What Can Democratic Participation Mean Today?

As we look back over the landscape of the twentieth century at the beginning of this new millennium, two features stand out in relief. First, this was a bloody century, with Nazi, Fascist, and Communist regimes alone costing more than 150 million lives. The second feature, materializing mostly in the past fifty years, is a dramatic increase in the number of democratic countries. If, following Freedom House, we define democracies as political systems whose leaders are elected in competitive multi-party and multi-candidate processes in which opposition parties have a legitimate chance of attaining power or participating in power, and that have a universal franchise, there were no democracies in 1900. Only 22 of the 154 countries existing in 1950 were democracies, encompassing 31 percent of the world's population. Today, 119 of the 192 existing countries count as democracies, encompassing 58.2 percent of the world's population. Eighty-five of these 119 also rank highly enough in protecting basic human rights and respecting the rule of law to count as liberal democracies.' Democrats should have every reason to look back on the past fifty years with satisfaction. While the Freedom House threshold for democracy is not high, the gains are immensely important when measured in terms of threats to basic human welfare. Although democracies are quite capable of atrocities against their own populations, they have not carried out the massive largescale atrocities engineered by nondemocratic countries in this past century, nor do they experience famines.2 Moreover, democracies tend not to fight wars with one another, removing one of the most pervasive threats to human