Definition Of Democracy

Democracy is a term that has no absolute definition and the significance of it has changed over time, depends on to places and the degrees of its use. And this is due to the changed shift from city-state during the Athenian decade to nation-state thousands of decades later and is no longer achievable due to the size of polity, i.e., a nation (Grugel and Bishop 2014: 23).

Democracy is a concept of ideology that embodies a set of political ideas which detail the best possible form of social organization (MacKensie 1994 in Grugel and Bishop 2014:21). The word democracy derived from the combination of two Greek words ‘demos’ which means a whole citizen living within a particular city or state and ‘kratos’ which means for power or rule (Arblaster

The theory is considered as an inappropriate model, as it does not take into considerations poverty and privileges that exists in the developing countries (Grugel and Bishop 2014:35). Therefore, many societies in the world are outright rejecting the empirical democratic theory or failing it completely in their process of achieving democracy. Conventional theorists see democracy simply as an end in itself, critical thinkers are much more likely to see democracy as a source of emancipation (Hobson 2010:17 in Grugel and Bishop 2014: 36). As a result, Bishop and Grugel proposed new prospect like participatory democracy, there the focus is on the participants, not on the elections or representation to ensure that democracy is achieved. For example, the participation of feminist in the political sphere is highly encouraged as it redefines the boundaries of the ‘political’ in democratic theory. It has also become a tool to uncover the gender inequalities that exists in the social, economic and political arena with the quest to liberate democracy from the straitjacket of liberalism and neo-liberalism (Grugel and Bishop 2014:38-39). Although the civil and legal rights of women have improved in many societies, it is not so in the developing countries as their capacity to exploit their rights successfully decreases (Grugel and Bishop 2014:40). Similar to feminism, associationalism and citizenship are important perspectives to increase the potential of democracy, both as acts in the effective participation of individuals in the community level or political organization without the involvement of the state as a way to limit the states power (Grugel and Bishop 2014: