Abstract:

The purpose of this article is to investigate the limitations of democracy as a political regime. Democracy deserves much reverence with its delegation of the sovereignty to the people, its facilitation of change by peaceful means, its ability to keep the political authority accountable to the people by various means, and its contribution to the political awareness and activeness of the people by letting them take roles in political processes. Despite all such desired virtues, democracy has various limitations too, however, which are discussed in this article with reference to massive human rights violations of various leading democracies, the preservation of various monarchical and aristocratic institutions in many leading democracies, the democratic insufficiency to protect ethnic, religious and such minorities from the occasional hegemony of the majority, the occasional misuse of the authority by the elected political leaders (or corruption simply), the delegation of the management of various policy areas of knowledge and expertise under popular control, the possible change of state policies with the change of the government, the difficulties of forming coalition governments and their practical ineffectiveness and, finally, the democratic aggrandizement of the individual at the expense of moral and social values significant for the order and stability of the political life.

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