What Makes A Democracy A Democracy?

This post is part of a series of contributor perspectives and analyses called "The Coming Age of Tech Trillionaires and the Challenge to Democracy." Learn more about the call for contributions here, and read other pieces in the series as they are published here.

It is tempting to answer that democracies are simply governments where people participate in free and fair elections to make political decisions. Indeed, much of contemporary discourse surrounding democracy—and its purported decline in modern America—hinges on the idea that the aforementioned form of government is all but synonymous with the presence of competitive elections.

But the fact that a handful of technology moguls now possess outsized wealth and political influence should give us pause. While we certainly still hold competitive national elections every two years, this hasn’t stopped SpaceX founder Elon Musk from dismantling countless government agencies in his role at the Department of Governmental Efficiency, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg from transforming the nature of political debate by discontinuing fact-checking on Meta platforms, or PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel from catapulting JD Vance to the vice presidency. A state of affairs in which a few ultra-wealthy titans of industry hold massive sway over policy, political culture, and personnel is probably a far cry from anyone’s idea of how a “democratic” system of government ought to operate.

The immense political influence possessed by the tech elite perfectly demonstrates how free and fair elections may coexist with and even foster a political system that privileges the policy preferences of a select few. Put differently, it reveals that elections are not enough to produce meaningfully democratic outcomes. Any political project seeking to challenge plutocracy must take this insight as its starting point.

Our Plutocratic Moment

Present-day efforts to strengthen democracy often focus on boosting voter turnout, ending voter suppression and gerrymandering, and ensuring that winners and losers accept election results. These are all worthwhile goals, to be sure. But in looking for answers to our current woes solely within the bounds of electoral politics, these strategies overestimate the extent to which free and fair elections can possibly provide a counterbalance to the political machinations of plutocrats, who possess inexhaustible wealth and resources.

The second Trump administration has seen Musk’s SpaceX and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin win billions in Space Force rocket launch contracts to send extremely sensitive and complex Pentagon satellites into Earth orbit. Bezos, also the owner of The Washington Post, recently declared that the opinion pages of the flagship newspaper shall narrow their focus to the defense of “two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” And Meta, Google, OpenAI, and other companies have lobbied for the presidential administration to block state AI laws, allow them to use copyrighted material to train their AI models, and even use federal data to develop their technologies.

It’s highly unlikely that holding more elections and encouraging greater public participation within them could undo the confluence of technological and state power that the previously stated developments represent. Elections or no elections, influential tech figures will hold great sway over the national security apparatus, the press, regulatory agencies, and beyond for the foreseeable future.

If we fail to call out how tech billionaires manipulate politics—undemocratic in its own right, even amid competitive elections—citizens may grow disillusioned with democracy itself. Democracy, in the citizens’ view, has effectively come to mean a system in which voters are asked to choose between competing sets of plutocrats, so why must we bother championing it at all?

An increasingly cynical populace will throw their support behind populist politicians who claim to represent the people’s will and promise to usher in a break from the “establishment.” Pointing out how elections have not been able to ensure that public officials act in the interests of the public rather than those of corrupt elites, these leaders can convincingly cast doubt upon the legitimacy of liberal democracy on the whole. Populist demagogues will finally use their electoral victories as mandates to do away with liberal-democratic norms and practices such as the rule of law, the freedom of the press, and the separation of powers. That is, they will administer the coup de grâce to popular government as we know it.

Democracy for Realists

Recent democratic backsliding in the United States shows that our tendency to define democracy as merely the presence of free and fair elections can lead to democratic decline. This pattern has already occurred in many other countries, as well. If we want a more realistic picture of what democracy entails—and a better shot of preserving it long-term—we’d do well to look beyond the ballot box for inspiration.

Remaining sober about the likelihood that plutocracy may persist even as we hold competitive elections forces us to consider extra-electoral mechanisms by which we may allow for more genuinely democratic sociopolitical outcomes. We should, by all means, continue holding elections. However, we must arm public institutions to prevent their capture by private interest groups. Making changes to the regulatory process by introducing more checks and balances on the power of rule makers and enforcers, such as regulatory reviews and oversight of agencies’ budgets and finances, bringing in greater interdisciplinary perspectives, and promoting public transparency is a good start.

Enacting campaign finance reform and imposing restrictions on lobbying is imperative if we wish to limit the political influence of a handful of wealthy individuals and massive corporations. We must also target the unethical actions of former public officials facilitated by the “revolving door” that allows them to use their public offices for private gain. And, finally, we should place greater emphasis on local self-government, which offers citizens the opportunity to discuss and make laws for themselves. These actions alone may not promptly put a stop to the tech titans’ undue political influence. However, they will better ensure that our democracy is more reflective of diverse sets of the populace, better able to combat the threat of plutocracy, and popularly supported—or, put simply, more democratic.

Acknowledging that democracy entails more than just elections will also help preclude mass disillusionment with and even rejection of liberal-democratic norms. Once we hold democracy to higher standards, so to speak, we’ll have solid grounds on which to criticize plutocratic domination by the tech elite as an aberration rather than accept it as a natural consequence of liberal democracy. In other words, we’ll come to recognize that being realistic about the prospects of democracy does not mean resigning ourselves to a cynicism that says the ultra-rich will always call the shots no matter what, but instead means going out of our way to make sure that democracy lives up to its ideals.