Democracies are misled when they assume that they can one day become ‘completed’. But that does not mean that they should not aspire to become more democratic. On the contrary – if we shed the belief that democracies should be judged by whether they are becoming more like those of the North, it becomes even more essential to offer clear criteria for democratic advance or retreat. On what must our judgment of democratic progress rest? An answer requires us to answer another question – what is democracy's defining feature, which sets it off against other political systems?

THE ELUSIVE DESTINATION: DEMOCRACY AS POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY

As a popular text points out, ‘Democracy comes from the Greek words demos meaning people and kratos meaning authority or power’. This basic definition clearly separates democracy from other forms of rule – in particular, monarchy (rule by an individual), oligarchy (rule by a few) or meritocracy (in which power is wielded by an elite considered inherently better able to govern). David Estlund, following Plato's Republic, has called this last strain ‘epistocracy’ or ‘rule of the knowers’. Democracy is distinguished from all these alternatives because it is, by definition, a system in which ‘the people’ – all adult members of a political community – are meant to exercise power. If this sounds straightforward and obvious, it is anything but that.

First, how do we decide who belongs to the political community whose members are to govern themselves? Most South Africans would agree wholeheartedly that every citizen should enjoy equal rights, but what about people who have lived in the country for a long period yet are not citizens? And how do we decide who is an adult? Is the present criterion, that people may vote when they turn 18, too high a barrier – or not high enough? These two examples illustrate that deciding who is included and who is not can become complicated.