What is democracy?

Democracy is a system of government in which ultimate political power rests with the people, who exercise it directly or through freely elected representatives. The word comes from the Greek dēmos, meaning people, and kratos, meaning power or rule. Ancient Athens experimented with direct democracy from roughly 508 BC, when adult male citizens voted personally on laws and policy in an assembly.

American democracy is representative rather than direct. Citizens elect federal, state, and local officials who make most decisions, with periodic elections offering accountability. The United States is sometimes called a constitutional democracy or a democratic republic to capture the combination of popular rule, written constitutional limits, and representative institutions.

Several features distinguish democratic government. Free, fair, and regular elections give people the power to remove officials. Universal adult suffrage, achieved in stages through the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, the Nineteenth in 1920, the Twenty-Fourth in 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Twenty-Sixth in 1971, ensures the broadest possible participation. Freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association under the First Amendment lets citizens debate, organize, and criticize the government. The rule of law, due process, and an independent judiciary protect minorities from majoritarian abuses. Peaceful transitions of power between political parties are a defining test of any functioning democracy.

Many countries hold elections without meeting the full standard. International organizations like Freedom House classify countries on a spectrum from free democracies to electoral authoritarian regimes that hold votes but lack the freedoms and protections that make those votes meaningful.

American democracy is older than most, with a continuous constitutional order dating from 1789, but its history includes long periods when democracy was incomplete, particularly with the exclusion of women until 1920 and the systematic denial of voting rights to Black Americans, especially in the South, until the 1960s. Democracy in this fuller sense is an ongoing project rather than a finished state. Citizens, courts, legislatures, and political parties continually negotiate how it works, who participates, and what limits the constitution imposes on majorities.