Democracy, Political Power, and Authority

摘要

Arguably, political systems in which political power is the exception and coercive power the norm are "democracies" in name only. Because democracy has become a general term of commendation, democracy has lost its specificity (Dahl 1989: 2; Hyland 1995: 36) with the result that many of these "democracies" use the term to gain legitimacy without any semantic specificity.