Democracy starts with the citizen, and the subject of the first pillar of the framework is the rights of the citizen and the ability of the state to guarantee equal rights of citizenship to all through its constitutional and legal processes. This starting point is made more complex in a globalized world by the presence in many countries of non-citizens – migrant workers, refugees, asylum seekers and so on – whose rights are often severely restricted or denied. The guarantee of civil and political rights needs no special justification in a democracy assessment, since these rights are manifestly necessary for participation in the political process in association with others.
To include economic and social rights, however, is more contestable (and especially so in the case of non-citizens). Many political scientists take the view that democracy is about the processes of public decision making, rather than its outcomes, and that the delivery of economic and social rights is only one possible outcome of government, which is contested between different political parties in their policy programmes. Our view, in contrast, is that the inclusion of an economic and social rights audit is justifiable in terms of both process and outcome. As regards process, it is a necessary condition for the exercise of civil and political rights that people should be alive to exercise them and should have the capacities and resources to do so effectively.
At the same time, people do – rightly – judge the quality of a democracy in terms of its ability to secure them the basic economic and social rights on which a minimally decent human life depends. If democracy cannot deliver better outcomes in this respect than authoritarianism, why should they support it? Such considerations have been especially strongly urged by our partners in the South in discussions about the content of the assessment framework.
See also
Representable and accountable government Civil society and popular participation Democracy beyond the state
