Against the republican notion, it can be argued that government cannot be assumed to rely on consent, particularly not under conditions of a plurality of lifeworlds. Instead, democracy is a form of government which concerns, not the capacities of political decision-making, nor the multiple voices of civil society, but the connections between them. Thus, the conditions under which elections take place and political decisions are reached determine whether a governmental system is democratic or not. Hence, democracy does not refer to the realization of certain goals but to the institutionalization of procedures that make possible the free pursuit of goals without a predetermined direction. It entails the possibility of dissent and the promise to peacefully handle disagreements.
Democracy is risky business.
The suggested procedural perspective brings out the specific qualities of a democratic rule of law. The rule of law itself, then, is to be understood as a procedure, its democratic qualities measured by the potential to allow a process of dissent rather than a state of consent, for otherwise democracy would become but a label for any governmental system with formal institutions. At the same time, it should be understood that institutionalized democratic procedures remain in confrontation with the necessities of state bureaucracies and the market economy. The citizenry remains susceptible to repression as a result of the structural forces of politics and economy and the unequal distribution of power and money as a result of those forces. A first and necessary, but insufficient, requirement of democratic criminal justice, then, is that there can be no democratic criminal justice without democracy in government and law.