What is a Democratic system?

Answer 1

Democracy is a system of government where the people rule directly by voting on every decision that must be made. It is not practical for any real government larger than a village or small town, due to the cost of the extremely frequent elections (possibly daily) and the personal and work time its people lose to participate in those elections.

A democratic republic is a reasonable compromise, where the people vote for representatives at infrequent but periodic elections and those representatives vote on the decisions that must be made.

Answer 2

One in which one person=one vote, where Citizens are elibible to run for and hold office; where freely elected representatives of the people at all levels of the government excecise their judgment on behalf of the people, where majority rule determines the laws to be legislated, except when the Supreme Coiurt says that majority rule flies in the face of Constitutional Law (there is much debade about this, however).

Answer 3

A democracy is any form of government in which the public either votes directly on political policy or votes for representatives who themselves vote on policy. There are several different democratic systems such as:

1) Direct Democracies: Direct Democracies, which compose a number of limited initiatives, such as exist in some Swiss cantons, are governments where the individual citizens vote directly on issues, without a Congress or other indirect form of election. The difficulty and complexity of modern government have effectively made direct democracy impossible.

2) Presidential Republics: Presidential Republics, which include the United States and large parts of Latin America, are governments where all citizens over a certain age can vote for political parties that sit in Congress as well as voting for a President who is the chief executive. In Presidential Republics, there is a clear delineation between the legislative and executive branches.

3) Parliamentary Democracy: Most European countries (including the constitutional monarchies) have governments where all citizens over a certain age can vote for political parties that occupy seats in a Parliament and create a ruling coalition. This coalition appoints the Prime Minister and takes over the affairs of governance between the fair and non-fraudulent elections.

4) Illiberal Democracies: Russia and many Third-World Nations were Liberal Democracies on paper with guaranteed voting rights, freedoms of speech and religion, constitutions that bind the authority of the Executive. In nearly every regime that this describes (like Putin's Russia, Erdogan's Turkey, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Mubarak's Egypt) these paper rights and limitations on paper did not exist. These rulers used an apparent mechanism of democracy to perpetuate a Dictatorship.

5) Compromised or Confessional Governments: In situations with various powerful ethnic groups like Lebanon (with its Maronite, Shiite, and Sunni communities) and Iraq with its (Shiite, Sunni Arab, and Kurd communities) there are democracies which guarantee certain positions in the government to a certain ethnic group so that one group cannot dictate policies for all the other groups. This often results in fights over census taking as that might lessen a particular group's strength and actual group on group violence to intimidate voters of one ethnic group to vote for a candidate that also supports whatever objective would help the perpetrators who are a different ethnicity. This results in very fragile agreements.