“Of the people, by the people, for the people.”
I think we can both agree that Citigroup is not a democracy, though the Board of Directors are elected. A democracy necessarily entails some conception of majority rule, and you can’t have that if some adults are not allowed to vote. All that said, defining democracy is somewhat contentious - I’m just saying universal suffrage is part and parcel of modern conceptions of democracy. I agree that wasn’t the case 200 years ago, but language evolves.
Here’s another way of looking at the issue. “The US is the oldest constitutional democracy.” Thinking it over, that’s not an atypical formulation, probably constructed so that the US beats Iceland. It could also be said the the US has the oldest democratic constitution. In both cases the emphasis is place on the form of government, and is accurate IMHO as far as that goes.
But the US isn’t the oldest democratic society. That honor appears to belong to New Zealand. I would argue that “Continuous democracy” as referred to in the OP more properly matches how the society and politics operate, rather than its narrower legal structure.
Societies can be more or less democratic, so I don’t think there can be an objective bright line, societies on one side of which are democratic and societies on the other side of which are not.
Much of the discussion here focuses on the electoral franchise. That’s important, but perhaps its importance is a bit more nuanced than we realise. Post 2 in this thread links to a site which dates democracies according to when they first opened the franchise to more than half of the adult male population. If you think about it, that means a country can be considered democratic when three out of four adults are denied the vote. How can this be?
I think you have to take account, not just of who has the vote, but whose interests will be represented in each vote cast. I’m certain not defending a franchise defined by gender, but it’s clearly not true that in a country with such a franchise the wishes interests of women carry no weight, unless we assume that husbands care only about their own welfare and are wholly indifferent to the effects of law and policy on their wives and children.
So, you can arguably defend a country as democratic so long as the franchise is sufficiently widely defined that retaining office requires the government to be responsive to the wishes and interests of all classes and groups in society. A universal male adult franchise can achieve this, because men mostly live in families with women and children and their interests and welfare are deeply intertwined. By contrast, in a racially divided society a franchise defined not by gender but by race might cover a greater percentage of the population but might be less effectively democratic, if racial divides and antagonisms are so deep the voters drawn exclusively from race A will be largely indifferent to the effects of law and policy on people of race B. You could make a similar argument about a deeply class-marked society and a franchise depending on property qualifications.
Only by a strained definition of “democratic society” that includes NZ, and how it treat the native votes, and 18yo voters, but excludes the USA as there were issues with Jim Crow laws in a few states. Because in most of America, that wasn’t a issue.
I agree that language evolves, but that doesn’t mean that me or my group can just make up a definition out of whole cloth and answer any objection to it with “language evolves.” That’s true, but I don’t get to pick the new meanings.
I agree that bright lines are difficult when we’re discussing continuities and would go further than you. My reasons for characterizing 1925 US as non-democratic by contemporary standards isn’t because of the minutia of election law. It’s because of the outcomes: African-Americans had their civil rights curb stomped to the point of being routinely threatened by lynch mobs and bullied if they weren’t sufficiently deferential to the dominant ethnic group. As a contrast, Strom “Segregation Forever” Thurmond immediately hired black staff members following the passage of 1960s civil rights legislation.
Contrast NZ, where attempts to give the Maori a numerically equitable voice in their countries affairs during the 1980s were squashed by a majority of Maoris, presumably because they were satisfied with their form of representation and didn’t want to lose it.
Looking at the laws and making educated guesses is a reasonable short cut, in lieu of a detailed examination of that country’s history. But it’s best to look at outcomes. For example, while it may have been sensible to lower the voting age from 21 to 18, I don’t observe massive transformational changes in the relative civil rights of 19 years olds following the passage of the 26th amendment. Those over 21 were subject to the draft as well after all, and that is but one issue. Furthermore, the all-volunteer army had a lot of advocates among those over 21. So I think the 21/18 discussion is a red herring.
So again, prior to the 1960s, the US was not a democratic society, though it had democratic forms of government, with the exception of a brief window during the postbellum 1800s.
100% agree. I get to pick the new meanings. 
More seriously, I welcome a discussion of contemporary usage of the word democracy. I believe and opine that I’ve established the plausibility of my usage. I think you make a good point if you’re saying that logical arguments for what is or is not democratic aren’t the same as empirical observation of popular usage. One test for my hypothesized usage would involve whether 2021 US considers Apartheid South Africa to be a democracy. If yes, 1950s US is also a democracy. If no, 1950s US was not a democracy. (Individual states within the US might plausibly have been democratic, to the extent that their protections for minorities simulated the policies that would have occurred in a democracy. One way to demonstrate that (for example) would have been observe whether they enforced state level laws on redlining.)
(Also, as noted upthread and as a matter of logic, the definition of democracy is a matter of controversy among political scientists, or at least it was 40 years ago. I’m not familiar with the more recent literature.)
ETA: “That’s true, but I don’t get to pick the new meanings.” Well, actually you sort of do provided you make it clear up front what your definition is. Bonus points if you assess whether your definition is atypical. I didn’t do that, because I wanted to work with common understandings of the word democracy, something we haven’t gone into in great depth. I just wanted to make a side-point about rhetoric in GD.
I think you are misunderstanding the situation. Maori most definitely have a numerically equitable voice in their country’s affairs.
They have a free choice about whether to vote on the Maori electoral roll, for Maori candidates, or on the general NZ voters’ roll.
The number of Maori representatives is adjusted at each election if necessary so that they have the same representation as everybody else, no matter which voters’ roll they choose.
