Letitia Brown
Term Paper

A democracy is ‘…the institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.’1 A democracy is a system of government in which power is vested in the people, who rule either directly or through freely elected representatives. Democracy is known to be a government of the people, for the people, by the people. The people of a democracy all have a say in the proposal, development, and creation of laws. The word democracy came from the Greek terms demos and kratos. Demos means people and kratos means power. These two words were combined to make demokratia, which means rule of the people. Democracies bring about a sense of freedom and equality to its citizens; they are given the opportunity to have an affect on the government that controls them. “Democracies have a classical commitment to a politics that looks to the common or civic pursuit of the public good. They see political activity as an important element in developing a well-rounded and educated citizen. Civic values, traditions, and ends are seen as important to the constitution and maintenance of a public space or forum in which the business common to all citizens may be conducted. And recall the ideals of political virtue and political participation first enunciated by Plato and Aristotle, and later elaborated by Machiavelli and Rousseau.”3 “The terms isegoria (equal rights to speak), isonomia (equal political rights), and isokratia (equal right to rule) denote various forms of political equality that together embody democratic rule,…”3 “Thus Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, notes that liberty is the telos, or the essential and defining characteristic of democracy.” 3 In my opinion, A democracy is the best form of government because who knows better what’s good for the people than the people. When the people get a say in laws they have to abide by there are less rebellions, more unity, and respect for the government. There are many different theories and beliefs relating to when, where, and why democracy began. One being “Democracy was created, at least for white males, with relatively little conflict in the United States and some Latin America countries, such as Costa Rica.”1 “…the United States moved very early toward universal white male suffrage, which was attained by the early 1820s by northern and western states and by the late 1840s for all states in the Union, such a pattern was not universal in the Americas…Elsewhere, republican institutions with regular elections were the norm after countries gained independence from colonial powers such as Spain and Portugal, but suffrage restrictions and electoral corruption were much more important. The first Latin American countries to implement effective, relatively noncorrupt universal male suffrage were Argentina and Uruguay in 1912 and 1919, respectively but others, such as El Salvador and Paraguay, did not do so until the 1990s – almost a century and a half after the United States.”2 The first wave of democratization derived from these events. Another being “In August 1980, Polish workers, organized under the banner of the Solidarity movement, launched a general strike demanding the creation of trade unions independent of the Communist regime. Three months later, in Uruguay, voters overwhelmingly rejected a draft constitution which would have formalized the military regime in power in that country since 1973. Both events represented defiance of well entrenched authoritarian governments by thoroughly repressed and dominated societies. As such, they were almost entirely unexpected. Even more surprising were their outcomes: in both countries, gradual transition over the course of the 1980s from authoritarian regimes to electoral democracy.”2 In my opinion, Democracies originate from “the people” of a country taking action and rebelling and revolting because of becoming fed up with