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Discursion in Defense of Deficit Democracy

Author Affiliations

  • 1Political Science, City University, Mogadishu, Somalia

Int. Res. J. Social Sci., Volume 5, Issue (2), Pages 46-51, February,14 (2016)

Abstract

Recent advancements in ICTs, especially the internet, has been revolutionizing the way we understand democracy. General understanding of the concept of democracy is limited to representative democracy, and this representative democracy is understood, by many critics, as deficit in its domain; both in terms of inclusiveness in representation and in dispersing the benefits of the democratic power in an egalitarian manner. The concept of representation itself is under severe pressure as the demands to democratize democracy has been on rise with the advent of internet, and these demands are presumed to transform the nature of democracy. Hence, an evaluation of the present liberal democratic system may help us understand its strengths and weaknesses, and the modulations, mutilations, or adaptations that need to be made to address the democratic deficit that the internet has exposed. This paper attempts at deciphering the concept of present liberal democracy by looking at its foundations on which it stands. Different aspects related to different forms of liberal democracy like the general understanding of the concept itself, different axioms that support this particular version of democracy, functional limitations that force the present liberal democracy to take a particular shape, causal explanations for the emergence or development of this particular shape, power politics behind its promotion, survival mechanisms that the present system has adopted, and ways or methods employed by it to confine the alternatives to present liberal democracy etc. are critically looked at.

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