The word "democracy" comes from the Greek words "demos," which means "people," and "kratos," which means "rule." In other words, a democratic form of government, or democracy, involves rule by the people. The first definition of "democracy" in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is: "government by the people; especially rule by the majority."
All other forms of government involve rule by individuals or groups that may or may not consider the will of the people in their decision-making. For instance, in a monarchy, a king, queen, or some other person in the position of royalty holds absolute power through heredity, usually for life. A dictatorship is similar in that a leader or small group of leaders hold absolute power. An ecclesiastical government is ruled by a church, and a theocracy is ostensibly ruled by God, but the actual power rests with priests or other religious authorities. In communist or socialist forms of government, power rests with a central authority, which supposedly distributes property and goods equitably to all. These are just a few examples to illustrate that in governments other than democracies, power rests in an elite rather than with all the people.
Of course, even governments designated democracies are rarely if ever purely democratic. Ancient Athens, for instance, where the term was coined, had an impure form of democracy that included only a small group of eligible men and excluded women, slaves, and other "inferior" people.
When contemplating democracy as a form of government, the question arises as to which people should be included in decision-making. If children would necessarily be excluded, a pure democracy would at least include all adults. However, not all adults may be considered citizens. Additionally, there needs to be a way of resolving differences of opinion. Usually a democracy is governed by the will of the majority, but then there arises the controversy of whether decisions should be made by a simple majority, or whether agreement of a greater percentage of the populace is necessary.
The question of size also arises when contemplating a democratic form of government. The Athenians who formulated the concept ruled via an assembly of representatives, and usually any group larger than a few people requires a representative form of democracy.
The founders of the United States experienced the dilemma of what to call their fledgling form of government. Some termed it a representative democracy, but most preferred the term "republic" to define the system that they had put into place.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/democracy
https://www.ushistory.org/gov/1c.asp
There are two principal types of democracy: participatory and representative. In a participatory democracy, all citizens are eligible to vote on important issues. It must therefore be quite a small state (in practice almost always a city-state) for this to be logistically possible. Far more common is the representative democracy in which most citizens participate directly only once every few years by voting for representatives (generally several hundred of them, representing approximately equal-sized constituencies around the country).
It is generally argued that any form of democracy will take more account of the will and welfare of the people than monarchies, oligarchies or aristocratic forms of government. However, political thinkers such as James Madison have argued that democracy is always vulnerable to turning into ochlocracy or "tyranny of the majority." Most democracies will have legal safeguards against this, such as a Bill of Rights or even a constitutional monarch or head of state separate from the head of government, who can intervene only in situations where democratic power threatens tyranny over minorities.
Modern democracies have certain characteristics which have not necessarily been part of democracies in the past but are now regarded as ways in which democracies are unique. One is universal suffrage for adults. The NGO Freedom House has shown that there was not a single liberal democracy with universal suffrage in the world in 1900. By 2000, there were 120, over 60% of the world's nations. The secret ballot, highly controversial even in the nineteenth century, is now accepted worldwide as the fairest and least corruptible system of voting.
It is common, however, for citizens of Western democracies to claim that such attributes as the rule of law or even liberal social policies are a monopoly of democratic systems. This is clearly not the case. The rule of law is paramount in many non-democratic countries such as Singapore, and there are various illiberal democracies, such as Poland and Hungary.
A democracy is unique in that the people rule it by popular vote. This gives everyone in society, regardless of class, the same amount of political power. Contrast this with a monarchy or a dictatorship (where one person rules according to his or her whim) or an oligarchy (where a small group of people can make the major decisions for a country).
Some would argue that democracies are the best form of government in that the people, if taken as a group, will make the best decisions for themselves. They will not go to war unless its to ensure the nation's survival—people are not willing to vote themselves into a position where they may die. Also, the people will insist on efficient governance with minimal taxes because people do not vote for their property to be taken away without a good reason. Detractors of democracies claim that the people can be selfish and are often swayed by whoever is the best speaker at the time, regardless of his or her qualifications for office. Others claim that democracies are slow in that one has to get a vote to get anything accomplished; given the size of the population, this vote can be hard to acquire. Still, others claim that a democracy can crush the rights of the minority, thus isolating an entire group of people from the political process.
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