What counts as Democracy? Is Democracy Really what Counts?

The question of investigating the assumptions which lie behind democracy has become very pressing today: according to some political scientists we are living in an age of ‘post-democracy’, since the ideal of democracy has entered in collision with reality. As a political system of government, democracy was born to put a limit to the absolute power of kings and aristocrats, but today it seems it has become a tool in the hands of new powerful oligarchies that control the global economy and that exert an enormous influence on public life, without being themselves object of control. In this sense, Robert Dahl has spoken of actual existing democracies as poliarchies, given the plurality of powers, which lie behind the surface of democratically legitimated systems of government. Public life manifests clearly the symptoms of a crisis involving the traditional forms of political participation; moreover, according to Dahrendorf, parliaments seem today no more able to represent citizens’ interests, and the absence of truly independent media makes it quite impossible the formation of a really committed, pluralistic public opinion. Democracy seems capable of guaranteeing us from the hard power of tyranny, not from the soft power of media distorted by the mechanisms of power. John Rawls said that all existing liberal democracies are very far from being perfect: in America, for example, some political reforms appear as really necessary, especially in the field of elections financing and in that of the sanitary assistance. But perhaps all actual existing democracies need reforms truly inspired to what counts really as democracy. In my paper, I argue that the most urgent reforms needed by our democratic systems are those in the field of distributive justice.