What has been shown to work in the long run, is Western democracy.
My point is democracy as it stands today is very young and if you only compare it against the failed attempts of Communism you will miss almost all of civilized human history.
[1] http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/law_and_order/police.htm
“But here's some advice, boy. Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.” ― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
Arguably the British tradition had a bigger impact---without people's revolutions. (There was the Glorious Revolution..)
And all I'm saying is that at some point we get bored of calling successful revolutions, well, revolutions, and just accept them as the new normal. But we remember the short lived ones as revolutions because we never got around to give them another name, and thus we associate revolution with failure, when it is not the case at all (one way or the other).
The American revolution, Constitution and Bill of Rights are all inspired and influenced by, among other things, the Magna Carta, the English revolution and English Bill of Rights.
Let's ignore the unexplained impact you claim the American Revolution has had on "Western Democracy" and examine the impact it had on democracy merely within the United States:
In 1776 the only people who were entitled
to vote were white men who owned property.
100 years and a civil war later, the 15th
Amendment was passed in an attempt to give
black men the vote.
Another half century after that women were
given the vote.
Almost another half century after that -
200 years after the American Revolution -
the Voting Rights Act had to be passed, to
finally, properly give black people the vote.
You are confusing your ideal of democracy with what was actually a change in the way to look at government: it was a complete rejection of the monarchy and its god mandated right to rule unlike anything that came before.
And sure, everything is influenced by what came earlier, after all Thomas Paine, considered by many the intelectual father of both the French and American Revolutions was actually British. What started in 1776 was the beginning of modern democracy, and it inspired many western colonies to break from their colonizers with their own democratic revolutions (not all successful), but it was not perfect, it has evolved a lot since then, and it will continue to do so.
I will also argue your point about New Zealand. If your democratic process can be subverted by the whims of a single person using the power of his/her inherited authority on the assumption of being divine, then you don't really have a democracy, no matter how many people are allowed to vote.
But again, that is not the point I was making in my response to op. I was just merely pointing out that not all revolutions end in failure.
They're allowed to vote when they reach the age of 18 or 21. How do people excluded from voting due to their race or gender become eligible to vote?
> You are confusing your ideal of democracy with what was actually a change in the way to look at government: it was a complete rejection of the monarchy and its god mandated right to rule unlike anything that came before.
I've already given examples where monarchical rule was rejected and curtailed - events which inspired and influenced the American revolution - so why are you still pretending the first people to come up with such concepts were American revolutionaries?
> I will also argue your point about New Zealand. If your democratic process can be subverted by the whims of a single person using the power of his/her inherited authority on the assumption of being divine, then you don't really have a democracy, no matter how many people are allowed to vote.
Key word: "If".
The Romans were, of course, a foreign occupying force, but they served to keep other foreign occupying forces out. Once the Romans left (~450 AD), that stopped being the case, and England was successively invaded by Norsemen ("Northmen", a/k/a Vikings, Normandy is also settled by the Norse), and Saxons (from present day Holland / Netherlands), mostly.
William the Conqueror (Norman) was the last foreign invador to both substantially engage the dominant British inhabitants on their own soil, the last to defeat England (absent invited parties, e.g., Mortimor and the Prince of Orange). 1066 was the last time until the first World War that England was subject to any significant foreign attack, and the last time until the second World War that London itself was engaged by an enemy. I find that pretty significant.
There were numerous almost (though not quite) always peaceful devolutions of power from the Crown to an ever expanding scope of at first nobles, and finally commoners. The Magna Carta (1215), War of Roses (1485), the English Civil Wars (1642 & 1648), Commonwealth of England (1649), the Protectorate (1653-1659), the Bill of Rights (1689), Chartism (1838-1858) (the UK's answer to the Revolutions of 1848 and their populist reforms), Local Governance Acts (1888, 1894), and increasing welfare-state reforms of the 1930s - 1950s.
Throughout almost all of this has been a devolution of power from the centre to the periphery.
It's also occurred largely by the fact that those claiming additional power -- barons, lords, a growing merchantile and political class, and finally the proletariat -- could effectively make such demands, threatening disruption otherwise.
