Abstract
How do political arrangements in ‘liberal democracies’ enable citizens, who do little beyond voting, to influence public policy? To answer this question for such contrasting ‘democracies’ as Britain and Italy may be to offer a description of the ‘democratic destination’. I take it that, though terms such as ‘democracy’ and ‘democratization’ cannot be used innocently — as Adrian Oldfield made clear in Chapter 1 of this volume, because of the (essentially hidden) evaluative load they carry — systems that are widely called ‘democratic’ are ones in which the authorities respond in some way to the demands of citizens on terms approaching equality. It is often thought that systems are democratic to the extent that they display at least the following five features (in addition to the usual constitutional guarantees). First, their political arrangements are stable (if instability leads to collapse they will not be able to act as mechanisms for popular influence at all). Second, their electoral systems function so as to ensure, as nearly as possible, that all votes carry equal weight. Third, they ensure that the impact on government formation of factors other than vote distributions is kept to a minimum. Fourth, if they are parliamentary systems they ensure that there is effective accountability of the executive to the legislature. Finally, they ensure that government is sufficiently close to the people: through the provision of decentralized forms of government, the potential influence of each citizen is maximized.
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Notes and references
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Newell, J. (2000). Democratic Destination: The Examples of Britain and Italy. In: Garrard, J., Tolz, V., White, R. (eds) European Democratization since 1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333983317_13
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