The premise of the people's democratic dictatorship is that the Chinese party and state act on behalf of the people, but can and do use dictatorial methods in order to remain in power in the face of hostile forces. Implicit in the concept of the people's democratic dictatorship is the notion that dictatorial means are a necessary evil, and that without a dictatorship, the government may collapse and create a situation which is worse than the dictatorship.
Critics of the concept argue that dictatorships are inherently worse than non-dictatorships.
Democratic socialists maintain a commitment to the re-distribution of wealth and power and social ownership of most major industry, and some believe in a planned economy; these are all concepts which social democrats have largely abandoned.
Democratic socialist parties appeared before the First World War, when no single country could be described as democratic in the full modern use of the term, because of electoral discrimination on the basis of gender, race or wealth.
Democratic socialists advocating direct action may tend to similar positions with anarcho-syndicalism (with which democratic socialism shares the characteristics of being both anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian), although democratic socialists characteristically do not regard the state itself as an evil to be abolished.
Under such a system, legislative decisions are made by the people themselves or by representatives who act through the consent of the people, as enforced by elections and the rule of law.
The word democracy originates from the Greek δημοκρατíα from δημος meaning "the people", plus κρατειν meaning "to rule", and the suffix íα; the term therefore means "rule by the people." The term is also sometimes used as a measurement of how much influence a people has over their government, as in how much democracy exists.
In addition, for countries without a strong tradition of democratic majority rule, the introduction of free elections alone has rarely been sufficient to achieve a transition from dictatorship to democracy, until a wider shift in the political culture and gradual formation of the institutions of democratic government have occurred too.
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