Democracy
Democracy is difficult to define, not only because it is vague, like so many political terms, but more importantly, because what one person would regard as a paradigm case another would deny was a democracy at all. The word has acquired a high emotive charge in the last hundred years; it has become good tactics to apply it to one's own favored type of regime and to deny it to rivals. The most diverse systems have been claimed as democracies of one sort or another, and the word has been competitively redefined, to match changes in extension by appropriate changes in intention. However, there is still this much agreement: Democracy consists in "government by the people" or "popular self-government." As such, it would still be universally distinguished from, say, a despotism that made no pretense of popular participation—the despotism of Genghis Khan or of Louis XIV, for instance—or from a theocracy, like the Vatican. There remains plenty of room for disagreement, however, about the conditions under which the people can properly be said to rule itself.
In the first place, what is "the people"? In ancient Greece, the demos was the poorer people; democracy meant rule of the poor over the rich.
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