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I think the title is very clear, but I'll complete the question below:
What are the minimum requirements needed for a system to be called democratic?
Is holding elections every n years enough, or there are deeper requirements?
In other words, what criteria must a system of government meet before it can be called democratic?
A common definition is Karl Poppers, that democracy is system that makes it possible to get rid of a government without spilling blood.
This is a pragmatic definition, and it makes United states a democracy no matter what objections you have of the process, but not South Africa, even though the process is democratic in principle, as ANC still rules.
I think this is one of the few definitions that people of different ideologies can agree on, just because it's purely pragmatic and casts no judgement on how the system looks, only how well it works.
"Democratic" is a very imprecise label. For example, USSR held elections every N years, and called itself a democracy, despite "the people" having virtually no power.
Wikipedia defines Democracy as:
a form of government in which all eligible citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Democracy allows eligible citizens to participate equally—either directly or through elected representatives—in the proposal, development, and creation of laws.
Note two things here:
In reality, "Democracy" as defined here is an ideal that Simply Does Not Exist. Nobody ever has "equal say", for a variety of reasons. Like anything else, in reality there's a continuum, which, since we are dealing with humans, is messy and hard to pin down.
The official definition is about an idea, not an implementation. Thus, elections, while one way of implementing democracy-aimed ideas, are not a requirement at all (for example, you could simply make every citizen vote on every political decision directly). Elections are about representative Democracy.
Democracies are governments that allow all people to participate equally, either directly or indirectly. This spectrum stretches from pure democracy, with majority rule, to representative democracies where a subset of the populace speaks for the whole.
An important distinction: in a democracy, it is the fundamental premise that the Majority Rules. Convince a large enough portion of the populace to support an idea, and it can be implemented.
Democracy exists to whatever extent the group decision-making of a set of people (e.g. a society) consistently reflects the will of that set of people collectively. Elections are one means of helping to achieve or assure that, but it is possible (though rare and difficult) to have democracy without elections. As an observer one applies the label "democracy" when the extent to which this is true exceeds some arbitrary threshold level. That is the one and only requirement to calling a political system democratic.
