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Comment by mac_was | Hacker News Reader

This is based not on any research, polls, just a group of people decide how is a country by reading newspaper articles. While in some cases a democracy status might really show what is happening in a specific country on the other hand there is bias involved, if we compare that in France we've got constant protests, fighting with Police and it is on the same level as Australia?

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Its based on human rights watch organisations, not people reading newspapers.

Also, democracy does not equal absence of civil unrest. Possibly even the opposite.

"democracy does not equal absence of civil unrest. Possibly even the opposite." This is next level thinking and reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_the_mil...

The index it's based on attempts to rank "civic spaces" - not levels of democracy.

The name implies how these organisations do their work - they watch. And the only way to watch is to read articles, watch TV news, etc.

Civil unrest shows that people are unhappy and government is not doing anything, is this democracy? The difference between France and poor countries is if you live in a poor country you fight to survive and have got no energy to protest, in Europe, basic rights (food, vote, etc) are provided and people can protest and then go to supermarkets to get food. So again is French government truly democratic? Should we use the same measures in France, Australia and Kongo?

That is absolutely not the only way to watch. These organisations talk to local activists, assess the court processes in countries, etc.

While I believe that these organisation do more good than harm I do believe that they are biased in some cases.

Are you implying that protests happening is less democracy? AFAIK there are always a group of people that are not happy about something and they will protests. Teachers are not happy about salaries and they protests, X is not happy abut petrol tax and protest etc.

I don't think that the number of protests were used anyway and from what I seen a there are countries like US were people are at most protesting on social media but I never seen major teachers,students,truck drivers,farmers protests in US either so I don't think is correlated if you are a poor country you are too busy to protest.

Protest is a sign of democracy, really. If you find yourself somewhere where there's never any protest, ever, well, you're probably somewhere very nasty indeed.

Queensland is attempting to pass laws as a knee jerk reaction to some of the climate protests that disrupted traffic recently.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/09/queen...

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-09/extinction-rebelli...

Yeah, I've always had the impression that Australia, or at least its governments, has a disconcerting authoritarian streak that just isn't found to the same level in other western democracies. Possibly impacted by not having a real equivalent to either a US style bill of rights or something like the ECHR.

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