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Konkvistador comments on Open Thread, March 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Is this really key feature? Lots of elections considered perfectly democratic are more or less predictable. I mean you do have places like Norway or Japan where the same party kept winning for decades in a row. Once you knew who the party leader was before the election you would also usually know who the PM will be. Who will ascend in the Chinese Communist Party next is if anything less predictable than if say Obama will be re-elected. Also the conclaves often produce surprising choices for the Pope and they are elections, but I don't think most people consider the Vatican to be a democracy.
Fair enough. It was a tentative definition.
Another angle is PJ O'Rourkes idea that societies which are good to live in have rule of law. Unfortunately, I don't have convenient access to his description (if he's got one) of rule of law. It would be in Eat the Rich.
Rule of law and democracy are not at all the same thing. They are probably related -- hard to have meaningful elections without reliable laws about them, for instance. But it's necessary to explain that connection more carefully -- and find out which ways the causality goes -- before you can argue for democracy on the basis of it promoting rule of law.
There are many examples of non-democratic governments that have reliable, predictable, and reasonably even-handed legal process. (Imperial France under Napoleon or Napoleon III had this reputation, as did Rome under the good emperors. Singapore is a modern example.) There are also plausible examples of democracies that don't have reliable legal systems, I suspect.
I'm not sure I would have said that Ancient Athens had "rule of law" as we understand it, for instance.