A Dahl). Democracy can be very hard to define, as there are many criteria that deem to be essential to some political thinkers, yet hardly relevant to others. Robert. A. Dahl believes that there are five essential criteria for assessing the level of democratizion in a country, those being: effective participation, voting equality, enlightened understanding, control of the agenda, and the inclusion of adults. He believes that without these, no state can fully call themselves democratic'. For Samuel. P. Huntington, democracy has five different elements of criteria, firstly, in terms of elections, Huntington believes elections, open, free and far are the essence of democracy, the inescapable sine qua non (the third wave, p 10), secondly, a democratic country should chose their political leaders through democratic means and that they share their given power with other groups in society. Thirdly, that the democratic state of the country should remain stable and not fluctuate from one axis to another. In addition, there is the question of whether or not to treat democracy and non-democracy as a dichotomous or continuous variable with regard to the degree' of democracy in a country. And finally, you must be able to distinguish between totalitariasm and authoritarianism in order to understand 20th century politics. Again, an essential political thinker: Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 believed that democracy "is an institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote- (capitalism, Socialism and democracy p269). It is clearly evident that by looking at three great political thinkers and their ideologies on democracy, all three are very different, having certain criteria and criticisms about democratic definition. Although there are different definitions about what it is to be democratic, there are still obvious criteria that democracy has, and an authoritarian government does not, which enables us to discuss the transitions from authoritarian government to democratic rule without being over concerned with dense political ideology.
