Not to be confused with liberal democracy, democratic liberalism aims to reach a synthesis of democracy which is the participation of the people in the power, and the rational liberalism, which declines the emotional populism.
It arose accepting general suffrage after World War I, and its main question is how to ask people between elections, or should they be asked at all? In 2004, James Surowiecki published The Wisdom of Crowds, in which he argued that small groups exhibit more intelligence than isolated individuals and that collective intelligence shapes business, economies, societies and nations.
The Liberal Democrats (UK) describe their ideology as giving "power to the people"; they are against the concentration of power in unaccountable bodies. They propose decentralisation of power out of Westminster, and electoral and parliamentary reform, to create a system of tiered government structures to make decisions at what they see as the right level, including regional assemblies, the European Union, and international organisations. The Liberal Democrats want to protect civil liberties, and oppose state intervention in personal affairs.
Craig Duncan says in his Democratic Liberalism: The Politics of Dignity that: