The United States Democracy Audit:

A Prospective Evaluation of American Democracy

What is Democracy?

When Vaclav Havel addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress in 1990, he offered the following definition of democracy: "democracy in the full sense of the word will always be no more than an ideal; one may approach it as one would a horizon, in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained."

Social science scholarship about the democracy in America has not demonstrated this vision. Too often political theorists and political analysts simply equate democracy with the holding of free and fair elections, and measure the health of the democratic process solely through limited measures of electoral democracy.

The Concept of a Democracy Audit

The Center for the Study of Democracy at UC Irvine and the Institute for Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley are developing a Democracy Audit that can set the standards by which contemporary democracies should be judged. We ask: "What are the democracy's goals on the horizon?" and "How does the United States measure up in terms of these goals?" We are not attempting to develop a single democracy score, but to systematically determine the multiple elements of democracy and how they might be evaluated in terms of the American political system.

Assessing the Audit Criteria

The audit criteria will be an important product from this project. Even more important, this process will generate an exciting new program to systematically evaluate American democracy with specific criteria that can be assembled into a coherent portrait of our nation and its political system. This will stimulate new understanding of how we:

• Assess citizen expectations and evaluations the democratic process,
• Expand definitions of participation to include the full range of citizen involvement; ensuring that participation is effective and equal,
• Incorporate more explicit measures of representation and minority/majority relations into our study of politics,
• Examine the role of parties and interest groups in a new style of complex democratic governance,
• Evaluate the transparency and accountability of governmental institutions,
• Assess political responsibility in a new system of complex governance.

A systematic audit can reshape the political debate about democracy in America. It can draw new attention to the progress and limitations of our current system--and steps that can be made to move the democratic process forward.