Visualizing the State of Democracy, by Country

It's an interesting visualization, but, to reuse a phrase that I heard here recently, these scores are a Ouija board based on entirely arbitrary choices made by an entirely arbitrary group of people.

The US has not met the alleged criteria for Full Democracy or even Flawed Democracy within the bounds of my living memory.

None of our elections are fair because of:

- extreme gerrymandering

- rampant voter suppression

- first-past-the-post decisionmaking that entrenches two faces of a neoliberal corporatocracy distinct only in their identity politics but not significantly in their economic or foreign policies

- laws that prevent or obstruct ever investigating plausibly fraudulent election outcomes in favor of announcing results expediently

- media conglomerate kingmaking

- perpetually fatally flawed vote casting mechanisms that regularly and repeatedly flip, invalidate, and discard votes, often without any kind of oversight or potential for review (e.g. a paper trail)

- voter fatigue because this shit just keeps happening over and over

- repeatedly discarding mailed-in votes just because and then not making voting days a mandated holiday

- and a million other things that I'm not even thinking of

On top of that our executive branch has zero transparency whatsoever, and many of our highest positions of power go to people who are there only because they kiss the ring, including people currently who have literally no merits other than being related. We even have a justice department memo now saying that the Whitehouse is exempt from Federal Anti-Nepotism laws.

Also the questions are just complete rubbish, from treating "confidence" as a valid proxy for democracy to believing that some random schmoe's answer to "On average, other people X" means fuck all.

Let's call that a "Flawed Visualization".

I always start with a quick check, comparing the USA with a few specific European countries. I can see that the USA got ranked below the UK, below Sweden, and below Germany. OK, we can disregard this data. Another quick check is to look at the USA by year. If the rating suddenly dropped in 2016, when the people got what they wanted despite heavy opposition from the powerful elite, then the rating is junk.