albatross, a wooden carving on the Koru ’s prow was said to bear an uncanny resemblance to the fiancée of a certain Skittle-munching oligarch. The owner may be Jeff Bezos, but you guys all paid for it.

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Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.

Donald J. Trump intends to bring independent regulatory agencies under direct presidential control. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times

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By Jonathan Swan ,  Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman

• Published July 17, 2023 Updated July 18, 2023

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

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