The concept of a revolution in the modern sense seems, well, quite modern: France (1794), Europe generally (1848), Russia (1917) and the subsequent Communist Revolutions of China and Cuba. (I'm excluding the Communisation of Eastern Europe which was in fact an act of imperial oppression by Soviet Russia). The Fascist revolutions of Italy and German (a strongly cautionary tale). The fall of the USSR and Communist Eastern Europe, though should fit. I'd include the Iranian Revolution (1979), though that was not in the Liberal tradition.
More generally, power transitions are from one oligarchical group to another, though frequently playing on public sentiments.
The Civil War interrupted that stability a bit (as AlgorithmicTime in a dead comment points out), but that wasn't as much upheaval as eg the French revolution.
> Not that important for what?
Western Democracy. Sorry for the confusion, I was relying too much on context here.
I agree with you, democracy can be traced to the British, and further back to the Romans, and even the Greeks, but it wasn't until the French Revolution that the core concept of it was implemented; namely that there are no divine rights of kings (Britain also contemplated that idea, it is a shame they didn't follow thru).
Democracy is not only about voting or rights or property, it is also the idea that the people can decide for themselves they way they want to live. Voting is just the best way we've come up to decide that until now.
For a very interesting take on this, see "The White Indians of Colonial America". (http://www.amstudy.hku.hk/staff/kjohnson/PDF/engl56_kj_axtel...)
French revolution resulted in revolutionary becoming the aggressors and they were took over by Napoleon so power returned to back to Regency.
Revolutions in China, South America, USSR etc also resulted in same. I can't comment on American revolution though, it may have been an exception.
Calling it just a struggle for independence says nothing about why they were struggling to be independent.
Weren't the Spanish anarchists betrayed by their Republican and Stalinist allies?
Western democracy works?
How "long" has "Western democracy" been around for?
In any case, I don't think it matters which -cracy/-archy/-ism it is. What ulitimately works is that the people be allowed to do what they want to do. ...within universal moral standards (:Murder is Bad.)
As long as people are allowed to buy what they want, watch, read and play what they want, build what they want, go where they want, work where they want — if they have enough money — and say what they want and have relationships with whomever they want, then on the whole they will be complacent if not content or happy. They won't care what type of government it is or who is running it.
Take a contemporary issue for example. Do you think you can even vote out the NSA and dismantle all domestic surveillance mechanisms at this point in America? But the majority of people don't care because they're more or less content.
I reside in a third-world country that isn't exactly a bastion of Western Democracy, yet the people here more-or-less live their daily lives out as one might in a Western country, so they don't really pay their government much mind.
In the end, what works is consumerism.
> "its autonomy as an indigenous Purepecha community is recognised and underwritten by the Mexican government."
My guess would be that this is a whole culture.
Case in point: You can change things, even radically, in the western democracies. All it takes is to create a new party (the law and the constitutions place only very broad limits) - the you can get elected.
The point that new parties have not actually been elected is not a sign that democracy doesn't work, it is a sign that people in summary don't actually think any of them would be an improvement.
Just because you don't like some of the outcome doesn't mean it's not a democracy.
Whilst this is true, it also matters how the people's will is summarised, and (perhaps even more importantly) how that summing method affects the behaviour of the people.
The obvious example being that first-past-the-post systems have a tendency to get ~2 dominant parties (e.g. US and UK), whilst proportional systems tend to get more parties or coalitions (e.g. Germany and Scotland).
Hence, in a first-past-the-post system, the fact that new parties don't tend to get elected is a sign that people don't think those parties offer enough of an improvement to convince a majority of voters to sacrifice their influence on the race between the big 2. It's like a giant prisoner's dilemma, where it's possible for every individual to think that some new party is a big improvement, but for nobody to vote for that party as they don't trust others to cooperate.
Although there are second-order effects, e.g. it may be worth chasing a seat in parliament even if there's no hope of forming a government; or getting second-order effects from an issue/protest vote (e.g. voting UKIP to influence whichever majority party wins to focus on immigration)