Democracy Index 2016
eiu.com
eiu.com
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2018/united-st...
Even that bastion of conservatism admits there was fishiness in the previous elections.
Is that a sign that the US is becoming less Democratic or a sign that Americans are becoming wiser?
Are politicians in higher ranked countries more trustworthy, or are their misdeeds less well known?
https://twitter.com/jonlovett/status/889931964144246784?lang...
In Europe ( mostly ) yes ( you see a lot of politicians fall because they handed themselves too much money for some case). I think in America, that's not the case now.
First-past-the-post voting and the dysfunctional 2 party states it engenders would be enough for me to mark it down, never mind the new Jim crow, gerrymandering, funding model, popular vote not counting etc.
Electoral reform is underrated, I think people can't quite imagine how different things would be under voting regimes where every voter can help you, even if you're their 2nd, 3rd or 4th choice. This means that people work on projects with broad appeal, and have less incentive to demonise the people that will never vote for them. Just the fact that you can assume I'm on "the other team" from my comment is part of the problem.
Therein lies the flaw in the democracy.
Our current democracies generally meet the 19th century definitions of liberalism, in that the people select the government. But I think that in the modern mind, democratic systems (eg the elected people) are supposed to conduct the pure will of the people. We don't really like the idea of representative democracy, where representatives have minds (and interests) of their own. It doesn't help that democratic political systems are very mature, with well established and understood political dynamics (parties, etc.) driving most things.
Imo, what people have in mind as a genuinely democratic system is more like direct democracy. Frighteningly, we still have strong modernist mentalities when it comes to politics. Most people argue from abstract justice, and assume efficacy (if they consider it at all) to be a byproduct of justice. IE if the system directly conducted the will of the people, stuff would also work better.
Realistically, we have the technology now for direct democracy but almost no experience with it. I suspect we'll see attempts made in the next couple of decades.
Anyway... I wonder if the Economist is influenced by the same sentiments, and have altered their view of what democracy is (or should be, idealistically).
What that article should say is"woman chooses to be disruptive at public hearing, gets kicked out."
If I decide to a public hearing and play rap music really loud as a protest and I get kicked out, it doesn't mean the system is broken. It actually means it works.
edit: original post title was The US has been downgraded from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy”
Random observation, one nice thing about the Economist is that its readers are super handy about identifying themselves.
Also, seems to be paywalled.
Isn't it quite reasonable that it's based on past performance rather than being a guess at what might happen in the future?
Edit: By the way, look at the way the top of the "Flawed Democracies" cluster under 8.00! I can totally believe some tweaking went on here.
Why is this post so controversial? The US democracy IS crumbling. And I would have never guessed that I will find this much resentment to this fact in the comments on HN...