Even among his contemporaries, Madison’s refusal to apply the term democracy to representative governments, even those based on broad electorates, was aberrant. In November 1787, only two months after the convention had adjourned, James Wilson, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, proposed a new classification. “[T]he three species of governments,” he wrote, “are the monarchical, aristocratical and democratical. In a monarchy, the supreme power is vested in a single person; in an aristocracy…by a body not formed upon the principle of representation, but enjoying their station by descent, or election among themselves, or in right of some personal or territorial qualifications; and lastly, in a democracy, it is inherent in a people, and is exercised by themselves or their representatives.” Applying this understanding of democracy to the newly adopted constitution, Wilson asserted that “in its principles,…it is purely democraticaclass="underline" varying indeed in its form in order to admit all the advantages, and to exclude all the disadvantages which are incidental to the known and established constitutions of government. But when we take an extensive and accurate view of the streams of power that appear through this great and comprehensive plan…we shall be able to trace them to one great and noble source, THE PEOPLE.” At the Virginia ratifying convention some months later, John Marshall, the future chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, declared that the “Constitution provided for ‘a well regulated democracy’ where no king, or president, could undermine representative government.” The political party that he helped to organize and lead in cooperation with Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence and future third president of the United States, was named the Democratic-Republican Party; the party adopted its present name, the Democratic Party, in 1844.
Following his visit to the United States in 1831–32, the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville asserted in no uncertain terms that the country he had observed was a democracy—indeed, the world’s first representative democracy, where the fundamental principle of government was “the sovereignty of the people.” Tocqueville’s estimation of the American system of government reached a wide audience in Europe and beyond through his monumental four-volume study Democracy in America (1835–40). Solving the dilemma
Thus, by the end of the 18th century both the idea and the practice of democracy had been profoundly transformed. Political theorists and statesmen now recognized what the Levelers had seen earlier, that the nondemocratic practice of representation could be used to make democracy practicable in the large nation-states of the modern era. Representation, in other words, was the solution to the ancient dilemma between enhancing the ability of political associations to deal with large-scale problems and preserving the opportunity of citizens to participate in government.
To some of those steeped in the older tradition, the union of representation and democracy seemed a marvelous and epochal invention. In the early 19th century the French author Destutt de Tracy, the inventor of the term idéologie (“ideology”), insisted that representation had rendered obsolete the doctrines of both Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, both of whom had denied that representative governments could be genuinely democratic (see below Montesquieu and Rousseau). “Representation, or representative government,” he wrote, “may be considered as a new invention, unknown in Montesquieu’s time.…Representative democracy…is democracy rendered practicable for a long time and over a great extent of territory.” In 1820 the English philosopher James Mill proclaimed “the system of representation” to be “the grand discovery of modern times” in which “the solution of all the difficulties, both speculative and practical, will perhaps be found.” One generation later Mill’s son, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, concluded in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861) that “the ideal type of a perfect government” would be both democratic and representative. Foreshadowing developments that would take place in the 20th century, the dēmos of Mill’s representative democracy included women. New answers to old questions Suffrage
Representation was not the only radical innovation in democratic ideas and institutions. Equally revolutionary were the new answers being offered, in the 19th and 20th centuries, to some of the fundamental questions mentioned earlier. One important development concerned question 2—Who should constitute the dēmos? In the 19th century property requirements for voting were reduced and finally removed. The exclusion of women from the dēmos was increasingly challenged—not least by women themselves. Beginning with New Zealand in 1893, more and more countries granted women the suffrage and other political rights, and by the mid-20th century women were full and equal members of the dēmos in almost all countries that considered themselves democratic—though Switzerland, a pioneer in establishing universal male suffrage in 1848, did not grant women the right to vote in national elections until 1971 (see woman suffrage).
Although the United States granted women the right to vote in 1920 (by the Nineteenth Amendment), another important exclusion continued for almost half a century: African Americans were prevented, by both legal and illegal means, from voting and other forms of political activity, primarily in the South but also in other areas of the country. Not until after the passage and vigorous enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were they at last effectively admitted into the American dēmos.
Thus, in the 19th and 20th centuries the dēmos was gradually expanded to include all adult citizens. Although important issues remained unsettled—for example, should permanent legal foreign residents of a country be entitled to vote?—such an expanded dēmos became a new condition of democracy itself. By the mid-20th century, no system whose dēmos did not include all adult citizens could properly be called “democratic.”
Obama, Barack; votingU.S. Pres. Barack Obama voting in the 2012 general election.Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
Factions and parties
In many of the city-state democracies and republics, part of the answer to question 3—What political institutions are necessary for governing?—consisted of “factions,” including both informal groups and organized political parties. Much later, representative democracies in several countries developed political parties for selecting candidates for election to parliament and for organizing parliamentary support for (or opposition to) the prime minister and his cabinet. Nevertheless, at the end of the 18th century leading political theorists such as Montesquieu continued to regard factions as a profound danger to democracies and republics. This view was also common at the United States Constitutional Convention, where many delegates argued that the new government would inevitably be controlled and abused by factions unless there existed a strong system of constitutional checks and balances.