In the 2018 census there were 775,836 Maori, and 473,077 of those chose to be on the Maori electoral roll - that is, nearly 61%.
That gave them 7 representatives, while the general population (including nearly 40% of Maori) had 65. Besides these 72 directly elected representatives, there are 48 who are assigned proportionally from party lists, for a total of 120 in the House of Representatives.
Well, it wasn’t a monarchy, an oligarchy, or an autocracy. So while I would use a bunch of terrible words to describe Apartheid South Africa, you would almost have to say it was a democracy.
Every democracy limits the body politic in some way. As has been mentioned, we don’t allow children, the insane, (sometimes) felons, and (most of the time) incarcerated people to vote. So your definition could not require complete universal suffrage or else there is no such thing as a democracy. If your definition is that we don’t limit the body politic for reasons we consider bad or evil then we are sort of moving out of political science and into opinion.
People debate on this board whether convicted felons should vote. Does the definition of a democracy change based upon your opinion of that question?
It could plausibly be called an oligarchy, as the population allowed to vote was so small.
The point about the Māori franchise is that it was a way of including Māori voters, not excluding them. It was recognised that they were wholly excluded by the property-based franchise (because they held land in common, not individually), and therefore a dedicated franchise was constructed for them, so that they would not be excluded.
This it was a fundamentally democratic impulse; an attempt to include, not exclude. It can’t really be compared with Jim Crow laws, which were the exact opposite.
Nice post UltraVires. Nothing gets settled on this board, but sometimes we outline most of the main issues.
This I think is near the nub of the argument. The problem is that Apartheid South Africa reflected some conceptions of democracy (eg elections) while strongly repelling other (eg majority rule). Let’s discuss usage. Here’s how Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines democracy:
- government in which the people hold the ruling power either directly or through elected representatives; rule by the ruled.
- a country, state, etc. with such government,
- Majority rule
- the principle of equality of rights, opportunity, and treatment, or the practice of this principle
- the common people, esp. as the wielders of political power
I’m leaning heavily into #4. If UltraVires is saying #4 doesn’t exist, I would dispute that. But you can’t ignore the other listings either (except 5, which I don’t understand). I find it hard to put Apartheid into any of the definitions - except for the fact that the US government c. 1980 characterized South Africa as democratic in some way, which argues for that particular (contested) usage.
So where does this lead our hapless international listmaker? When definitions are too broad, split them up. Call the US the oldest continuous constitutional democracy, and New Zealand the oldest continuous democratic society. Easy peasy. Except:
I handled age restrictions upthread via the curbstomp criteria. I could do the same with the insane. But I think you’ve wrongfooted me with ex-cons. Because it’s at least plausible that societies that allow ex-cons to vote treat the incarcerated a lot better than the US does. It’s no longer obvious.
Narrowly speaking, your opinion of democracy doesn’t change on the basis of your of opinion on that question, based on common usage of the word democracy. But it could within the next few years, wrongfooting the listmaker who is trying to be semi- (or rather pseudo-) authoritative.
So the OP needs to be adapted somewhat (unsurprising as I wouldn’t have bothered posting it if my ideas were clear). But I think I can keep my 1965 date as the beginning of US democratic society, based on definitions 1, 2, and 4, but not 3. According to #3, we became a democracy in 1920.
I suspect that #1 might be adapted to fix the date at 1786. But that’s a task for another poster.
If I was to approach the OP with seriousness, I would ground my rankings on the framework developed by Freedom House. Their dataset extends back to 1973. I would want to simplify their (evolving) methodology somewhat, then extend it backwards as best as I could. I’m not sure that such an exercise would be worth the effort, but creating a simplified set of democratic criteria then applying them to eg New Zealand, US, Britain, and France every decade or so might be interesting.
This is a great thread!
I don’t think you can compare apartheid South Africa to the Jim Crow USA, because in South Africa the people being repressed were the vast majority of the population, and as soon as they got the vote the entire political system of the country radically shifted.
In the USA things certainly would have been better for blacks if they had had their civil rights, but the majority of the voters would still have been racist whites.
As others have said, neither woman suffrage nor lowering the voting age has ever produced any seismic shifts in the political balance of power.
So I guess I would set the minimum qualifications for democracy at “a large majority of households include at least one member with the right to vote”. By that standard the USA qualifies since at least the early 19th century, which I think is better than anyone else can claim.
“Households” rather than “Individuals” certainly finesses matters. You get majority rule right there for the late 18th c. US. The problem/complexity is that the founding fathers were pretty concerned about mob rule, so they discussed minority rights at length. And those concepts in turn became incorporated into public and international understandings of what democracy is: see definition 4 above.
Don’t get me wrong. You’re not necessarily going to get great logical consistency when you accept popular meanings of deeply philosophical words like democracy. I guess I would just observe that if there was a country that protected the rights of ethnic majorities at the expense of a large ethnic minority who were denied the vote, I don’t think we would call it a democracy today.
The answer I say is to make a bunch of lists, but be clear about your definitions. But UltraVires makes a decent point that barring ex-cons and the incarcerated could conceivably create a transformational shift in the living conditions of those in prison. Maybe. If so, perhaps Freedom House should update their more granular (and serious) rankings.
ETA: Thanks to GreenWyvern for his elaboration on Maori voting in New Zealand.
The first three women elected to the Spanish Parliament were elected before women were actually allowed to vote in general elections. Ironically two of those women were opposed to women’s suffrage.