Democracy
This, as with all other things on this wiki, is a work in progress.
This simply refers to the mechanism for choosing some portion of the persons in government. Democracy is a form of government, and thus it's orthogonal to, say, whether a government is liberal or authoritarian, small or large, etc.
The core feature of democracy is anti-incumbency--when elected officials do a particularly bad job, the electorate can "throw the bastards out."
The core bug of democracy is that voters are systemically irrational.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-- H. L. Mencken
Are there alternatives?
A common reaction I get when I complain about democracy, or more specifically the typical outcomes of voting, is to simply ask, well, what's the alternative? I think there's a mistake buried somewhere in there. Bryan Caplan nails this on page 3 of The Myth of the Rational Voter (emphasis his):
In the minds of many, one of Winston Churchill's most famous aphorisms cuts the conversation short: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." But this saying overlooks the fact that the governments vary in scope as well as form. In democracies the main alternative to majority rule is not dictatorship, but markets.
One method of giving over some scope to markets is to have people vote on values, but bet on beliefs: futarchy.
Copyright © 2008, 2009 Edward O’Connor. CC BY-SA 3.0.