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Democracy Vs Representative Democracy

Decent Essays

Abraham Lincoln (2005) defined modern democracy in three-part as “government of the people”, “government by the people” and “government for the people”. Democracy started in Greek around 500 B.C. with the simple meaning of people with power, nowadays democracy could be separate into two forms the direct democracy and the representative democracy. In this essay, I will argue that democracy is in crisis from the following aspect, fail of the direct democracy, the decline of representative democracy and the eroded right.

Firstly, democracy is in crisis due to fail examples of direct democracy. Referendum a primary for of a direct democracy when people are directly consulted for government decision making and give the decision through a vote. …show more content…

Other than representative democracy, liberal democracy has an additional liberal feature, the freedom. In the Belmarsh case in 2001 ,for example, the freedom has been eroded. In this case, nine men have been put in jail without trial due to UK parliament respond to the 9/11 attack in the USA. After the judicial review, the Crime and Security Act has been changed from the government have the power to detain anyone who was suspected without trial into the suspected terrorist can only be held without trial up to 28 days. Human right has been eroded and people’s freedom are therefore not secure anymore (Ginsburg, 2005). Freedom of religion, another feature of liberal democracy becomes controversial under Huntington’s view of the clash of civilizations. According to Huntington’s point of view that “the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic, the great division among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural” (1996), therefore, the freedom of religion would have a possibility leads to conflict. As this brings the question to choices between either freedom or conflict, some country chooses to abandon freedom of religion. For example, in China government forbids the beliefs to “Fa Lun Gong” as it partly clashes with the communist ideology. From the side of liberal democracy, democracy is decreasing because of the fact that freedom is been

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