Who Are 'The People'? A Question Democracy Has Always Had to Answer

Democracy means rule of the people. It says so in the etymology: demos (people) + kratos (rule). But who counts as the people has never been self-evident. It has been the central contested question of democratic politics across every era — and the history of how that question has been answered, and repeatedly re-answered, is both clarifying and humbling.

Athens: where democracy was invented, and where it was first bounded

Athens in the fifth century BCE is the canonical origin of democratic governance. And it was remarkable. The Athenian assembly (ekklesia) gave citizens direct participation in legislation and decision-making. Accountability mechanisms — ostracism, the rotation of offices, scrutiny of magistrates — were institutionally sophisticated. Democratic practice was not ceremonial; it was the way ordinary Athenians governed their city.

But Athens governed a society in which roughly a third of the population were enslaved. Resident foreigners (metics) — people who lived, worked, and paid taxes in Athens for generations — were excluded from the demos. Women had no formal political standing. The democratic institutions that produced Pericles, Socrates, and the Parthenon were built on, and sustained by, the labour of people who had no voice in them.

This is not an anachronistic criticism. Athenian thinkers knew the question existed. Aristotle's Politics discusses who should and shouldn't be a citizen at length. The exclusion of slaves was not an oversight — it was a constitutive feature of how Athenians understood political life. Democracy, as they defined it, was governance by those who counted as citizens. The people who didn't count simply didn't count.

The democratic innovation was genuine. So was the exclusion. And the framework — govern well for those who count, exercise unaccountable power over those who don't — turned out to be extraordinarily durable.

The pattern repeats

The same structure appears at every subsequent founding of democratic institutions.

The American republic (1776–1789) produced perhaps the most celebrated democratic founding documents in history. "All men are created equal." "We the people." The political philosophy was serious and the institutional design — separation of powers, federalism, checks and balances — was sophisticated. Several of the men who wrote those documents owned other people. The three-fifths compromise, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for congressional apportionment while giving them no vote, was not a failure of the founding principles — it was a negotiated expression of who the founding principles applied to.

Revolutionary France (1789) declared the rights of man and citizen with universal ambition: liberty, equality, fraternity. Within a few years, Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution were testing that universalism against the reality of French colonial slavery in Saint-Domingue. France abolished slavery in 1794 under revolutionary pressure, reinstated it under Napoleon in 1802, and only permanently abolished it in 1848. The rights of man, as initially practised, were the rights of French men in France.

British parliamentary democracy developed through the 18th and 19th centuries while administering an empire that governed hundreds of millions of people who had no voice in Westminster. The same parliament that passed the Great Reform Act of 1832 — extending the franchise to middle-class men — also administered the transportation of convicts, the suppression of Indian independence, and the systematic extraction of colonial resources. Parliamentary democracy was not considered inconsistent with these arrangements. The demos was the British electorate. Everyone else was governed.

Australia, where DOD is based, did not count Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the national census until 1967 — 66 years after federation. The Australian Constitution, until that year's referendum changed it, explicitly excluded "aboriginal natives" from the count by which parliamentary representation was apportioned. Parliamentary democracy functioned in Australia throughout this period. "The people" whom it governed democratically were defined in a way that excluded the continent's first peoples.

Apartheid South Africa is the starkest 20th-century case. South Africa had parliamentary elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, and genuine democratic competition — among white South Africans. The system governing Black South Africans — pass laws, bantustans, forced removals, systematic exclusion from economic and political life — was not incidental to this democracy but constitutively separate from it. Two systems of governance operated in the same territory: one democratic, one not. The democratic one governed well enough by its own lights, and is remembered with some nostalgia by those it included. The other is remembered rather differently.

What the pattern shows

These are not examples of failed democracies. Athens, the American republic, revolutionary France, British parliamentary democracy, early Australian federation — these are the founding cases of democratic governance. They are cited as origins, inspirations, and models. Students learn about them in civics classes. Their institutions are studied and emulated.

