Explore The Fusion Of Elitist Democracy And Pluralism

Sartori is one of the most important democratic thinker in the contemporary western.His democratic idea has strong reflective and vividly theoretical features and has an important influence for the formation of the modern democratic theory.So making a systematic study for his democratic idea is a worthy topic.The formation and development of Sartori's democratic idea was controlled by the environment in which he lived.The influence of fascism,the development of the wave of democratization and the challenged for the liberal democracy had influence on the formation of his democratic idea.Although he thought elitist democracy is the only one kind democratic theory,his democratic idea was also influenced by representative democracy theory and classical democratic theory.He thought the etymology of democracy,the excessive realism and the perfectionism were easy to make mistake.And through for the criticism of participatory democratic theory,he thought the democratic theory was just only competitive democracy in modern society.He defined democracy from descriptive and normative and the opposite of democracy.And he argued that the democracy was electoral polyarchy and based on achievement and merit.He developed Schumpeter's elitist democratic theory,and put forward the normative definition of democracy based on the Dahl's actual democracy.In some degree,his democratic theory integrated their views.But his theory also had some limitations.The extent to which public opinion was free,and whether the “another democratic theory” existed are still worth discussing.Sartori didn't think “Democracy is the governance of the people” but just limited majority.He introduced constitutional principle and thought the power should hand to the majority and minority so that to avoid tyranny of the majority.Through the comparison with consensus democracy and deliberative democracy,we can learn that they had some similar with the limited majority and all of them reflected the inclusive of democracy.Of course,there isn't only one democratic theory.The controversy of free and equal,representative democracy and deliberative democracy,and how to make a choice between the western democracy and political meritocracy are still test our political wisdom.