Democracy has become a widely accepted political system across the globe, and the majority of states have adopted it (some still doesn’t have democracy), although the degree of democratization varies from country to country. Such wide acceptance raises the question of why Democracy has become a default system for the world when every society is different, and the underlying factors that play a prominent role in a society act differently in every society.
Democracy is largely traced back to Athens(Greece),considered to be the birth place of democracy, where a direct form of democracy was present for a relatively small population, then Rome was a republic for a brief period, and then the path to democracy is largely traced through British history with magna carta, glorious revolution and all events that followed it. The underlying idea here is that democracy emerged at a relatively early period in human history but was then replaced with centralization of power and ever-large territorial expansion, which made it hard to govern with democracy as there weren’t enough communication tools to make it possible. Also, power kept on getting centralized. Then, with the advent of the printing press, information started flowing more freely, and transformation within Society, especially Western society, started culminating in the 18th and 19th centuries, which led to democratization. Technology did play a major role in democratization, but it wasn’t the sole factor; ample factors were interacting with each other, and the struggle between them gave rise to democracy, which is beautifully explained by the Political development theory of Francis Fukuyama.
Now, the struggle for democracy can be seen largely as a fight against the centralization and concentration of power in few hands and that’s the underlying reality as to why most of the countries choose this system. The basic problem with the concentration of power in one person or a few is that the goodwill of society gets effectively placed in their hands, and it depends on their conduct solely as how to run the affairs of the state. They might do good but if they, at a point of time chooses not to, there isn’t a mechanism of stopping them from doing so, and without checks on their power they can at any point create chaos in society.
This is where democracy becomes a default system as it effectively works for decentralization of power and creating a mechanism for people to replace those in power, if they aren’t doing justice with the faith the society has put in them. The power gets effectively divided between different organs of state, effectively checking each other with the ultimate power resting with the people who can make a government accountable mainly through elections at regular intervals. This availability of choice and to not allow a person or group of person tyrannizing the state by concentrating the power is what makes the democracy a default system despite its defects.
Democracy effectively negates the major defect of human nature and that’s working for self-interest. Human tends to work for self-interest as it is designed in this way, and at the individual level, it’s necessary, but when those running the affairs of the state work on this principle, that’s when society really starts to disintegrate. The general effort of society over the course of history has been to stop that from happening and priorities collective interest, and that’s exactly what democracy does. It, by virtue of its mechanism, tends to reduce the self-interest factor of humans by dividing their authority and placing checks on them, which essentially makes them comply with general rules. The communism of property and wives by Plato was the realization of this very fact to remove the human factor (Working for self-interest) as much as possible from governance to make it more efficient even though those were too harsh of measures by any standard.
So, democracy effectively tries and create a system where power is shared, with checks and balances system put in place to create a system that works for collective interests of society as a whole, although with human nature in play these mechanisms do gets override by human as even in apparent democratic structures, power gets centralized but that happens by degradation of democracy itself.
