| > I do know the history, despite your suggestions to the contrary -- which to be honest are a bit patronizing. What's funny is that the response you saw was edited for politeness. > You're right that a dictionary isn't the place to look to find out where to draw the line, but the line certainly has to be drawn somewhere. I'd say most people would agree that a society where people are systematically disenfranchised based on race, property and gender is not democratic. I think I see what's going on here. There are two different issues, the meaning of the word "democracy" and the norms of democracy at any given time. I think the accurate thing to say with regard to both of these, and hopefully you'll agree, is that the word, its meaning, and the ideal it defines have been pretty constant over time and the degree to which democracies adhere to the ideal of democracy has changed. (it seems to me a more interesting question is whether America in 1900 would qualify as an "illiberal democracy" under today's emerging definition) > A country of 1 million where 1 person has the vote isn't a democracy. More useful examples abound, with all the countries that did not achieve universal suffrage until the 20th century. I think you're staking out a very strange linguistic position if you think those countries, which self-identified as democracies both before and after the change, and which everyone referred to as democracies both before and after the change, could only correctly be referred to as "democracies" after they enacted universal suffrage. It seems a lot more useful to say that those democracies were functioning closer to the ideal of democracy than they had been previously. A tangent: there's a satirical Asimov story called Franchise about a country where only one guy has the vote. I don't remember much about it except that it was great, like most Asimov stories. |
> I think you're staking out a very strange linguistic position if you think those countries, which self-identified as democracies both before and after the change, and which everyone referred to as democracies both before and after the change, could only correctly be referred to as "democracies" after they enacted universal suffrage.
I think you're staking out a very strange political position if you're suggesting that it wouldn't be undemocratic to disenfranchise women, African-Americans and people who don't own significant amounts of property.
Self-identification is not a reliable guide. The DPRK presumably self-identifies as democratic.
Now, if you think that (say) the USA should still qualify as an 'imperfect democracy' following a massive disenfranchisement of the kind I just described, then I can't really argue with that, since there's no hard and fast rule for deciding when an imperfect democracy stops being a democracy at all. But personally I would not call it a democracy any longer in that circumstance.