Sheri Berman tells the GC what is democracy

We asked Sheri Berman, What is democracy?

[quote style=”default”]Democracy is, by definition, ‘rule by the people.’ This does not require a perfect correspondence between some impossible to define ‘will of the people’ and political outcomes, but it does require that the divergence between the two not be too great. In addition, political equality is the heart of democracy: some citizens cannot be systematically and permanently more powerful or impactful than others.

We are living in a time when these basic features and requirements of democracy have been eroded, leaving many citizens feeling disregarded and disempowered.  The challenge democracy’s advocates face today is figuring out how to reverse these trends, making democracy responsive to broad cross-sections of the population rather than elites or narrow groups of voters and thus better able to recognize and hopefully solve the large social and economic problems facing our societies today.[/quote]

Sheri Berman is a professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research interests include European history and politics; the development of democracy; populism and fascism; and the history of the left.  She has written about these topics for a wide variety of scholarly and non-scholarly publications, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and VOX. In her most recent book, Democracy and Dictatorship: From the Ancient Regime to the Present Day (Oxford University Press, 2019), she offers a new perspective on the relationship between the development of states, nations, and democracy.