leadership crises and decline of opposition parties in

CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.1. Literature Review.Emphasis here is on the various democratic attributes and
ingredients especially on multi party systems as being practised in matured and
developing democracies.
2.1.1. Conceptualising Democracy in Modern Context
As a rule, empirical definitions of democracy have been concerned with
explication of certain behavioural or institutional variables operational in the actual
working of democratic political systems.A representation of these conceptions may be
found in the works of Joseph Schumpeter, Carl Friedrich, Robert Dahl, Schattschneider
and Seymour Martin Lipset.
Having explicitly rejected the “classical doctrine of democracy”, Schumpeter
gives an alternative definition of democracy in terms of leadership and competition in a
pluralistic political environment.The primary function of the people, he states, is not to
decide issues but”to produce a government” The democratic method is that”institutional
arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which the individuals acquire the power
to decide by means of competitive struggles for the people’s votes”(Schumpeter.1962).
Friedrich (1960), equates democracy with constitutional democracy.Constitutional
democracy he adds, is “to be understood as a system of effective restrainst upon
governmental power, thereby ensuring political responsibility.”
For Dahl and for, as for many other theorists, democracy requires, as a minimun,
the existence of “a process by which ordinary citizens exerts a relative high degree of
xxviii