Real democracies are approximations along two axes, contestation and participation, so the question is how far a system sits along each rather than whether it qualifies.
Dahl's 1971 concept, coined because he thought no real system deserved the word democracy. It converts a binary question into two continuous measurements, which is why it survives in comparative research.
In practice
- A country holds contested elections with a press free to criticise and bars a third of its adult residents from voting; it scores high on one axis and low on the other, and the yes-or-no question has no answer.
- A club with open membership and a committee nobody may stand against is participatory and uncontested, and the two failures need different remedies.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works