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When I began studying political science it was common to talk of "liberal" democracy as a particular type of democracy, to be contrasted with participatory democracy, single-party democracy, or Marxist democracy.1 Remnants of that thinking persist, though a moment's reflection will show that this typology is based on a conceptual confusion, for without liberty there can be no democracy. If people are to have any influence or control over public decision making and decision makers, they must be free to communicate and associate with one another, to receive accurate information and express divergent opinions, to enjoy freedom of movement, and to be free from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.
This essay begins with some further elaboration of the relations between freedom, rights, and democracy, and then briefly summarizes the connections between these and other elements of democratic quality addressed by other contributors to this cluster of articles. It subsequently sets out a procedure for assessing the quality of a country's democracy in four successive steps: first, defining the appropriate democratic "goods"; second, identifying standards of best practice as a benchmark of attainment for each of these goods; third, analyzing the typical modes of subversion which may prevent their attainment; and fourth, exploring possible agencies of protection against these subversions.
The integral connection between freedom and democracy was already well understood in ancient Athens. In Pericles's famous Funeral Oration (circa 430 B.C.E.), recorded and probably rewritten by Thucydides, the Athenian leader celebrates the values of freedom and openness, alongside equality, as the distinctive attributes of Athenian democracy in contrast to the militaristic Spartan regime. Aristotle considered freedom to be the telos, or goal, which democracy was designed to foster. Plato caricatured democracy for "bursting with the spirit of freedom," and imagined that in such a system, even the donkeys would bump you aside as you walked down the street.2 In his definitive book on rhetoric in ancient Athens, Josiah Ober demonstrates how public communication and freedom of speech were essential to argument and debate in both assembly and law courts, and how this freedom presupposed the validity of individual freedom of thought.3
The idea that such freedoms are distinctively modern stems from a misreading of Benjamin Constant's distinction between the liberty of the ancients and that of...