Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Polyarchy
/ˈpɒliɑːrki/noun
A political system in which power is spread across many competing groups rather than held by one.
The Greek roots
πολύς
polýs
many
ἀρχή
archḗ
rule, command
Literally: “rule of many”
The story of the word
The word is seventeenth-century, but Robert Dahl gave it its modern job in 1971: not democracy as an ideal but the observable thing, a regime with contested elections, broad suffrage and real freedom to organise. He wanted a name that would stop analysts scoring actual states against a standard no state has ever met. The measure now runs as a research dataset under that name.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
monarchyoligarchyanarchypolygon
In a sentence
By Dahl's criteria the country counts as a polyarchy, whatever its citizens think of the parties on offer.