Word.ws English Dictionary

democratic deficit

democratic deficit noun: a situation when ostensibly democratic organizations or institutions (particularly governments) are seen to be falling short of fulfilling the principles of the parliamentary democracy in their practices or operation where representative and linked parliamentary integrity becomes widely discussed.

Noun

democratic deficit (plural democratic deficits)

  1. A situation when ostensibly democratic organizations or institutions (particularly governments) are seen to be falling short of fulfilling the principles of the parliamentary democracy in their practices or operation where representative and linked parliamentary integrity becomes widely discussed.
    • The euro was launched with a fundamental democratic deficit, which didn’t trouble the European elite behind it because they had come to believe in a version of manifest destiny.2011, John Lanchester, Once Greece goes…

Forms of democratic deficit

pluraldemocratic deficits

Origin of democratic deficit

First used by the Young European Federalists in their Manifesto in 1977.

Questions about democratic deficit

What does democratic deficit mean?
Democratic deficit means a situation when ostensibly democratic organizations or institutions (particularly governments) are seen to be falling short of fulfilling the principles of the parliamentary democracy in their practices or operation where representative and linked parliamentary integrity becomes widely discussed.
What part of speech is democratic deficit?
Democratic deficit is a noun.
What is the plural of democratic deficit?
The plural of democratic deficit is democratic deficits.

Words near democratic deficit in the dictionary

  1. democratic
  2. democratic backsliding
  3. democratic centralisation
  4. democratic centralism
  5. democratic centralization
  6. democratic deficit
  7. democratic deficits
  8. democratic education
  9. Democratic Kampuchea
  10. Democratic People's Republic of Korea
  11. Democratic Republic of Afghanistan

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: democratic deficit (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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