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November 10, 2010, Beth B, Leave a comment

Democracy is a form of government where the power lies with the people (being governed). The term comes from the Greek word demos meaning people and kratos meaning power. The underlying principle behind democracy is freedom and equality for all its constituents. Democracy acknowledges the decision of the majority, and in a democracy, all constituents have an equal vote, regardless of stature.

The principle of democracy is usually classified in two, direct democracy and representative democracy. It is said that there is no true direct (or pure) democracy wherein power is shared by every citizen. Most democratic countries have a representative democracy, wherein officials are elected into positions of power by the people.

When officials are elected into public office, they are expected to be accountable to the populace who elected them. The people are free to express their thoughts on how the governance is, without fear of recrimination or prosecution, and the elected officials can be reelected or removed by mandate of the people after a prescribed period of time through an election.

Although the power in a democracy is held by the people, democracy is not a rule of individuals but a rule of laws. These laws serve to protect the citizens, limit the power of the government, protect hum rights, and maintain social order. Ideally, every citizen is protected by it, and at the same time no citizen is above it.

Currently, almost half of the worlds nations are governed using the principles of democracy, but this does not make them all fully democratic nations. Some countries that are examples of democracy are: United Kingdom, United States of America, France, Australia, and the Philippines.

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What is Democracy? - A Knowledge Archive

Tammy Patrick is a Senior Advisor to the Elections program at the Democracy Fund, a bipartisan foundation working to ensure that our political system is able to withstand new challenges and deliver on its promise to the American people. Focusing on modern elections, Tammy helps lead the Democracy Funds efforts to foster a voter-centric elections system and work to provide election officials across the country with the tools and knowledge they need to best serve their voters.

Previously, Tammy served as a Democracy Project Fellow with the Bipartisan Policy Center, focusing on discussion on recommendations of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA). Former Federal Compliance Officer for Maricopa County Elections Department for eleven years, Tammy was tasked with serving more than 1.9 million registered voters in the greater Phoenix Valley. She collaborates with community and political organizations to create a productive working relationship with the goal of voter participation. In May of 2013 she was selected by President Obama to serve as a Commissioner on the Presidential Commission on Election Administration which has led to the position at the Bipartisan Policy Center to further the work of the PCEA.

The organizer of the 2007 Native American Voter Outreach Summit, Tammy is dedicated to voter education, outreach, and empowerment. She continued this work with the Election Assistance Commissions working group on Language Assistance for Unwritten Languages, and shared her experience with Voting Rights Act minority language compliance in 2011 by presenting at the Pacific Northwest Election Administrators Conference. She was formerly responsible for the Election Departments Voting Rights Act Section 5 submissions to the United States Department of Justice.

Her efforts in supporting good stewardship via sound data collection and analysis has afforded her inclusion in the Princeton Press publication The Democracy Index by Yale Law Professor Heather Gerken, a position on the Pew Advisory Board for an Elections Performance Index, and on the Advisory Board for the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. Tammy was honored to represent Maricopa County and the State of Arizona by testifying in Congress in 2007 on the role of election audits. She has served on the Election Centers National Task Force on Education and Training, their Election Administration Benchmarking Task Force, as well as their Legislative Committee. In the Spring of 2017 she began teaching Data Analysis for Election Administration at the University of Minnesotas Humphrey School.

She was appointed by the Election Center in 2012 to represent them on the Mailers Technical Advisory Committee (MTAC) to the United States Post Office and serves on the Postal Task Force for the Election Center and as an auxiliary member to the EAC Standards Board Postal Task Force and the Postal Task Force for the Washington Secretary of State. In 2016 she presented at the National Postal Forum and also became the only non-postal employee to present to their operational leadership team with her Delivering Democracy webinar. Publication of The New Realities in Election Mail by the Bipartisan Policy Center focuses attention on the PCEA recommendations in the current postal environment.

Arizona was the first state to offer online voter registration and Tammy has collected data and worked with the Brennan Center for Justice as well as the Pew Election Initiatives to study its effect. Tammy has testified in the United States Senate on the importance of modernization of voter registration as well as more than a dozen state legislatures. She has shared the data supporting modernization with election officials around the country who have used it to support passage of similar legislation in their own states and has been presented to the National Conference of State Legislatures at their National Conferences as well as at the Pew-sponsored Voting in America Summits.

