According to Wikipedia, democracy is a political form of government in which governing power is derived from the people, either by direct referendum (direct democracy) or by means of elected representatives of the people (representative democracy).

Principles common to all democracies are:

• Rule of law: individuals, private corporations, elected representatives (member of parlament, government officials), and public institutions are subject to it.
• People’s sovereignty, equal voting rights, majority rule.
• Separation of power to enable checks and balances between the governing bodies: legislative, executive, and judiciary power.

Beyond these basic principles, democracy can take many forms, about as many as there are countries that are defining their form of government as being a democracy.
A broad categorization is:

• Representative democracy: power is delegated to elected officials for a limited period of time. No other participation is asked to the citizens than to cast their vote on election day.
• Direct democracy: while current affairs are managed by elected officials, all constitutional and major legislative changes are under the citizens’ control by way of referendum. The referendum may have a compulsory character (i.e. in case of constitutional change) or may be facultative, if a given number of citizen request it. Also a legislative initiative may be proposed by a number of citizens on which all electors will have to vote.
• Deviant democracy: all forms of democracy that is reduced to rare elections and where the law allows for a small group of people or one party to hold all power and who are capable to manage the poll results in their favour. This is called oligarchy (power held by a very small number of people), plutocracy (power held by the rich) or bolshevism (power held by a single party).

World deployment

The actual form of democratic government of sovereign states is a mix of these three categories. Unsurprisingly, no deviant democracy describes itself as such.

The most achieved direct democracy is found in Switzerland. However, many politicians around the World don’t perceive it as being a goal to be sought after. Their preference goes rather to a representative democracy where the winner takes most or all the power for the duration of the electoral mandate.

Still a handful of states have no claim for democracy, they are absolute monarchies, dictatorships, or theocracies.