Democracy: concept, conceptions and normative justification

This essay belongs to the normative theory of democracy, namely, the search for the moral grounds of democracy and the democratic institutions. Unlike the descriptive or explicative approaches, the normative theory of democracy does not point to the empirical knowing of the actual democracies, but to give an account of the moral value of democracy as an ideal and the justification of principles for designing or reforming political institutions. The aims of this article are: a) To introduce some normative questions that the concept of democracy leaves open; b) To present, in their basic thesis, the main contemporary conceptions; c) To suggest the requirements that the proposal of an regulative ideal should meet to constitute a normative successful justification of democracy.