Working to provide access to all voters, including those serving our country in the military or residing overseas, Tammy was an active observer for the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws Uniform Military and Overseas Voters Act which passed in July of 2010. Her analysis of UOCAVA voting populations was presented to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee at the National Institute of Science and Technology in July of 2011; UOCAVA Voter Trend Analysis and Risk Assessment reviews what characteristics of the UOCAVA voter make them most susceptible to casting ineffective ballots, and if access to online information and process aid in mitigating those vulnerabilities. Her experiences are further shared with the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) working group on electronic voting. The Council of State Governments (CSG) established a Policy Working Group to review the PCEA recommendations on UOCAVA voters and Tammy was an active participant in that group. She published Clarion Call: Voter Registration Modernization in CSGs 2015 Book of the States.

In 2012, Tammy was asked to join the IEEE P1622 group developing standards for a common data format for election results reporting. In 2013, she became a voting member of that organization and continues with the work now under the EAC VVSG working group. Her interest in voting technology includes participation in the Overseas Vote Foundations End to End Verified Internet Voting (E2EVIV) project and the Election Verification Network. She has presented numerous times to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) on the impact of their standards and certification of equipment and test laboratories.

Tammy is responsible for many award-winning programs including the expansion of the Voter Assistance and Boardworker Enhancement Training Program which won a National Association of Counties (NACo) Achievement Award in 2005, and another in 2006. The Voter Language Assistance Proficiency Assurance Program was also recognized in 2006 with a Best in Category Award in the County Administration and Management Category. The Election Reporting System developed in Maricopa County was awarded not only a NACo Achievement Award, but also the Election Centers Professional Practice Award in 2007, and was recognized as one of the Top 50 Innovations in Government by the Harvard Kennedy School of Governments Ash Institute which also honored the program with a Bright Idea Award. Maricopa Countys Voter Assistance Website was awarded a 2008 NACo Achievement Award for its accessibility to voters, and their Disaster Recovery Plan received a National Association County Recorders Election Officials and Clerks Best Practices Award in 2009. Her dedication earned her the ADA Liberty Patriot Award in 2008 by the AZ Disability Advocacy Coalition.

Tammy has a bachelors degree in American Studies from Purdue University and has attained accreditation as a Certified Election Voter Registration Administrator through the Election Center and Auburn University.

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About Us: Democracy Fund

Democracy

In a Democracy the supreme power is retained by the people. People vote on the actions they want their government to take, such as new taxes, health care or representatives.

People can run for office and get elected to form part of the government. Such as the President, vice president, state representatives and other various positions.

In a democracy, people usually elect representatives. In the USA, each state has 2 Congressmen or Congresswomen and the state gets another set of representatives for the amount of people in their state. For example, the State of texas gets more State Representatives than oregon because Texas is more populated than the state of Oregon.

Democracy allows you to vote and elect representatives to form the government.

Quick Review of the Types of Government Studied. Click here.

World Map of Governments

Country Government Research page: CIA World Fack Book

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Types of Government - Democracy

We welcome new members to join in the fight for a liberal democracy.

There is an increasing feeling of democracy in the country.

We use democracy as a method of selecting representatives.

The widespread belief in the robustness of the rule of law in Britain certainly reflects our reputation as a vibrant multicultural democracy.

After touring the United States for more than nine months in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville returned to his native France and penned the two-volume Democracy in America.

In point of fact, bourgeois democracy is the political formula for free trade, nothing more.

The AA is proud to have the benefit of an active and participatory democracy.

Their exclusive possession of power made the commonwealth in which they bore rule an aristocracy; but they were a democracy among themselves.

Coverage of the scrutiny process is central to our parliamentary democracy.

Participation in political life was one of the pillars of Athenian democracy.

Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government?

During the early 1990s, under pressure from western aid donors, the Moi government was finally forced to concede to a multi-party democracy.

The only speech made by him during his three years in parliament that was listened to with impatience was, curiously enough, his speech in favour of counteracting democracy by providing for the representation of minorities.

Indeed the spread of democracy elsewhere increased the prestige of the Athenian administration, which had now reached a high pitch of efficiency.

