  In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Schmitt understands democracy as the self-rule of the people. In a democratic polity, the decisions taken by the rulers express the will of the people (CPD 25–6). However, the principle of democracy, taken in the abstract, is open to different and competing interpretations. In political practice, the identity of the ruling will with the will of the people is never a simple given. Rather, it is always the result of an act of identification. When political decisions are taken through majority vote, the will of the majority is identified with the will of the people, and every citizen is expected to obey regardless of whether he voted with the majority (CPD 26–30). But what, Schmitt asks, is the basis of this identification? If a majority can overrule a minority, and identify its will with the will of the people, why should it not be possible for the will of a minority to express the will of the people?  What if a group of democratic revolutionaries want to establish a democracy in a society where most people are opposed to the principle of democracy? Would they not be justified, from a democratic point of view, to abandon majority rule, to identify their own will with the true will of the people, and to subject their compatriots to a re-educative dictatorship? Schmitt suggests that such a dictatorship would still have to be considered democratic, since it still appeals to the idea that political rule ought to be based on the will of the people (CPD 28–30). Once one accepts this claim, the conclusion that Schmitt aims to establish in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy will follow: The electoral institutions that we usually take to be paradigmatically democratic are not, in truth, any more intimately connected with the principle of democracy than a dictatorship in the name of the people. The latter was to be legitimated by plebiscites, initiated by a charismatic leader, in which the people, Schmitt argued, should be allowed to give or withhold approval, but never to initiate the question (CPD 32; VV). But this conclusion must surely be an overstatement. Even democratic dictatorship, however crucial to the establishment of democracy, is exceptional and limited in time. Hence, there must be a characteristically democratic condition of legal normality, and a theory of democracy should tell us what it is.  Schmitt’s apparent attempt to dissociate the idea of democracy from any particular method of will-formation fails to explain why the democratic tradition has considered institutional provisions like the election of officials or the extension of the franchise to be characteristically democratic.