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What does "liberal democracy" mean to you? How is it different from the universal theme known as "democracy"? What do we gain by adding the word liberal in front of democracy? Is the word liberal necessary in defining and refining democracy, especially in the context of a developing country like Nepal? April 10, 2005 In modern times, real life democracies are basically liberal ones, in which case the liberal adjective may be redundant --what most scholars have in mind when they think of democracy is liberal democracy (or what is sometimes called representative democracy). The core of this conceptualization is that "the people" (the "demos" in Greek) do not rule directly, but rather through elected representatives chosen in reasonably free, fair, and competitive elections, with universal adult suffrage and the underlying civil and political liberties required to ensure that no significant political tendencies are excluded from the process. Personally, however, I like the liberal adjective-- it clarifies that we are talking about representative democracy in the narrow sense of a political regime, and it implicitly distinguishes this regime from alternative forms (such as direct democracy, where the demos rules directly rather than through representatives, or social democracy, which implies liberal democracy plus a range of social or economic citizenship rights). In developing countries like Nepal today, it is useful to maintain these distinctions. Perhaps most important, the liberal democracy label buttresses the point that real democracy is more than just elections; elections in the absence of civil and political rights that allow for meaningful contestation do not make a country "democratic." (Department of Government, Cornell University after July 2005) Democracy is not only a process (people electing their representatives), but also a result (elected officials acting in the interests of the people). And such "rule of the people," which is what the word, "democracy" means, is not possible without full protection of human and civil rights and without full realization of the "democratic freedoms": freedom of speech, press, and petition and assembly. Recently there has been interest in the term liberal democracy, and its counterpart, illiberal democracy. The starting point for those making this distinction is a minimalist definition of democracy amounting to the presence of competitive elections. Elections, they point out, do not guarantee that liberal freedoms will be adhered to. At times the majority can even deny freedom to minorities and support coercion. A fuller definition of democracy requires transparency, freedom of association, a free press, and the free exchange of opinion and argument. And at some point election-holding political systems, without these freedoms, turn into non-democracies rather than illiberal democracies. For all countries, Nepal included, the development of both electoral processes and an educational and social infrastructure that supports a critical, lively, and free exchange of ideas are the basis for the beneficial consequences of a system of accountable decision-making, which is what we really understand by democracy. You have raised a valid question on the issue of democracy. Democracy is inclusive and does not need any adjective for defining it. Democracy is empowerment of people of all sorts and is not confined to stratified sections of society. Democracy should have the capacity to be common to all (poor, oppressed and suppressed, ethnic and dalits, gender etc.) and so that all people could identify themselves with the democratic process. So election alone is not democracy (it is electocracy, not democracy) if it tends to be elitist in terms of caste, class, gender and other forms of discriminations. The twelve-year old experience of Nepali democracy, though not fully democratic, has tried to reinvent democracy in the Nepali context. Nepal was in thick discourse on reinventing democracy on the basis of popular legitimacy. Unless we contextualize democratic process, it would be an import only, though basic values are universal. Participatory or inclusive democracy has one underlined objective --empowerment of people. It is possible only when the society and polity are qualitatively transformed. Nepal is still reeled under feudocracy and hence the occasional setbacks to democratization processes. |
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