Democracy is a word used to describe at least three political systems. In one system the government is said to be democratic if its decisions serve the 'true interests ' of the people whether or not those people directly affect the making of those decisions. It is by using this definition of democracy that various authoritarian regimes – China, Cuba, and certain European, Asian, and Latin American dictatorships – have been able to claim that they were “democratic”. Presidents of the now-defunct Soviet Union, for example, used to claim that they operated on the principle of democratic centralism. Democracy consisted in the fact that the highest body of the Party was its congress to which delegates were elected by local organization. In theory at least, therefore, although party members were bound to carry out a policy once it had been adopted, there was room for democratic input in the pre-congress discussion and elections. In practice, criticism of party leaders under any circumstances was considered disloyal and grounds for expulsion. Thus, the true interests of the masses were discovered through discussion within the Communist party and then decisions were made under central leadership to serve those interests. The collapse of the Soviet Union occurred in part because many average Russians doubted that the Communist party knew or would act in support of the people's true interests. 
Second, the term democracy is used to describe those regimes that come as close as possible to Aristotle's definition – the “rule of the many”. A government is democratic if all, or most, of its citizens participate directly in either holding office or making policy. This is often called direct or participatory democracy. In Aristitle's time – Greece in the 4th century B.C. - such a government was possible. The Greek city-state, or polis, was quite small, and within it citizenship was extended to all free adult male property holders. (Slaves, women, minors, and those without property were excluded from participation in government.) in more recent times the New England town meeting approximates the Aristotelian ideal. In such a meeting the adult citizens of a community gather once or twice a year to vote directly on all major issues and expenditures of the town. As towns have become larger and issues more complicated, many town governments have abandoned the pure town meeting (in which a larger number of elected representatives, perhaps two or three hundred, meet to vote on town affairs) or representative government (in which a small number of elected city councillors make decisions). 
The third definition of democracy is the principle of governance of most nations that are called democratic. It was most concisely stated by economist Joseph Schumpeter :” The democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individual (that's leaders) acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote.” Sometimes the method is called approvingly representative democracy (Representative democracy is any system of government in which leaders are authorised to make decisions by winning a competitive struggle for the popular vote.); at other times it is referred to, disapprovingly, as the elitist theory of democracy. It is justified to be one or both of two arguments: first, it is impractical, owing to limits of time, information, energy, interest, and expertise, for the people to decide on public policy, but it is not impractical to expect them to make reasonable choices among competing leadership groups. Second, some people believe that direct democracy is likely to lead to bad decisions because people often decide large issues on the basis of fleeting passions and in response to popular demagogues. This fear of direct democracy persists today, as can be seen from the statements of those who do not like what the voters have decided. For example, politicians who favored Proposition 13, the referendum measure that in 1978 sharply cut property taxes in California, spoke approvingly of the “will of the people”. Politicians who disliked Proposition 13 spoke disdainfully of 
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