Does Democracy Promotion Also Promote Peace?

What is democracy, do we really understand the concept and the implications of the freedoms that our society enjoys. Democracy by definition is a “government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections”.(1) The United States democracy in current times can be a difficult situation to grasp, due to the fact that we are operating off of the Constitution written over 200 years ago, and individuals modern

Democracy is when the whole population are all members of the state for the government. Which means all people have equal rights. Nobody is less than another.

Democracy is a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, and is one with representative institutions and a rule of law.

Democracy is the idea government of present day. Many nations are converting to a democratic image to improve and better their society and make the people have a “fair” government. Today, it may seem easy to do things such as voting and our own freedom, but the expansion of democracy back then was a struggle. During 1776- 1920, many attempts were made to expand/ create democracy to increase citizen participation in the government. Acts for rights for suffrage, equal rights for the “lower class”, women, and African Americans, and balanced government where no one directly controls the government like the monopolists did, helped form the way democratic governments are run today. Events such as the Civil War, protests that created amendments and

According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Democracy is defined as a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections. This definition is accurate in

The Democratic peace thesis, whose basic concepts were studied by Kant in the 1700s, is the theory that suggests that democracies have been pacific in their relations with one other and are unlikely to go to war with another democracy. “Democracies rarely fight each other (an empirical statement) because (b) they have other means of resolving conflicts between them and therefore do not need to fight each other (a prudential statement),and (c) they perceive that democracies should not fight each other (a normative statement about principles of right behavior), which reinforces the empirical state¬ment. By this reasoning the more democracies there are in the world, the fewer potential adversaries we and other democracies will have and the wider the zone of peace.” russet

A democracy is when the common people are considered as the primary source of political power. Although democracy and absolutism had advantages and disadvantages, democracy was a more effective type of government for it limited royal power and protected the rights of the people socially, politically, and economically. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tension arose between the two different types of governments, the democracy and absolute monarchs.

Democracy is the freedom for the citizens to be a part of the governments decisions. Although many do not like the decisions made within a democracy they do not understand that they are part of the reason why they are living with the laws or rules that they have within a country. While democracy was first brought about by the Greeks many Americans wanted to live within a democracy because they had the idea that being under a democratic government was going to make their lives better because they could put their say within the laws and rules made. As the Britannic Library explains “The Greeks were also the first people to think about the nature and value of democracy in a logical and systematic way.”

Democracy is a type of government used in different countries, including America. A Democracy is a system of government by the populations of a state, through elective representatives (Kloppenberg 1). “In a democracy, the people are sovereign—they are the highest form of political authority” (“What is Democracy?” 1). Democracy is made up of values just like other ideology in different countries. There are many vales that are the factors of Democracy, but four mainly make democracy in America what it is today, the home of the free. “A Democracy has four values, it is a political system that is for choosing or replacing government fair, causes people to be active citizens, protects human rights, and the laws apply equal to all citizens” (“What is Democracy?” 1). One of the greatest values of democracy is the way voting is taken in America. “Democracy is a means for the people to choose their leaders and to

A democracy is a government by the people, in which the power is vested in the people themselves. The people then elect representatives who conduct their power in a free electoral system. The Declaration of Independence, which says that all men are created equal, was written on the premise of a democracy.

     A democracy is a system of government controlled by the people, not by one certain group or individual. In the Declaration of Independence it states that “all men are created equal,” an idea which leads to the concept that all citizens should have the same rights, responsibilities, and influence in the governing of their country. In writing the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson was trying to break his ties with the harsh and non-democratic rule of the British and begin a new, equal society and government for America.

There are two ways of thinking about the democratic peace theory, which are the structural and normative. According to the structural perspective, liberal democracies are able to avoid war because of constraints on the decision makers. Leaders are not all-powerful or able to misuse their power, decisions to go to war are well thought out, have gone through due processing and measures and involves the opinion of the people. The structural perspective of the democratic peace theory takes into account the structures liberal democratic states have in place that prevent them from going to war with other liberal states such as checks and balances, accountability to the people, limits to terms in office, pluralism and competition. According to Russett (1993, pp. 40), ‘In an economy of checks and balances, the division of power and the presence of public debate in the formulation of public

Democracy is a form of government in which all eligible citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Democracy allows eligible citizens to participate equally—either directly or through elected representatives—in the proposal, development, and creation of laws. It encompasses social, economic and cultural conditions that enable the free and equal practice of political self-determination.

Theoretically, democracy is a stable form of government where power is in the hands of the people. In a democracy, people have the liberty to elect officials that best represent their interests, and political institutions exist as a result: Benjamin Constant argues in The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns that “true modern liberty is

Violent civil conflict has been attributed to many reasons and there are indeed a web of factors that make violent conflict an issue from economic inequality to employment to deep rooted ethnic rivalry. The literature is indeed very rich. However while there are causes there are also factors that create a conducive environment for violent conflict and one area is the system of government. Systems of government present a classification through which we could assess the occurrence of violent civil conflict. Democracy is believed to have a pacifying power, the electoral processes, the rule of law and freedom from state oppression gives the population enough avenues to express grievances without resorting to full scale civil violence. This is drawn from the work of Kantian view that the representativeness of democracy makes it more difficult for the government to go to war seeing that it risks losing political power among the population who bear the brunt of war.[1] The democratic peace theory beyond mutual democratic pacifism, would thus have an impact on internal civil relations positively but this is not the case. However there have been an increased number of cases of civil and ethnic violence in government systems that we might consider to be in stages of democratization. Evidence would seem to suggest that there are greater levels of violent civil conflict in these sort of regimes as opposed to full blown dictatorships or