Democracy (from dēmokratía, dēmos 'people' and kratos 'rule') is a system of government and form of liberalism in which state power is vested in the people, or the general population of a state based on principles of liberty and free will. According to the United Nations, democracy "provides an environment that respects human rights and fundamental freedoms, and in which the freely expressed will of people is exercised."
In a direct democracy, the people have the direct authority to deliberate and decide legislation. In a representative democracy, the people choose governing officials through elections to do so. Who is considered part of "the people" and how authority is shared among or delegated by the people has changed over time and at different rates in different countries. Features of democracy often times include freedom of assembly, association, property rights, freedom of religion and speech, citizenship, consent of the governed, voting rights, freedom from unwarranted governmental deprivation of the right to life and liberty, and minority rights.
The notion of democracy has evolved over time considerably. Throughout history, one can find evidence of direct democracy, in which communities make decisions through popular assembly. Today, the dominant form of democracy is representative democracy, where citizens elect government officials to govern on their behalf such as in a parliamentary or presidential democracy.
Prevalent day-to-day decision making of democracies is the majority rule, though other decision making approaches like supermajority and consensus have also been integral to democracies. They serve the crucial purpose of inclusiveness and broader legitimacy on sensitive issues—counterbalancing majoritarianism—and therefore mostly take precedence on a constitutional level. In the common variant of liberal democracy, the powers of the majority are exercised within the framework of a representative democracy, but the constitution and a supreme court limit the majority and protect the minority—usually through securing the enjoyment by all of certain individual rights, e.
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This course will offer students a broad but hands-on introduction to technologies of human self-organization.
Ce cours devra permettre aux étudiants de développer une réflexion critique autour des grandes questions qui animent l'Afrique d'aujourd'hui.
Nous devons passer à un modèle économique plus résilient et inclusif en-dedans des limites planétaires. L'objectif de ce cours est de poser les questions que cette aspiration soulève, d'apporter les r
A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a means by which organizational policies are enforced, as well as a mechanism for determining policy. In many countries, the government has a kind of constitution, a statement of its governing principles and philosophy.
A head of state (or chief of state) is the public persona who officially embodies a state in its unity and legitimacy. Depending on the country's form of government and separation of powers, the head of state may be a ceremonial figurehead or concurrently the head of government and more (such as the president of the United States, who is also commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces). In a parliamentary system, such as the United Kingdom or India, the head of state usually has mostly ceremonial powers, with a separate head of government.
A constitution is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organisation or other type of entity, and commonly determines how that entity is to be governed. When these principles are written down into a single document or set of legal documents, those documents may be said to embody a written constitution; if they are encompassed in a single comprehensive document, it is said to embody a codified constitution.
This collection of essays, all authored and curated by Tim Waterman, foregrounds the entangled nature of utopia(nism), landscape (aka landship), design and imagination, where ‘everything is connected, everything is inseparable, everything can have differen ...
We study socio-political systems in representative democracies. Motivated by problems that affect the proper functioning of the system, we build computational methods to answer research questions regarding the phenomena occurring in them. For each phenomen ...
EPFL2023
How can democracy empower employees to implement real climate action? The 2024 MyBluePlanet deliberative assembly, following the Academic Citizens’ Assembly approach, looks into workplace democracy, reaching consensus on seven recommendations. ...