Dalam istilah sosialisme demokratis, kata sifat demokratis digunakan untuk membedakan sosialis demokratis dengan sosialisme yang terilhami Marxisme-Leninisme, yang dipandang banyak orang dalam praktiknya sebagai tidak demokratis atau otoriter.[4][5] Sosialis demokrat menentang sistem politik Stalinis dan perencanaan ekonomi tipe Soviet, menolak bentuk pemerintahan yang dianggap otoriter dan ekonomi komando yang sangat tersentralisasi seperti di Uni Soviet dan negara Marxis-Leninis lainnya pada awal abad ke-20.[6] Sosialisme demokratis dibedakan dengan konsep demokrasi sosial abad ke-20 atas dasar bahwa sosialis demokrat lebih berkomitmen pada transformasi ekonomi dari kapitalisme menuju sosialisme dengan menggunakan sarana pemerintahan; sedangkan demokrat sosial modern menentang penghapusan total kapitalisme dan sebaliknya mendukung reformasi progresif dari kapitalisme.
[7]
^Busky, Donald F. (20 July 2000). Democratic Socialism: A Global Survey. Praeger. pp. 7–8. ISBN978-0275968861. "Democratic socialism is the wing of the socialist movement that combines a belief in a socially owned economy with that of political democracy."
^Anderson, Gary L.; Herr, Kathryn G. (2007). Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice. SAGE Publications. p. 448. ISBN978-1412918121. "Some have endorsed the concept of market socialism, a post-capitalist economy that retains market competition but socialises the means of production, and in some versions, extends democracy to the workplace. Some holdout for a non-market, participatory economy. All democratic socialists agree on the need for a democratic alternative to capitalism."
^ abKurian, George Thomas; Alt, James E.; Chambers, Simone; Garrett, Geoffrey; Levi, Margaret; McClain Paula D. (12 October 2010). The Encyclopedia of Political Science Set. CQ Press. p. 401. ISBN978-1933116440. "Though some democratic socialists reject the revolutionary model and advocate a peaceful transformation to socialism carried out by democratic means, they also reject the social democratic view that capitalist societies can be successfully reformed through extensive state intervention within capitalism. In the view of democratic socialists, capitalism, based on the primacy of private property, generates inherent inequalities of wealth and power and a dominant egoism that are incompatible with the democratic values of freedom, equality, and solidarity. Only a socialist society can fully realise democratic practices. The internal conflicts within capitalism require a transition to socialism. Private property must be superseded by a form of collective ownership."
^Busky, Donald F. (20 July 2000). Democratic Socialism: A Global Survey. Praeger. pp. 7–8. ISBN978-0275968861. "Sometimes simply called socialism, more often than not, the adjective democratic is added by democratic socialists to attempt to distinguish themselves from Communists who also call themselves socialists. All but communists, or more accurately, Marxist-Leninists, believe that modern-day communism is highly undemocratic and totalitarian in practice, and democratic socialists wish to emphasise by their name that they disagree strongly with the Marxist-Leninist brand of socialism."
^Kurian, George Thomas; Alt, James E.; Chambers, Simone; Garrett, Geoffrey; Levi, Margaret; McClain Paula D. (12 October 2010). The Encyclopedia of Political Science Set. CQ Press. p. 401. ISBN978-1933116440. "Democratic socialism is a term meant to distinguish a form of socialism that falls somewhere between authoritarian and centralised forms of socialism on the one hand and social democracy on the other. The rise of authoritarian socialism in the twentieth century in the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence generated this new distinction."
^Prychito, David L. (31 July 2002). Markets, Planning, and Democracy: Essays After the Collapse of Communism. Edward Elgar Publishing. p. 72. ISBN978-1840645194. "It is perhaps less clearly understood that advocates of democratic socialism (who are committed to socialism in the above sense but opposed to Stalinist-style command planning) advocate a decentralised socialism, whereby the planning process itself (the integration of all productive units into one huge organisation) would follow the workers’ self-management principle."
^Eatwell, Eoger; Wright, Anthony (1 March 1999). Contemporary Political Ideologies: Second Edition. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 80. ISBN978-0826451736. "So too with ‘democratic socialism’, a term coined by its adherents as an act of disassociation from the twentieth-century realities of undemocratic socialism…but also, at least in some modes, intended to reaffirm a commitment to system transformation rather than a merely meliorist social democracy."
^Anderson, Gary L.; Herr, Kathryn G. (2007). Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice. SAGE Publications. p. 447. ISBN978-1412918121. "[...] the division between social democrats and democratic socialists. The former had made peace with capitalism and concentrated on humanising the system. Social democrats supported and tried to strengthen the basic institutions of the welfare state--pensions for all, public health care, public education, unemployment insurance. They supported and tried to strengthen the labour movement. The latter, as socialists, argued that capitalism could never be sufficiently humanised, and that trying to suppress the economic contradictions in one area would only see them emerge in a different guise elsewhere. (E.g., if you push unemployment too low, you'll get inflation; if job security is too strong, labour discipline breaks down.)"
^Sargent, Lyman Tower (2008). "The Principles of Democratic Socialism". Contemporary Political Ideologies: A Comparative Analysis, 14th Edition. Wadsworth Publishing. p. 118. ISBN978-0495569398. "Still, the origins of contemporary democratic socialism are best located in the early to mid-nineteenth century writings of the so-called utopian socialists, Robert Owen (1771-1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837), Claude-Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825), and Etienne Cabet (1788-1856). All these writers proposed village communities combining industrial and agricultural production, owned in varying ways, by the inhabitants themselves. Thus the essence of early socialism was public ownership of the means of production. These theorists also included varying forms of democratic political decision making, but they all distrusted the ability of people raised under capitalism to understand what was in their own best interest."