Competition - A Normative Principle of Democracy

Competition is a normative democratic principle. Starting from Diamond and Morlino's (2004, p. 24) requirement that democracy demands "a political system [with] regular, free, and fair electoral competition between different political parties", we can identify a necessary requirement for examining the quality of any regime. However, this leads to the question “why is competition a necessary principle rather than a mere procedural formality?” The answer follows from the foundational democratic promise: that citizens have the power to choose and remove those who govern them. This also points to the normative requirement that vertical accountability forms part of the wider normative criteria used to define ‘democracy’. Acknowledging that Diamond and Morlino (2004) indicate the linking between dimensions of democracy, the focus here is to isolate competition. Without genuine electoral contestability, this promise cannot be met. As Dahl (1971, p. 8) argues, public contestation is not simply a feature that democracy happens to possess; it is one of the two core attributes without which a government cannot qualify as democratic at all. By ensuring that power is never static, competition transforms the will of the people from a theoretical concept into an enforceable reality.

The legitimacy of any democracy rests on the idea that political power must be genuinely contestable. However, not all electoral activity constitutes genuine competition. A government may hold elections and allow opposition parties, a core element of a democratic system. This does not preclude them simultaneously controlling media access, manipulating campaign finance and using government institutions to render electoral challenge futile. Electoral procedure has occurred; competition has not. This distinction between genuine contestability, to use the language of Dahl, and procedural simulation points directly to the core issue within a quality of democracy framework.

Schmitter and Karl (1991, p. 76) draw a useful distinction between the minimalist threshold, the minimal normative requirement that elections provide a genuine mechanism through which governments are held accountable through the competition of their elected representatives, and the procedural simulation of competition, where elections occur but genuine contestability does not. Importantly, they insist that elections alone do not constitute genuine competition if they are not conducted freely and fairly (Schmitter and Karl, 1991, pp. 77-78). It is the former, threshold sense that is asserted here as a necessary democratic principle. To be democratic, there must be genuine contestability, the realistic possibility that electoral challenge can succeed. At root, an indication that competition exits is seen via the ballot box, with changes of party occurring.

That this requirement recurs across frameworks developed independently, from different methodological starting points, using different variables, is not coincidental. It is evidential. Diamond and Morlino (2004, p. 24) name it explicitly as a dimension. V-Dem (Nord et al., 2025, p. 9) treats electoral democracy, built on competitive elections, as the 'necessary core for any type of democracy,' dissolving it into measurable indices such as the Clean Elections Index, capturing the 'absence of registration fraud, systematic irregularities, government intimidation of the opposition, vote buying, and electoral violence' (Nord et al., 2025, p. 17). Freedom House (2025), the Economist Intelligence Unit (2025, p30) and International IDEA (2025, p. 24) arrive independently at the same requirement through their own frameworks. This range, with its universality, strengthens the normative requirement.

This consensus, however, contains a fundamental problem. While these global frameworks agree on the normative requirement for competition, they diverge significantly in how they attempt to measure it. As Vaccaro (2021, p. 680) demonstrates, even when different measures of democracy appear highly convergent at a surface level, their actual interchangeability is weak. This lack of consistency means that a researcher’s choice of measure can dictate the final conclusions of a study, with these divergences only increasing in recent decades. Ultimately, different empirical approaches embed different normative assumptions about what competition truly requires. This creates a "noisy" environment where the variance in data is not random; rather, it is produced by the hidden normative choices embedded within the measurement variables themselves.

The implications of this normative noise extend beyond academic debate. It directly impacts how we assess democratic backsliding. When indices prioritise different variables, such as focusing on "clean elections" versus "media access", they may produce conflicting reports on the same nation’s democratic status. If one framework views a regime as a "procedural simulation" while another sees it as a "minimalist threshold" success, the response becomes fragmented. The task is not merely to collect more data, but to work towards a higher degree of transparency regarding which normative assumptions are being prioritised when we measure the quality of a democracy and focus on, in this instance, measurement of competition.

The differences between empirical measures do not suggest that the principle of competition is unstable. Rather, they highlight that the normative requirement is more foundational than the tools used to capture it. While indices such as V-Dem or the Clean Elections Index must select specific variables, these remain approximations of the deeper requirement of contestability. The “noise” identified by Vaccaro (2021) arises because no single empirical framework can fully encompass the ethical necessities of democracy. The requirement in this analysis is straightforward: competition must exist if a government is to be labelled democratic. If we are to judge democratic quality, these indices should be treated as imperfect translations of a principle that exists independently of them. The normative demand for competition provides the standard by which indices are assessed, not the other way around.

Ultimately, the normative requirement for competition stands independent of our methodological capacity to quantify it with precision. Whether a government represents a “minimalist threshold” success or a “procedural simulation” (Schmitter and Karl, 1991) requires us to move beyond surface-level electoral activity and examine the underlying distribution of political power. The question is not whether elections occur, but whether the competition they claim to embody is secure and meaningful. If democracy is defined by the population’s right to remove those who govern them, competition remains a core principle. Without contestability, there is no democracy.

Competition is therefore best understood not merely as an empirical variable, important though that is for evaluating democratic quality, but as a constitutive democratic requirement that structures the meaning of the concept itself. The variety of measurement tools, whether developed by V-Dem, Freedom House or the Economist Intelligence Unit, reflects the difficulty of operationalising contestability rather than any instability in the principle. As Dahl makes clear, public contestation is one of the defining dimensions without which a regime cannot be classified as democratic. Schmitter and Karl’s distinction between genuine electoral accountability and procedural simulation reinforces that elections alone are insufficient if they do not permit a realistic possibility of change in power. Empirical indices may approximate this condition with varying precision, but they do not generate it. The normative demand precedes its measurement and provides the benchmark against which those measurements must be judged. Where genuine contestability is absent, electoral form may remain, but the democratic claim cannot be sustained.