If we were to make a list of the essential idea of democracies to understand them in a general way, it boils down to three main prepositions. The people, legitimately influenced during an election, choose representatives who promise certain policies, and afterwards the people legitimately influence the elected official. There is universal suffrage in the election, and approximate equality in both the influencing of the people during the election and their subsequent influencing of those elected representatives. The society's actual policies are chosen by the representatives in accord with their promises, and the policies do take effect. (Honderich) To briefly summarize these thoughts one would have to say that democracies incorporate the idea of legitimacy based on popular determination, elected governments, accountability, limited government, and guaranteed civil rights and freedoms.
             Some theorists hypothesize that a stable, effective democracy requires a relatively homogeneous population. A homogeneous population is a society that shares common beliefs, ancestry, background, religion, economic interests, and similar political outlooks. The more things people have in common in society, the more likely they are to sustain democratic institutions and make effective governmental decisions. Democracy rests on cooperation, thus the more a group of people have in common the more likely they are to work together to form a stable democracy. Social diversity in democracy can be expected to cause collapse or inefficiencies of that society. So, for a democracy to be effective and stable, the society's population would have to be homogenous. We will call this hypothesis the "homogeneity hypothesis." We will let the dependent variable be an unstable and ineffective democracy. The independent variable is the heterogeneous population. The question to be asked is does a heterogeneous population lead to an unstabl...