democracy

Generally speaking, democracy is government by the people. More specifically, a democracy is a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected representatives under a system of free elections.

Many of the world’s democracies are also republics (in which people have the power and wield it through electoral representation). Sometimes, these are referred to as democratic republics.

The words democracy and republic are sometimes used interchangeably. The U.S. is typically considered, for all practical purposes, both a democracy (in a more general sense) and a republic (in a more specific, functional sense). Technically speaking, it can be considered a federal presidential constitutional republic or a constitutional federal representative democracy. (You can see why it’s easier to just call it a democracy.)

Sometimes, the word democracy is used in a very general way to mean political or social equality, or the state of a society where this equality has been formalized.

Democracies are most commonly classified as one of two types: a direct democracy (which involves citizens directly governing) and a representative democracy (which involves citizens electing representatives to govern on their behalf).

Sometimes, democracies are classified or categories in other ways. They may be labeled as aggregative, deliberative, or radical, or as participatory, pluralist, or elite. There are many other adjectives that can be applied as well. Of course, democracies vary from place to place, and every democracy may not fit neatly into a particular category or system of classification.

Democracy is complex, and the word doesn’t have an exact opposite in the same way that words like hot and cold are opposites. But there are forms of government that are based on very different ideals or values—including those in which the people (the average citizens) do not hold any power.

The U.S. famously founded its representative democratic republic by breaking away from a monarchy, a system in which a monarch like a king or queen claims to wield power not from the consent of the people but based on divine right (lol).

Terms for systems of government in which power is held not by the people but by a single person or a small group include authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and despotism. More generally, such situations may be described as tyranny.

A specific government in which the power is held not by the people but by a single leader might be called a dictatorship or an autocracy.

There are also a lot of critical words that refer to a governmental system that is considered undemocratic in a specific way, such as plutocracy (rule by the wealthy) and oligarchy (rule by a powerful few).

Some people contrast democracy with systems like Communism or socialism, both of which also involve economic aspects. Such systems exist in many forms (both theoretically and in practice). They may be extremely different from democratic systems, but they may overlap in some ways. A country could be both socialist and democratic, for example.

The word democratic can mean different things depending on whether it’s capitalized or not. Lowercase d democratic is a general term referring to things that involve or are based on democracy. Direct antonyms for this sense of democratic include undemocratic or antidemocratic.

In the U.S., Democratic with a capital D is used in the name of the Democratic Party, one of the two major U.S. political parties, along with the Republican Party. These two parties are typically seen as rivals, and some people may consider them opposites (though, just like everything else in politics, there are many people who disagree).