The central question concerning the human right to democracy is whether there is such a genuine moral right. Some kind of legal human right to democracy appears to be a part of international law (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966, Article 25). But there is a lot of dispute as to whether there is any such moral right (Buchanan 2013; Cohen 2006; Gould 2004). In order to answer this question, we must examine some different possible conceptions of human rights, and we must examine some different conceptions of democracy. Finally, we will look at what, if any, justification can be offered for the idea that there is a genuine moral human right to democracy. In general, I will use the term “human right to x” with the understanding that we are talking about a moral right to x of a particular sort. When I refer to legal rights, I will explicitly flag the legal character of the right.
Human Rights
There are in contemporary thought about human rights broadly speaking two...
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Christiano, T. (2019). Human Right to Democracy. In: Sellers, M., Kirste, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_141-1
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