The world throughout history has constantly been making evolutionary changes; this is no different for the United States Democracy. There are many models of democracy, such as protective democracy, developmental democracy, pluralist democracy and participatory democracy. However, most of these democracies if not all are governed by the elites in our governmental society, thus they are privileged with more access and benefits from the United States Government. Nevertheless, this has been changing year by year, as we face multidimensional crisis and lead our government into an inclusive democratic system.
An inclusive democracy is a political theory and political project that aims to address the diverse crisis in our political, economical, social, ecological spheres caused by the concentration of power in various levels (Inclusive Democracy, 1997). Thus, inclusive democracy is the abolition of this concentration of power at the institutional level, the abolition of this concentration of power in all its forms and the creation of conditions of equal sharing of power, of political, economic power, and so on (Inclusive Democracy, 1997). The inclusive democracy project is influenced by two major historical traditions, the socialist tradition and the democratic tradition. In is also influenced by the currents that developed in the last 30 or 40 years, the new social movements, i.e., the feminist movement, the ecological movement, the identity movements of various sorts (Inclusive Democracy, 1997).
First, one of the foundations of the growing U.S inclusive democracy is that it has a focus on our political system in bases of a direct democracy and the crisis that this entails because mass participation is weakening. The inclusive democ...
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...racy is growing a democracy, which focuses on balancing power and crisis with in the political, economical, social, ecological spheres. Many people such as President Reagan believe that, “ Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” (Hill 2002 p.170). Nevertheless, with the developing inclusive democracy and growing expansion of Civil Rights and protection of our Civil Liberties the government has the potential to develop into our solution and not our problem.
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To begin democracy simply is defined as being for the people, but Zakaria explains how western countries governments version of democracy has meant liberal democracy, a system that has the qualities where there is not only fair and free election, but also constitutional limitation of power that the government has, separation of powers and protection of basic rights such as freedom of speech, assembly, religion and property. Liberal Democracy avoided civil war by providing protection of its citizens and their rights. This form of democracy differs from the historical and theoretical form of democracy. There are many different forms of government besides liberal democracy, in fact, many countries goes through many types of government before becoming a liberal democracy. Countries tend to start of with self-elected ruler that do not protect its people rights, this form of government is an Illiberal Autocracy, then they go on to become a Liberal Autocracy, still self elected but protects its peoples rights, and then finally become Liberal Democracy. Another form of government is illiberal democracy; this government is not free and fair.
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The United States of America is a republic, or representative democracy. Democracy, a word that comes to us from Greek, literally means the people rule (Romance, July 8). This broad definition leaves unanswered a few important details such as who are the people, how shall they rule, and what should they rule on (July 8). Defining the answers to those questions means defining a model for a democratic system. William E. Hudson defines four such models in his book American Democracy in Peril: the Protective, Developmental, Pluralist, and Participatory models of democracy (Hudson, 8-19). Of these models, perhaps Participatory comes closest to an ideal, pure democracy of rule by the people (16-19). In practice, however, establishing a stable ideal democracy is not entirely feasible. In a country the size of the United States, it quickly becomes unwieldy if not impossible to have direct rule by the people. To overcome this, the compromise of the representative system allows the people to choose who will rule on a regular basis. The political culture that defines American politics shows that despite this compromise, America is still very much a democratic society.
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In deciphering what constitutes the brilliance of democracy then, we find that it is not citizens’ ability to make informed decisions or an unflawed and subtly manipulated election process, but the unapparent way in which democracy persuades citizens – informed or not - and leaders – corrupt or not – toward working to build better, more prosperous societies.
There have been enormous efforts to spread democracy as a political system throughout the world by the developed democratic countries and the international development organizations including the World Bank. By the late 1990s the United States alone spent over a half billion dollars to promote democratic expansion throughout the world (Diamond, 2003). These were done considering that the democratic system leads towards development. As a result in the late 20th century we saw a huge political transformation towards democracy. During the last few decades a huge number of countries adopted democracy as their political system. However, it retain a big question how far democracy is successful in bringing development of a country? At this stage, some people also criticizes the effort of democratization arguing that it is done without considering the context of a country, sometimes democracy is not ideal for all countries and it is an effort to extinct diversity of political system. In studying the literature regarding the debate, we found a paradoxical relationship between democracy and development. Some argue that democracy has failed to ensure expected outcomes in terms of development. While others confronted that democracy has a considerable impact on development. Another group of people argue that form of political system actually does not have any impact on development process. On the verge of these debates, some development institutions and academics throw light on why democracy is not working properly, and what measure should be taken to make it more successful in bringing effective development of developing countries. Consequently, this writing is an effort of revisiting the different views about impact of democra...