"Britain is not a democracy in any modern sense of the word."
Demos kratos - things/doings of the people (or similar) - Old Greek. Nowadays it describes a generally agreed form of government and approach to governing. After that it gets pretty complicated - your democracy may not match mine ...
I'm going to be voting for councillors soon in Somerset, along with everyone else here who can be bothered to turn out. We are not forced to vote. We can freely discuss the vote. We have a reasonable expectation of our vote being counted correctly and can inspect the process if we wish. We can volunteer to count votes too.
That's just local government stuff. Obviously, countrywide elections are taken rather more seriously.
I'm sure your home country of India has similar processes and probably invented them in the first place.
Yours is the most honest answer, but yes, lets agree that Democracy means one person/one vote and everyone's vote is equal. The Brits have a pretty good form of government for its citizen but a one-person/one-vote-and-equal vote it is not. Similarly a country where the Majority's choice does not become President (like the US) does not qualify no matter how loudly they proclaim themselves to be the world's oldest democracy. Those folks also conveniently forget that they just got universal suffrage in 1967.
India did not invent democracy or representative assemblies and I am sure that principle occurred to many a tribe wandering the Savannah or Steppes a long time ago. There are written records of Republican assemblies dating back to ~500 BC in India.
As much as I might want to believe in "one person, one vote" defining a democracy, I don't think it does. It's certainly not in the dictionaries I look it up in (e.g., [1]), and it's not like we don't carve out exclusions even in the most democratic societies (e.g., a 15-year-old would have a hard time finding a place where they could vote). Heck, my understanding is you don't even need to have elections for a democracy, let alone letting every person vote - check out the system in [2]. I don't really like that lottery system, but it sure seems pretty democratic to me.
This isn't to say the US or UK or whatnot is a perfect democracy by any stretch, but that's how I'd describe them: flawed democracies. They're still close enough to democracies to be called democracies, but they're flawed/defective/etc., so that's what I'd call them. (Unless you're going for a no-true-Scotsman thing.)
It does though - "rule of the majority" in the Webster definition implies one person, one vote. If you work out the mathematics starting from n=2, and then by induction it holds. If not one-person/one-vote then for every n, there exists a set of weights, for which one person can usurp the popular vote. In the US, due to the electoral college, some state resident's vote counts for more than others which is why the loser of the popular vote can be the President. Company boards are famously not one-share-one-vote as the latest Muskian opera shows.
The legal age cutoff is a red-herring - every self-proclaimed democracy has a legal voting age i.e. definition of what constitutes the one-person. As long as it is applied uniformly across genders, races and the rest then it is does not take away from the one-person/one-vote criteria. I would argue that if they can enlist you to fight (and die) for them, then you should be able to vote. However different societies might have different criteria for what constitutes the person in one-person-one-vote.
BTW, thank you for your comment, after all the sneering and name-calling it is nice to engage is reasoned discourse.
Note majority rule isn't in the definition either, it's just strongly correlated. As the simplest example, a democracy that required 55% of the votes wouldn't stop being a democracy. For more different examples, see the lottery system I linked to, or imagine variations thereof (e.g., half the population votes one year, half the next year, etc.).
Also, I don't think the age-limit is a red herring in this case to be honest, since it's another manifestation of "who is a person". Claiming a 17yo is not a person in the US but is a person in Argentina undermines the notion that there's a universal definition of democracy (even one that has an age cutoff)... which is the premise of this entire argument! Otherwise we're acknowledging different societies can differ on whose votes they care about, and still be democracies. (Which I think is fine: we merely need a fair & just definition of democracy. It just isn't as simple as "one person, one vote", is all.)
> "As the simplest example, a democracy that required 55% of the votes wouldn't stop being a democracy."
Good point. Considering that 55% is > 50%, would we not say that anything that requires more than 50%, is a supra-majority system? In a multi-party system, they sometimes require some thresholds which requires runoffs but I would consider them supra-majority or supra-variations on the majority rule.
> Claiming a 17yo is not a person in the US but is a person in Argentina undermines the notion that there's a universal definition of democracy... which is the premise of this entire argument!
Societies the world over different notions of what constitutes legal age for driving, marriage, enlisting and in general to be considered of age. Voting is just one more manifestation of that inconsistency.
Your other point about lottery systems does seem interesting but could we not say that term-limits are a (poor) version of a lottery system? Term limits have pros-and-cons and those would transfer to the lottery system, namely lack of institutional knowledge to run a govt in which case the bureaucracy (also called the deep state in fringe literature) would dominate.
I just wrote a long reply to your comment, but I realized it ultimately was just a ramble, so I'll scrap it.
To answer your questions briefly:
- Sure, I guess we can call it that.
- Term limits seem orthogonal to the lottery system though? You can have either with or without the other. Not sure I can see them as being versions of each other.
Democracy doesn't mean one person one vote per se - it means governance by "the people" instead of the tyrant. Ironically a tyrant might be deliberately installed in times of peril by the people and then removed from office later on. Politics were quite robust in those days. Politics - from politike I think (never studied Greek, only Latin) - people of the city, also "police" is derived from politike or perhaps polis, which is nearly how Police is pronounced with a Scottish accent - especially around Glasgow.
Let's face it when the Greeks came up with a functional democracy, slavery was routine and obviously women and servants and other undesirables were ineligible to vote. Times have changed somewhat since then but there is still much work to do to ensure full equality for all. One day we may all be able to cry "Liberty, equality, fraternity" and not frown at fraternity meaning brotherhood and hence is rather sexist.
Anyway, what we have here in the UK is a voting system which is called "first past the post". It does involve one person = one vote but it is designed to avoid close results meaning a hung parliament. I don't actually know anyone who is a fan of this system but then again voting systems are quite a niche worry at the moment. The US system for presidential elections "colleges" is even weirder than ours for parliament/PM.
Quite obviously the UK cannot be the oldest example of a democracy because the word itself is way older than the UK and the old Greeks clearly invented the concept and lived by it! The current boast I think is oldest parliament "Mother of Parliaments" but I think Iceland may have prior art on that with the Alþingi - "allthingi". That letter that looks like a p is a thorne and was also used in English until we unceremoniously ditched it a few years back. Thorne also has a form that looks like y so "Ye olde shoppe" which is literally pronounced as "the old shop" but most hereabouts will insist on as something like "ye oldee shopee". Bloody kids!
No, democracy is NOT one person one vote. That is a specific kind of democracy, which may or may not be acceptable for whatever reasons. Democracy means
“the people” as a group decide the outcome. But how it is done may defer a lot.
Demos kratos - things/doings of the people (or similar) - Old Greek. Nowadays it describes a generally agreed form of government and approach to governing. After that it gets pretty complicated - your democracy may not match mine ...
I'm going to be voting for councillors soon in Somerset, along with everyone else here who can be bothered to turn out. We are not forced to vote. We can freely discuss the vote. We have a reasonable expectation of our vote being counted correctly and can inspect the process if we wish. We can volunteer to count votes too.
That's just local government stuff. Obviously, countrywide elections are taken rather more seriously.
I'm sure your home country of India has similar processes and probably invented them in the first place.