Totalitarian democracy

Totalitarian democracy is a term popularized by Israeli historian Jacob Leib Talmon to refer to a system of government in which lawfully elected representatives maintain a nation state whose citizens, while granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of the government. This idea that there is one true way for a society to be organized and a government should get there at all costs stands in contrast to liberal democracy which trusts the process of democracy to, through trial and error, help a society improve without there being only one correct way to self-govern. Totalitarian democracy is equivalent to electoral autocracy.

The phrase had previously been used by Bertrand de Jouvenel and E. H. Carr, and subsequently by F. William Engdahl and Sheldon S. Wolin.