INTBUS 6 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Ideal Type, Conscience Vote, Liberal Democracy
14 Oct 2020
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Week 1: introduction and comparing regime types democracy and autocracy. How do we know that we live in a democracy? freedom separation of powers: elections with opposition, accountability free press rights protected under the law. Russia has elections but we don"t consider it as a democracy. Why the interest in defining democracy: not a very common regime type, used to be a very homogeneous type , decolonization and third wave of democratization changes all of this. Towards a more robust definition of democracy a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections. Dahl (i: argument: in practice, we have polyarchies, not democracies, often we have the process but not the substance. In many of the oldest and most stable democratic countries, citizens possess little confidence in some key democratic institutions.