A nobility of this kind often gave way to a democracy which either proved as turbulent as itself, or else grew into an oligarchy ruling under democratic forms. Thus at Florence the old nobles became the opposite to a privileged class.

In politics he advocates absolute equality - a democracy pushed to anarchy.

The network aims to deepen democracy through greater citizen participation in local governance.

Those sixty thousand, like the populus of Rome, formed a narrow oligarchy as regarded the rest of the nation, but a wild democracy among themselves.

Shortly afterwards, however, an insurrection took place, by which the disciples of Pythagoras were driven out, and a democracy established.

For a certain class of citizens to be condemned, by virtue of their birth, to political disfranchisement is as flatly against every principle of democracy as for a certain class of citizens to enjoy exclusive rights by reason of birth.

In the heyday of the Athenian democracy, citizens both conservative and progressive, politicians, philosophers and historians were unanimous in their denunciation of "tyranny."

Their weak point lies in their necessary conservatism; they cannot advance and adapt themselves to changed circumstances, as either monarchy or democracy can.

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Use democracy in a sentence | democracy sentence examples

For some time, the word democracy has been circulating as a debased currency in the political marketplace. Politicians with a wide range of convictions and practices strove to appropriate the label and attach it to their actions. Scholars, conversely, hesitated to use itwithout adding qualifying adjectivesbecause of the ambiguity that surrounds it. The distinguished American political theorist Robert Dahl even tried to introduce a new term, "polyarchy," in its stead in the (vain) hope of gaining a greater measure of conceptual precision. But for better or worse, we are "stuck" with democracy as the catchword of contemporary political discourse. It is the word that resonates in people's minds and springs from their lips as they struggle for freedom and a better way of life; it is the word whose meaning we must discern if it is to be of any use in guiding political analysis and practice.

The wave of transitions away from autocratic rule that began with Portugal's "Revolution of the Carnations" in 1974 and seems to have crested with the collapse of communist regimes across Eastern Europe in 1989 has produced a welcome convergence towards a common definition of democracy.1 Everywhere there has been a silent abandonment of dubious adjectives like "popular," "guided," "bourgeois," and "formal" to modify "democracy." At the same time, a remarkable consensus has emerged concerning the minimal conditions that polities must meet in order to merit the prestigious appellation of "democratic." Moreover, a number of international organizations now monitor how well [End Page 75] these standards are met; indeed, some countries even consider them when formulating foreign policy.2

Let us begin by broadly defining democracy and the generic concepts that distinguish it as a unique system for organizing relations between rulers and the ruled. We will then briefly review procedures, the rules and arrangements that are needed if democracy is to endure. Finally, we will discuss two operative principles that make democracy work. They are not expressly included among the generic concepts or formal procedures, but the prospect for democracy is grim if their underlying conditioning effects are not present.

One of the major themes of this essay is that democracy does not consist of a single unique set of institutions. There are many types of democracy, and their diverse practices produce a similarly varied set of effects. The specific form democracy takes is contingent upon a country's socioeconomic conditions as well as its entrenched state structures and policy practices.

Modern political democracy is a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives.3

A regime or system of governance is an ensemble of patterns that determines the methods of access to the principal public offices; the characteristics of the actors admitted to or excluded from such access; the strategies that actors may use to gain access; and the rules that are followed in the making of publicly binding decisions. To work properly, the ensemble must be institutionalizedthat is to say, the various patterns must be habitually known, practiced, and accepted by most, if not all, actors. Increasingly, the preferred mechanism of institutionalization is a written body of laws undergirded by a written constitution, though many enduring political norms can have an informal, prudential, or traditional basis.4

For the sake of economy and comparison, these forms, characteristics, and rules are usually bundled together and given a generic label. Democratic is one; others are autocratic, authoritarian, despotic, dictatorial, tyrannical, totalitarian, absolutist, traditional, monarchic, oligarchic, plutocratic, aristocratic, and sultanistic.5 Each of these regime forms may in turn be broken down into subtypes.

Like all regimes, democracies depend upon the presence of rulers, persons who occupy specialized authority roles and can give legitimate commands to others. What distinguishes democratic rulers from nondemocratic ones are the norms that condition how the former come to power and the practices that hold them accountable for their actions. [End Page 76]

The public: realm encompasses the making of collective norms and choices...

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Project MUSE - What Democracy Is. . . and Is Not