democracy

Democracy is considered as a fair and convenient form of government to live in harmony. In an ideal democracy, citizen participation is the factor that materializes changes, so it is necessary that governments and citizens establish a dialogue to achieve common goals.

On paper, democracy and freedom go hand in hand and one cannot exist without the other. But, then, reality shows that there are different degrees of democracy. There are democracies with better quality, in which limits are placed on power. And there are democracies in which those limits are more nominal than real. What is the quality of Spanish democracy?

The last decades have witnessed a continuous increase in all continents in the number of States that are governed by democratic procedures, in such a way that today “electoral democracy” is already the most frequent form of government in the world. However, along with this process of extension of democracy, there has been another process of deterioration of old democracies or the appearance of "illiberal" or defective democracies in some sense, in such a way that the classifications that divided countries into democracies or dictatorships have been replaced by others that measure to what extent a state meets the conditions that allow it to be defined as a democracy. There is no unanimity regarding what those conditions are, and that is why the different rankings give somewhat different results.

All this extension of democracies cannot lead us to think that democracy has won the battle against anti-democracy, since these continue to exist, and on many occasions they are linked to religious and nationalist fundamentalism