The point is not that they were bad. The point is that each of them drew a boundary around "the people" that fell short of everyone subject to their governance, and that each of them was internally consistent within that boundary. The democratic processes worked. Accountability mechanisms functioned. Citizens genuinely participated. And people outside the boundary were governed without accountability.

In every case, the expansion of "the people" to include the excluded came through struggle — abolitionism, suffrage movements, anti-colonial independence, civil rights, indigenous rights campaigns. Those struggles were, in every case, resisted by people who argued that the existing democratic system was working well. It was, for those it included.

Why this matters now

The historical pattern is clarifying precisely because it removes the comfort of distance. "Who counts as the people" is not a question that only bad systems get wrong. It is a question that the celebrated founding democracies got wrong, in ways they institutionalised and defended, and then got less wrong over time through sustained political pressure.

This suggests two things for evaluating democratic systems today.

First, the gap between a system's democratic claim and the actual scope of its accountability is not proof of bad faith by itself — it is the normal starting condition. Every democracy has it. The question is whether the gap is acknowledged, whether it is being contested, and whether the system has the structural capacity to close it. A system that acknowledges its accountability gaps and has functioning mechanisms for challenging them is in a different category from one that suppresses the organisations trying to name those gaps.

Second, the line between "the people we govern democratically" and "the people we govern without accountability" does not have to follow citizenship law. It follows governance power. Wherever a democratic system exercises authority over people — through military occupation, colonial administration, economic control, or legal jurisdiction — those people are within the scope of the accountability question, regardless of their formal status. Athens did not need to call slaves citizens to owe them something. The question was whether it could hold itself accountable for how it treated them, and whether there were mechanisms by which they could contest that treatment.

Those are the same questions today. The historical distance makes the pattern easier to see. Nobody defends the exclusion of slaves from the Athenian demos. Nobody defends apartheid. The argument is settled in those cases. It is not settled everywhere.

The contemporary case

The most contested contemporary application of this question is Israel and Palestine.

Israel has functioning democratic institutions — elections, a free press, genuine political competition, an active civil society. Israeli organisations including the Israel Democracy Institute, Movement for Quality Government, and Darkenu work on democratic accountability, anti-corruption, and rule of law from inside Israeli democratic discourse. The 2023–2024 judicial reform crisis, which drew mass civic mobilisation, was a live argument within Israeli democracy about where the limits of executive power should sit. That argument is real, and DOD's landscape includes the organisations making it.

The governance exercised over Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza operates under different rules. Palestinians there have no vote in Israeli elections, no recourse to Israeli courts on equal terms, and no mechanism to contest the military administration governing significant aspects of their lives. The occupation has now lasted more than five decades. The governance boundary between Israeli citizens and Palestinians under occupation is not citizenship in the conventional sense — it is a line determining who has democratic recourse and who does not, drawn across people subject to the same governing power.

This is not a novel framing. It is the framework applied by Israeli human rights organisations — B'Tselem used it explicitly in their 2021 report — and reflected in the 2024 International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the legal status of the occupation. The argument about where Israeli democratic accountability extends is being made, actively and at cost, by organisations on both sides of the line. AMAN Palestine — the Palestinian anti-corruption and governance integrity coalition — is in the DOD landscape for the same reason the Israeli organisations are: it is doing the work of holding governance accountable to its own stated standards, under conditions where that work is difficult.

The question DOD's framework asks is the same it asks everywhere: where are the mechanisms by which the people — all the people subject to this governance — can contest decisions made about them, and does power actually respond?

A note on the direction of history

The record here is mixed but not discouraging. The scope of "the people" in functioning democracies has expanded significantly over two and a half millennia — from Athenian male citizens to something closer to universal adult franchise in many countries, with hard-won extensions at every step.

That expansion has not happened automatically. It has happened because people who were excluded from the demos nonetheless acted as political agents — organising, arguing, demanding, sometimes fighting — and because enough people inside the demos came to recognise that the gap between the democratic claim and democratic reality was a contradiction worth resolving.

That is, in some ways, what DOD's landscape is about: the ongoing argument, across every democratic tradition, about how governance can be made more genuinely for and with the people — wherever that argument is happening, and however the people are defined.