A DEMOCRACY

is a society in which all adults have easily accessible, meaningful, and effective ways:

1.    to participate in the decision-making processes of every organisation that makes decisions or takes actions that affect them, and;

2.  to hold other individuals, and those in these organisations who are responsible for making decisions and taking actions, fully accountable if their decisions or actions violate fundamental human rights, or are dishonest, unethical, unfair, secretive, inefficient, unrepresentative, unresponsive or irresponsible;

so that all organisations in the society are citizen-owned, citizen-controlled, and citizen-driven, and all individuals and organisations are held accountable for wrongdoing.

All children should also have easily accessible, meaningful, and effective ways to hold organisations accountable as set out in point 2 above, but it is acceptable in a democracy to limit children's participation rights until they reach adulthood, mainly because psychological research has shown clearly that almost all children below a certain age do not have fully formed brains, and are not capable of reasonable deliberation and discussion.

The following participation and accountability measures need to be in place in every organisation (both government and corporate, public and private) in any society to fulfil the definition set out above:

1.
 a constitution that sets out the essential operating rules for the organisation (or the country, province/state, and municipalities), including strong protection of fundamental human rights;
2.
 an election system for choosing representatives that is fair and results in a governing body that represents citizen votes accurately;
3. a direct decision-making process (initiative and referendum, for example) that allows citizens to initiate decisions and actions on issues that their representatives refuse to address;
4. strong requirements with no loopholes that apply to every organisation (especially every government or government-funded institution, but also every corporate organisation (especially large corporations) in the areas of:
  • representativeness (elections, public consultation and direct decision-making);
  • openness (disclosure requirements and access-to-information laws);
  • honesty (including an honesty-in-politics law with an easily accessible complaint filing);
  • ethics (including limits on donations, gifts and other money-related ways of influencing decision-makers, and strict regulations on lobbyists), and;
  • spending (strict waste-prevention measures), responsiveness and responsibility in general operations (including publicly disclosed performance standards and performance reports, AND that apply to every individual in the areas of relationships with other individuals and individual responsibility);
5.  to emphasise, the requirements must be strong enough and comprehensive enough to ensure that citizens not only own governments (as voters and taxpayers), corporations (as shareholders), unions and citizen groups (as members), and public resources (land, water, air, TV/radio airwaves, publicly generated research and infrastructure), but also that citizens effectively control governments, corporations, unions and other citizen groups, and public resources;
6.  watchdog agencies (including police) that are fully independent (from political or other biased influence), fully empowered (to investigate and penalise), and fully resourced (to ensure a high chance that violators will be caught) that strictly enforce the strong requirements in the areas of elections, public consultation and direct decision-making processes, access-to-information, honesty, ethics, spending, and general operations, and the strong requirements for individuals concerning relationships with other individuals and individual responsibility;
7.  courts/tribunals that are fully independent (from political or other biased influence), fully empowered (to investigate and penalise), fully resourced (to ensure justice is not unreasonable delayed) to handle disputes about rights and responsibilities in every other area of society (including protection of fundamental human rights);
8.  a clear right for anyone to "blow the whistle" on any violation of any requirement, and to be protected from retaliation and rewarded if the requirement violation is proven true;
9. a clear right for citizens to complain to the watchdog agencies, and to the courts/tribunals, if any requirement is violated, including the right to sue as a group (known as "class actions");
10.  penalties for the violation of requirements that are high enough to actually and effectively discourage violations of the requirements;
11. every large organisation (especially government and large corporations) required to assist the citizens affected by it to organise into, and sustain, a citizen group that will advocate for the interests of the citizens and help them hold the organisation accountable;
12.    an easily accessible means (TV, radio, print publications, Internet sites) for citizens to share opinions and key, accurate information with each other about every organisation’s record in complying with the strong requirements set out above;
13. an economy large enough to finance the operation of all of the above organisations/investigative agencies/courts/citizen groups, and equitable enough so that every citizen (adults and children) has easy access to the above participation and accountability rights, and;
14.    enough people with the needed skills, knowledge and integrity to ensure that the operation of the above organisations and agencies, and participation and accountability rights, actually functions

Copyright Democracy Watch 2004

THE PILLARS OF DEMOCRACY