The etymology of the word 'democracy' is often rather sloppily rendered as 'rule of the masses', on the strength of the word 'demos' meaning 'the people' or 'the masses'. This isn't really correct. A deme, in ancient Greece, isn't some amorphous population group but rather an administrative unit. I'd say that crossing the word 'electorate' with the word 'village' or 'town' (in a corporate sense) would be the most accurate way to understand what the term refers to. Which means that the idea of democracy, in its earliest and purest form, is more about systems of power than it is about some Marxist interpretation of popular rule.
And when we look at how Athenian democracy actually ran, we can see the template for all future kinds of democracy as well. In essence, once we get past the central idea, the actual operation of democracy is rooted in limitation or control of the franchise or, to put that another way, placing limits on who can vote and who is qualified to stand for office. In the Athenian system, this was done through the simple mechanism of citizenship. Some historians argue, in fact, that the whole idea of citizenship was invented to serve this franchise limiting function of democracy. The requirements for Athenian citizenship are actually quite draconian by our standards. It initially boiled down to ethnicity, with potential citizens needing to prove some generations' worth of residence in their particular deme, and/or membership of their tribe. Women were famously excluded, as were slaves, and so were many of the poor by virtue of needing to have completed a term of military service - the equipment and free time required to participate in the hoplite formation were beyond the reach of most poor people. Many of the most bitter constitutional disputes in ancient Athens had to do with citizenship - to whom to grant it, and what its requirements were. In the period following the Persian wars, the morphing of Athens into a naval power meant commoners completed military service at rowing benches, and foreigners flooded into the city. This caused quite a lot of Athenian heartache, and was solved by creating yet more controls in order to limit the influx of new citizens. So it can be seen that the first and purest democracy was primarily preoccupied with limiting or controlling access to it.
We can also see this pattern in communist countries, most of whom think of themselves as democratic. China is a good example, as at local and provincial levels they have elections, and they also have a kind of ersatz (though not well understood) parliamentary, or at least assembly, based system. In China, which is nominally or socially communist, we get the strange anomaly where membership of the Communist Party is actually quite exclusive. Political officers are present in most schools, and their role is to look for the most able and most doctrinally sound students in order to mark them for potential party membership in the future. Sure, the upper echelons of sovereign and executive power are not directly accessible by the people, but on many coarse measures, China is about as democratic as we are. Sure, it's an oppressive oligarchy, but the simple fact is that they are able to claim, without looking completely insane, that they have democratic mechanisms, and these mechanisms are very similar to the ancient Greek ones in that they primarily exist in order to confine actual power to an elite while simultaneously encouraging popular involvement and participation.
But by far the most predominant and egregious example is representative democracy - basically the system in use in most of the western world. The vast mass of the people are effectively cut off from the actual running of their country. The actual mechanisms of executive power are surrounded by a constitutional ring of steel, with the state holding more or less absolute monopolies on the enacting of legislation and the use of force. Every few years voters can choose the people who are going to rule over them, but like the hoplite formation, there is in fact an effective property qualification for office. Basically, the amount of time it takes to run, the licence fees, the cost of media - even simple stuff like the cost of corflutes and posters - make it highly impracticable for poor people to stand for office. Sure, it's possible in theory, but it's far far easier to run for office if one has access to property, leisure, and significant sums of cash. And then there's the attitudinal aspect. We need only look at the recent election of Zali Steggall in Warringah - correctly hailed as a breaking of the deadlock of the two party duopoly of Australian politics. If we look unflinchingly at what exactly made her viable and attractive as a candidate, some uncomfortable truths emerge.
What made Zali attractive? Well, let's look at the aspects of her which were used to promote her. Firstly, there was the name recognition and moral connotations of her past as an elite athlete. Then there was her highly successful career in the law - an elite profession which is further seen as eminently suitable owing to the fact that politicians are lawmakers. And then there was the perception that she was 'experienced at high levels', and talk of her more than average intelligence. Put simply, the thing which made her most attractive as a candidate for democratic office was not the 'anyone but Tony' aspect - multiple candidates have run against Tony to near zero effect. No, what made her viable in the public's eyes was the fact of her belonging to an elite - to several elites, really.
This kind of limitation of power is, at its best, designed to actually facilitate rather than debar popular participation in rule. But the important thing about a system of power is that it needs to be understood. I see a disheartening number of people with little to no understanding of how their state is actually run, and therefore of actual and existing avenues to the creation of change and the application of leverage. This mass ignorance creates a situation where power is more and more monopolised by special interest groups and lobbyists, who are probably the people best acquainted with these systems. And it also creates the very dangerous situation where the people cease to understand how they can interact within the system, which inevitably leads to apathetic non-participation, or a kind of frustrated impulse to either bypass or destroy the systems they don't understand and feel (technically correctly) are disenfranchising them.
Both of these are recipes for disaster, and it's actually down to each individual citizen to fix this. We can blame fatcats or media or alien lizards as much as we like - the simple fact of the matter is that we ourselves are ultimately responsible for the types of government we have, and we shape this reality through a combination of what we consent to, and the extent to which we can be bothered understanding it.
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