Why democracy?
Jun 2nd, 2007 by Gideon Strauss
This morning as I continued reading an article in the Atlantic Monthly by David Samuels, on Condoleezza Rice and her work in the Middle East, I wondered again why I believe in democracy.
Before I am a democrat, I am a constitutionalist. Following Jonathan Chaplin, I believe it is crucially important for a state that its regime will be such that citizens can hold a “a deeply embedded expectation that governments will act responsibly and should be held to account if they commit serious wrongs, and that there is some kind of constitutional foothold by which such accountability can, in principle, eventually be realized.” The rule of law seems to me to be the crucial political achievement toward the establishment of public justice.
While I doubt that the establishment of a democratic political order can effectively precede the establishment of a constitutionalist state, or the cultivation of the cultural mores essential to bolster a constitutionalist state, it would seem to me that democracy can significantly contribute toward the securing of constitutionalism, by fostering a community of trust between those who govern and those who are governed. It also seems to me that democracy can enrich constitutionalism by enabling a civic dialogue about the nature of public justice, and therefore a continual re-affirmation and reconsideration of a particular constitutional order with a view to its improvement.
Again following Jonathan Chaplin, I believe that “[the] citizenry of a constitutional democracy will have some credible expectation that the decisions of their government will, to some degree at least, flow out of a process that is representative of their most important interests and beliefs, and that their government will not be able persistently to flout those with impunity. They will also have some credible expectation that political and legal channels exist to restrain, censure, and, where necessary, punish serious governmental misdeeds. Accountability is therefore double-sided: governments are politically accountable via the processes of representative democracy — for example, parliaments can pass a motion of non-confidence in them, and citizens can turf them out through elections, and they are legally accountable through the judicial process — government’s subjection to the law must itself be legally enforceable.”
