DEMOCRACY VS MONARCHY

DEMOCRACY VS MONARCHY

Who gives the government this power to make decisions and enforce laws?

The answer to this question depends on the type of government there is in a country. In a democracy, it is the people who give the government this power. They do this through elections in which they vote for particular persons and elect them. Once elected, these persons form the government. In a democracy, the government has to explain its actions and defend its decisions to the people.

Another form of government is monarchy. The monarch (king or queen) has the power to make decisions and run the government. The monarch may have a small group of people to discuss matters with, but the final decision-making power remains with the monarch. Unlike in a democracy, kings and queens do not have to explain their actions or defend the decisions they take.

Discuss

1. Do you think it is important for people to be involved in decisions that affect them? Give two reasons for your answer.

2. Which type of government would you prefer to have in the place you live in? Why?

3. Which of the statements below is correct? correct those sentences that you think need correction.

         a. In a monarchy the country's citizens are allowed to elect whomever they want.

         b. In a democracy a king has absolute powers to rule the country.

         c. In a monarchy people can raise questions about the decisions the monarch takes.

Source: This topic is taken from NCERT TEXTBOOK

DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENTS

DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENTS

India is a democracy. This achievement is the result of a long and eventful struggle of the Indian people. There are other places in the world where people have also struggled to have democracies. You now know that the main feature of a democracy is that the people have the power to elect their leaders. So in a sense democracy is ruled by the people. The basic idea is that people rule themselves by participating in the making of these rules.

Democratic governments in our times are usually referred to as representative democracies. In representative democracies people do not participate directly but, instead, choose their representatives through an election process. These representatives meet and make decisions for the entire population. These days a government cannot call itself democratic unless it allows what is known as a universal adult franchise. This means that all adults in the country are allowed to vote.

But it was not always like this. Can you believe that there was a time when governments did not allow women and the poor to participate in elections? In their earliest forms governments allowed only men who owned property and were educated, to vote. This meant that women, the poor, the property-less, and the uneducated were not allowed to vote. The country was governed by the rules and regulations that these few men made!

In India, before Independence, only a small minority was allowed to vote and they, therefore, came together to determine the fate of the majority. Several people including Gandhiji were shocked at the unfairness of this practice and demanded that all adults have the right to vote. This is known as a universal adult franchise.

Writing in the journal Young India in 1931, Gandhiji said, "I cannot possibly bear the idea that a man who has got wealth should have the vote, but that a man who has got character but no wealth or literacy should have no vote, or that a man who works honestly by the sweat of his brow day in and day out should not have the vote for the crime of being a poor man…".

More to know

Nowhere in the world have governments willingly shared power. All over Europe and the USA, women and the poor have had to fight for participation in government. Women's struggle to vote got strengthened during the First World War. This movement is called the women's suffrage movement as the term suffrage usually means the right to vote.

During the War, many men were away fighting, and because of this women were called upon to do work that was earlier considered men's work. Many women began organizing and managing different kinds of work. When people saw this they began to wonder why they had created so many unfair stereotypes about women and what they were capable of doing. So women began to be seen as being equally capable of making decisions.

The suffragettes demanded the right to vote for all women and to get their demands heard they chained themselves to railings in public places. Many suffragettes were imprisoned and went on hunger strikes, and they had to be fed by force. American women got the right to vote in 1920 while women in the UK got to vote on the same terms as men some years later, in 1928.

Source: This topic is taken from NCERT TEXTBOOK