القياس القانوني للديمقراطية

Abstract

In modem world, the importance of democracy has increased significantly for several reasons, such as human rights prosperity and the crisis of legitimacy from which many countries are suffering from, especially developing countries. This has allowed an opportunity for some States to use the question of democratization as a means to put pressure on systems that do not intersect with their interests, particularly those systems that do not accept the turnover in their orbit. On the other hand, some non-democratic regimes try to prolong their lives by using the question of national sovereignty as a pretext to avoid any talk about democratic transition In a world of compatible or contradictory interests, different political agendas emerge and many parts could play on many levels to protect their interests in the present as well as in the future. This situation, being very delicate, some non-non-governmental organizations devised the idea of measuring democracy in order to give a scientific assessment as concerns the extent of democracy of political regimes; thus democracy does not become a mere gift from major countries to those systems that satisfy them; whereas, others can be labeled rogue. On the other hand, these organizations and research centres aim at blocking the way before systems that hide behind some fake features of democracy while they have nothing to do with democratic rule. Despite the fact that some attempts to measure democracy are objective, when isolated from pressure groups, in some cases it makes us wonder about the credibility of these studies. "Freedom House", for example, has always classified Israel as a free country, while some Arab countries, like Algeria, for example, which is experiencing a lot of changes and political movement, has always been classified as not free and has never been, at least, classified partially free in the annual reports of the organization. Such a situation, has led this research to seek providing legal standards of democracy by choosing forty ( 40 ) indicators classified into two groups, organizing power and organizing access to power. This research has tried not to stop at the forms of democratic systems, but plunge in the core of these systems to reach the values upon which those systems have been built ; it also tried to touch the purposes of these regimes as well as the constraints and mechanisms according to which they work. In the end, this research provides a scale by which democracy can be measured objectively without favoring a particular model of democracy over the others as the genius of each people may yield a model that matches with the identity of the society and its aspirations as long as the rule, at last, is the rule of the people by the people and for the people