"We live in a participative democracy where every citizen can play a part in civil life".
To give an informed decision as to whether I agree with the above statement I will need to clarify what is meant by "democracy", "citizenship" and "participative democracy". Once this is done I will try to establish whether Britain allows its people to participate in the running of the country, and if so, to what extent. I will also focus on who we consider to be a citizen, and why certain individuals are not included. Finally, I will assess my findings and conclude whether or not I believe this statement to be correct.
There are many forms of democracy, but when defining democracy, most people will quote "government by the people" (Abraham Lincoln), implying that everyone should have political power. Although this was possible many years ago when the population was smaller, in the present day it is virtually impossible to work in this manner as numbers have grown and the decisions needed to be made have increased, which has caused us to introduce the method of electing someone to represent us. Therefore it is necessary to redefine the term so as to include the concept of representation - "government by the representatives of a majority of the people" (Arblaster, 1994). However in Britain it is not necessary for a party to receive the majority vote to win an election, they simply have to have more supporters than opposing parties, which is often estimated to be just over 40% of the votes. As Anthony Arblaster points out, this leaves approximately 60% of voters and the remaining non-voters being governed by an administration that they did not appoint.
Frequently it is assumed that democracy implies that political power should be distributed to every person that resides in a country. However this has never been the case. Dating back to Athenian society, three groups of people were excluded from participating; women, foreigners and slaves.