You should add the following to the FAQ page as I have not found an answer there. If it is already there somewhere I apologize in advance for the oversight.
How are decisions made here?
Is there anyone who can overrule a community decision?
You should add the following to the FAQ page as I have not found an answer there. If it is already there somewhere I apologize in advance for the oversight.
How are decisions made here?
Is there anyone who can overrule a community decision?
No. In the end, StackExchange is a company, so they need to make profit. They also know they need the community to achieve that. So there is a mutual dependency here: the community needs the company (for servers, support, etc) and the company needs the community.
The community has a lot of freedom when it comes to defining the boundaries of their own site. They can make 99% of the rules. But in the end, sometimes the company needs to make the decision. The glue between both worlds are the community managers.
They translate between the two worlds and help the community. They help to set up new sites and talk to the development team if a feature can be implemented.
There are several democratic elements that are fundamental to the way moderation works on SE sites. Moderators are elected, and many moderation actions can be performed by regular users with a certain amount of reputation.
The direction of a site and the rules are generally determined by the community. There are some general concepts and rules that apply network-wide, but almost all of them can be overriden by the community if they chose so. Stack Exchange has the last word in everything if they want to, they own the sites and can override any decision by the community. But that doesn't actually happen very often. There are a few cases I remember where they stepped in and just made decisions, but those were generally cases where the community was divided or hadn't developed a strong opinion yet.
There are some other aspects that are decidely non-democratic, the most important one is the software itself. Stack Exchange decides over the features of the sites, and that is one part where the input of the community is limited. Feedback from the community is often influential on how certain featues are implemented, but if SE feels strongly about anything they tend to be stubborn even if the community complains about a certain feature.
There is a more fundamental way in which SE sites are democratic, they only work as long as there is a healthy community. This limits the absolute power SE has to a certain extent, if they drive away the community the site will fail eventually. The Creative Commons licence is a strongly related feature, it allows anyone to create a new site and import the content of the SE site.
SE sites are not democratic, but the community still runs many parts of them and has considerable influence over the development of the site.