Democratisation Localisation of Democracy Essay

Democratisation Localisation of Democracy - Essay Example The present study would focus on a democracy as a government in which citizens in a country participate in making decisions that affect their lives. Primarily, this involves making decisions that affect legal aspects of people’s lives including drafting, debating and enactment of legislation to become law. In addition, democracy involves people participation in making social, economic and cultural decisions. In democracies, representatives or leaders put in record people’s contributions towards making of laws of the land, by-laws and other relevant social instruments depending on the extent of democracy. The constitution is the supreme law of the land in most modern democracies, and all other laws, including customary laws must be consistent with the constitution. Otherwise, they are null and void and cannot be enforced by any law enforcing agency in the country. According to historical events, democratic rule and governance is the fairest and most preferable of all typ es of governance as citizens are free to decide their fate by offering their views in various ways. There are many types of democracies depending on how the people express their views, and how they implement them. However, these many types have two main characteristics, where the people present their views on governance directly, and where people choose representatives to present their views; direct democracy and indirect democracy, respectively. In indirect democracies, the people elect political representatives. For instance, they elect parliamentarians who go to parliament to debate and pass laws, and each representative presents the key issues affecting his or her people. The various forms of indirect democracies include parliamentary, presidential, semi presidential, constitutional, and liberal constitutional democracies. In presidential democracies, the people elect a president who is the head of state and wields many executive powers. This democracy has other political leader s, but all leadership revolves around a powerful presidency. A semi presidential democracy has both a president and prime minister, with both sharing the powers of an executive president. A constitutional democracy is similar to a parliamentary democracy, but the parliamentarians make all decisions in accordance to the country’s constitution. The people have the power and mandate to petition against the parliament if the latter oversteps the limitations of the constitution on their duties. Finally, representative democracies include liberal constitutional democracies. A liberal constitutional democracy is just like the constitutional democracy, but its parliamentarians have the capacity to alter the constitution to fit the prevailing circumstances (Dworkin 2008, p. 218). Apart from representative democracies, there is the direct form of democracy whereby the people participate directly in governance. In this case, there are usually no representatives and the central governmen t has to consult the people every time it wants to make a decision that affects the legal, socioeconomic, and customary aspects of people’s lives. However, due to the number of people in each country, this democracy is not common and the preferred form of democracy is representative. People practice direct democracy in scenarios where the people involved are few, and it is an economically viable option. Subjects in a representative government vote for sensitive matters like changing a government, altering or changing a constitution, petitioning a non-performing leader, and subdividing the country among others directly in referenda. A referendum is one of the cases where citizens in a representative democracy express their direct opinion to the central government without their parliamentary representatives coming into play. However, these processes are expensive due to the number of people involved and, therefore, having a referendum is rare (Gaus and Kukathas 2004, p. 144). O ther scenarios where people