I recently joined a debate about Democracy on the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' blog:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ ronald_dworkin/2007/03/ is_democracy_possible_here.html

Here was my response to the article and many contributions:

Democracy is simply defined as: one person / one vote.
Anything more than this, then people are beginning to express their personal definition and expectations of government. Democracy does not come with a ready made constitution or a universally proved method of delivering the goods.


Democracy, defined by my own expectations, is this: the freedom to participate in both national and local affairs - 'participate' being the key word.


I would guess that the reason many are dissatisfied with current democracies is because these same people have given up their right to participate in local affairs to help improve whatever it is they're not happy about.


Don't like what you see? Do something practical to help fix the problem. The more we sit back and let fewer people have more power, both locally and nationally, the more things will slip out of our control - and with a higher chance we resent the options available to vote for.


There's been a lot of criticism over the years that the UK's elections are turning into something similar to the presidential campaign familiar to the US. I think this is because we have lost sight of our ability to participate in local solutions, and look increasingly only to broad-sweeping national solutions.


Democracy gives us the right to vote when we need to vote. But it also gives us the freedom to fulfil our own expectations and create our own definitions - providing we're willing to participate in bringing them about.