Democracy explained in terms of the people

For some political scientists, "democracy" means the right to vote in elections held every four, five years or six years. Perhaps countries such as Sweden and Switzerland practice a good form of democracy. But in the world's two largest democracies, the United States and India, contesting an election is a highly expensive affair. In a majority of cases, a candidate has to spend millions of dollars to have any chance of success.

In India, many candidates cross the legal limit for total campaign expenditure in a single day. And even in elections to city councils, a serious candidate usually has to spend several hundred thousand dollars.

What this means in practice is, people without access to huge amounts of money have almost zero chance of getting elected. In other words, more than 99.5 percent of the population don't have even the remotest chance of winning an election, simply because they don't have access to big money.