What are we defending when we defend and restore democracy? The distinction that organizes the answer to this question is between democracy as a method for processing whatever conflicts may arise in a particular society and democracy as an embodiment of values, ideals, or interests that different groups of people want democracy to realize. This is a distinction between minimalist and maximalist conceptions of democracy, where by “conception” I mean a definition that has normative connotations, which all definitions of democracy have.

Democracy is a system in which citizens collectively decide by whom and, to some extent, how they will be governed. This feature is definitional: A regime is democratic if and only if people are free to choose, including to remove, governments.

In the minimalist conception, this is all there is to democracy. As long as all the prerequisites for citizens to freely choose governments are met and political decisions are made according to established procedures, whatever the voters decide is democratic.1

True, voters decide only indirectly, by electing legislatures: Laws are adopted by legislatures, not voters.2 But if the legislature is freely elected and follows procedures in promulgating laws, and if the laws are duly executed, democracy is not questionable.

In this conception, the value of restoring democracy is intrinsic. It is the very capacity of the citizenry, as a collectivity, to choose governments. Yet this capacity is not ready-made: It does require prerequisites. Already John Stuart Mill thought that “the two elements of democracy” are “high wages and universal reading.”3 Democracy is a system of positive rights, but it does not automatically generate the conditions necessary for exercising these rights.4 As Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq observe,

For genuine electoral competition to be sustained . . . something more than a bare minimum of legal and institutional arrangements is necessary. In addition, there is a need for the civil and political rights employed in the democratic process, the availability of neutral electoral machinery, and the stability, predictability, and publicity of a legal regime usually captured in the term “rule of law.”5

Read the full article about restoring democracy by Adam Przeworski at Journal of Democracy.