In political theory, a protective democracy is one that is tasked primarily with maintaining and protecting the rights of its citizens. This ideal is fundamental to late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century liberalism, where it is associated with the writings of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, among others. Under this model, the government would only intervene in the lives of its citizens, and especially in the operations of the free market, in a very limited...
In political theory, a protective democracy is one that is tasked primarily with maintaining and protecting the rights of its citizens. This ideal is fundamental to late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century liberalism, where it is associated with the writings of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, among others. Under this model, the government would only intervene in the lives of its citizens, and especially in the operations of the free market, in a very limited way. The United States, whose people and leaders are very reluctant to embrace social welfare programs and government control of key industries, has historically been a pretty good example of a protective democracy. Basically, protective democracy assumes that the only reason government should exist is to protect its citizens from each other. People would only, then, get involved in civic life in order to protect their own interests.
A developmental democracy has a somewhat more benign view of human nature, and how it is reflected in people's participation in government. According to this theory, people participate in government out of a sense of civic-mindedness, what some political philosophers used to call virtue. According to this idea, our representatives must be truly representative, in that their actions in government should be consistent with the public will and the public good. This is, perhaps, how Americans understand their government, and it might be best used to describe local government, where individuals are elected to represent wards, precincts, or districts according to what their constituents want.
The first two categories were used by the political scientist William E. Hudson in his book Democracy in Peril, published in 2006. Classical democracy was not one of his categories, but it is usually used to describe the democratic system created in ancient Athens. In this system, citizens directly participated in government. Government officials were chosen by drawing lots, and all citizens were expected to contribute their voice directly to city politics. Of course, only a very small percentage of the Athenian people were actually citizens, so this ideal falls short of even our modern conception of democracy. But we can see echoes of this model in towns that are still run by town meetings (there aren't very many of them left) or even in local grassroots organizations that make decisions for neighborhoods.
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