Merits of Democracy

• Promotes equality among citizens;

• Enhances the dignity of the individual;
• Improves the quality of decision making;
• Provides a method to resolve conflicts
• Allows room to correct mistakes.
 Regular, free and fair elections
 Open Public debate on major policies and legislations
 RTI about govt. and its functioning.

Accountable, responsive and legitimate government

There are some things that democracy must provide. Q – How democracies provide
an accountable, responsive and legitimate govt.?

Democracy is based on the idea of deliberation and negotiation

Democracy is indeed based on the idea of deliberation and negotiation. This is
because the democracy talks about the peaceful solution problems or drawing
important decisions. So in order to take the good decision sometimes the delay
can occur before reaching a conclusive decision. This is mainly because of the
procedures that have to be followed in the democracy. If the negotiation and
deliberation are lacking, it may result in the conflicts resulting in the destabilize
conditions. But the proper procedure is need to be followed for a better
conclusion.

Accountable Govt. : Democracy is a accountable govt because it is the

govt. of the people and made by people and for the people. The
representatives elected by the people are responsible to them. If the people
are not happy with the govt they can change the leaders in coming
elections.

Responsive Govt. : A citizen who wants to know if a decision was taken

through the correct procedures can find it out. He/she has the right and the
means to examine the process of decision making. This type of transparency
is not available in non democratic govts.

Legitimate Govt. : Democratic govt is legitimate govt. It may be slow, less

efficient, not always very responsive or clean. But a democratic govt is
people's own govt. and cannot ignore the needs of people .So people wish
to be ruled by representatives elected by them.
 ECONOMIC GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT

If we consider all democracies and all dictatorships for the fifty years
between 1950 and 2000, dictatorships have slightly higher rate of economic
growth. The inability of democracy to achieve higher economic
development worries us. But this alone cannot be reason to reject
democracy. Economic development depends on several factors: country’s
population size, global situation, etc. We cannot say that democracy is a
guarantee of economic development. But we can expect democracy not to
lag behind dictatorships in this respect. When we find such significant
difference in the rates of economic growth between countries under
dictatorship and democracy, it is better to prefer democracy