| Chapter 1: | The Domestic Analogy |
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and ends with a fully instituted system of popular government with high and equal rates of participation. Somewhere between these two poles is a threshold value that enables one to speak of democracy. As I see it, the following two conditions must then obtain: (a) Leaders are chosen by voters on the basis of equal suffrage in free, regular, and secret elections (political equality). This value is founded on the two principles of freedom of association and rule by the majority. Without freedom of association, majority rule can degenerate into totalitarianism. Without equal suffrage, liberal freedoms tend to produce a society of privilege. (b) Voters are able to dismiss their leaders (electoral accountability).
Strictly speaking, the second condition is redundant: after all, if elections take place regularly, the right of voters not to reelect their leaders follows automatically. As I shall demonstrate, however, it is critical—in view of the way the debate is being conducted in political science today—to put explicit emphasis on the right of voters to dismiss their leaders. This is something I stressed in my previous book:
What distinguishes popular rule from other forms of government, in my estimation, is precisely that the people are able—without spilling blood or resorting to civil war—to get rid of a government that has lost their favor. Whereas democracy is a method for the peaceful change of power, the coup d’état is the rule of succession in a dictatorship.7
The debate within political science today on the topic of global democracy may be briefly characterized as follows. Democracy on a planetary scale seems unrealistic, but this does not mean researchers are generally satisfied with the current world order. On the contrary, many scholars have submitted proposals to set right what they consider to be defects. The idea is to encourage the process of democratization. Curiously enough, however, many of them see democratic orthodoxy as one of the greatest problems in this regard. The demand set by proponents of global democracy that world politics be made “democratic” in the sense that voters be empowered both to appoint their leaders and to