‘Economic’, ‘civil’ and ‘political’ liberties

How might one decompose ‘liberal democracy’? To do this, I first separate out the ‘liberal’ from the ‘democratic’. This is both a conceptual and a historical point. Conceptually, the ‘liberal’ is concerned with limiting the power of the state (the limits are usually enshrined in a constitution) and with creating mechanisms to prevent public power from interfering in the citizen's private sphere, while the ‘democratic’ is concerned with the nature and constitution of that public power. While the former is concerned about limiting arbitrariness and the abuse of power, the latter is about setting the rule of rules for popular decision-making. The discourse of ‘liberalism’ has been that of the limited or, in some cases, the constitutional state, whereas the discourse of democracy has been concerned with the Greek word ‘demokratia’, or ‘rule by the people’. Historically, ‘liberal democracy’ as we conceive it today developed from liberalism followed by the democratisation of liberal societies. There can be liberal, non-democratic states, as there are democratic but non-liberal states. The historical contingency of the conjunction of the ‘liberal’ and the ‘democratic’ is evidenced by the fact that it is only in recent times and mostly in the West that the two have gone hand in hand.

On the ‘democratic’ side, I restrict myself to modern representative democracy, that is a system of ‘rule by the people’, whereby the people are represented by ‘representatives’ whom they choose by vote.