The study of democracy cannot be separated from the
phenomenon of non-democratic governments in many countries. This would be
examined in this paper through some components of non-democratic governments concerning
about types of regimes, course of election, separation of power, equality
before the law, and the human rights protection compared to democratic
governments. Besides, we will examine Indonesia’s democratic scale. Either
Indonesia is a democratic or non-democratic one or something in between.
Nowadays,
world is dominated by mostly democratic governments and hybrid regimes.
However, there are still many countries that conquered by non-democratic
governments. There several types of non-democratic regimes, at least there are
five of them that will be elaborated.
First is monarchy that is led by queens or kings or sultans.
Monarchy is a form of government that actually embodied in single individual
ruler and passed through blood relations. Forms of Monarchy are different from
one to another depending on the autonomy that holds by the monarch. When the monarch has ‘unlimited’ power then
it is to be said as an absolute monarchy. Only few countries that hold absolute
monarchy like Saudi Arabia. Other monarchy is changing into constitutional
monarchy which limits the power of monarch like the British monarchy.
Second is Aristocracy, it means of form
of government that is led by a group of noblemen whose title are granted by
monarch or other related parties to have some authority. Aristocracy and
monarchy have similarity in passing power and authority through blood
relations.
Third is totalitarian form that means government
by a little group of leaders on the basis of an ideology that claims general validity for all aspects of life and
usually attempts to replace religion. The regime does not tolerate any
deviation from its state ideology. Regime opponents are persecuted, tortured,
detained in concentration camps and members of ethnic minorities are killed in
mass executions (genocide).[1]
The forth is authoritarian which government
by a little group of leaders. In contrast to totalitarian regimes,
authoritarian regimes have no distinct state ideology and grant some amount of
freedom (e.g. economic and cultural) as long as their rule is not jeopardized.
The most important goal of authoritarian regimes is the maintenance of power
and the personal enrichment on cost of the country and its population.[2]
And the last form of regime is theocracy
that means “government by God”: in reality this means government by religious
leaders. Usually a certain interpretation of ancient religious laws replaces
modern form of laws and is enforced with utmost severity. For example: Islamic
Republic of Iran.[3]
Those
explanations on the non-democratic regimes may give us an illustration for
other components. In the course of election, democratic and the non-democratic
governments have major difference. Democratic governments are elected fairly by
voting in which all citizens have the right to vote and to be voted in the
election. While in the non-democratic government forms, election process is
really depend on the ruler, they can be varied from one to another. Not all
citizens have the right to vote or to be chosen in the election or the country
only has one single party so there are no other choices. In extreme form, there
is no even a political party that can actually become a media for political
communications.[4]
Non-democratic
governments are also different in term of power separation. In reality, they
constituted power separation through the Trias
Politica superstructure style. However, the powers are too limited and
rigid. For example, King of Saudi Arabia has set up the gender composition of
Syuro Council’s members without taking so much concern on the public protests.
It shows how power is unlimited for him.
In more
telling passage, power is actually has a strong relation to law. In respect to
equality before the law, non-democratic governments are tending to violent the
law by their power. This automatically related to vulnerability of injustice.
While in democratic government, there is no inequality before the law. All
citizens are the same in term of laws. This leads to philosophical values of
justice and equality that is respected to human rights.
Democratic
governments really concern on the human rights issues. While in the
non-democratic governments, human right is a crucial issue that is far from
their ideologies. In many cases, all citizens live aspects are being ruled by
governments. They don’t have choices about their lives and future if not
obeying the leaders. We could take Hitler’s regime as the example of violating
human rights about how Hitler killed millions of Jews without any humanity
feelings just because he was being racist and he ignored the values of human
rights.
We have
known how different the democratic from the non-democratic governments are.
However, this conceptual of democracy and non-democracy have variations in
between. The political scientists classified them as hybrid regimes, it simply
means neither democratic nor non-democratic but still hard to be more
democratic, and flawed democratic, these countries also
have free and fair elections and even if there are problems (such as
infringements on media freedom), basic civil liberties will be respected.
However, there are significant weaknesses in other aspects of democracy,
including problems in governance, an underdeveloped political culture and low
levels of political participation.[5]
There
are some methods to measure how democratic a country is through several
components which are: (1) democratic participatory, (2) pluralist democracy,
(3) democratic protectiveness, (4) democratic performance, and (5) democratic development.
From that we can determine whether it is a high, medium, or low democratic
country. Through this paper we will examine Indonesia that is consider as the
most democratic country in ASEAN. We will prove how it came to be.
First,
participatory democracy means:
a process of collective decision making
that combines elements from both direct and representative
democracy: Citizens have the power to decide on policy proposals and
politicians assume the role of policy implementation.
The electorate can monitor politicians’ performance simply by comparing
citizens’ proposals with the policies
actually implemented. As a result, the discretion of politicians is severely
constrained. In this system, the extent to which citizens can affect policy and
determine social priorities is directly aligned with the degree to which they
choose to involve
themselves in the process.[6]
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