Reading #1 Summary
What the reading is trying to communicate and the main points made by the reading
Pages 1-7
• In this section, the author tries to demystify democracy so that he can free the reader’s understanding of real democracies from the original perspective (Przeworski 1).
• A major point the reading makes in this regard is that democracy has always confronted four elusive challenges.
• The challenges are the capacity to promote equality in the socioeconomic realm, the inability to make individuals perceive the effectiveness of their political participation, incapacity to assure that leaders perform their mandates and not otherwise, and the insufficiency in balancing noninterference and order (Przeworski 2).
• Nevertheless, the contingency of each of these incapacities is difficult to understand.
• Therefore, the reading claims that a need for analytical models to derive the limits of democracy is paramount.
• The key to this, according to the reading, is to focus on the case of individual democracies.
Pages 17-31
• This part of the reading attempts to discuss, based on historical context, the conditions under which self-government occurs in large societies that have heterogeneous preferences.
• The reading clarifies that the idea about democracy that emerged from the social contract tradition does not necessarily deem the role of minority as that of the opposition (Przeworski 24).
• Besides, the democracy that emerged from the identity of the rulers and ruled does not acknowledge the right of the opposition.
• The idea about democracy that people are free to oppose the government that the majority has elected emerged only gradually and painfully across the world (Przeworski 24).
• The reading supposes that, based on the idea that democracy is a method of processing conflicts, the government represents as many people as possible even if conceived otherwise.
• The modern belief about democracy, as the author purports, is that democracy precludes the likelihood that some individuals could always serve as leaders while others will never reach such a capacity (Przeworski 31).
Pages 66-70
• This section of the reading tries to communicate the role of equality in self-government.
• The author expresses that, for people to govern themselves appropriately, they must have the ability to exercise equal influence over their decisions (Przeworski 66).
• Thus, no group or individual must access favors due to some traits they might possess.
• However, the condition is not always evident as it might appear.
• Equality is not equal to anonymity.
• Democratic citizens are only

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