Democracy Distribution of the World | Hacker News Reader

Democracy Distribution of the World

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31 pointsdedalus20 comments

Two other international rankings with annual revisions that have been going on for a while are produced by nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations.

1) The Freedom House rankings of countries by freedom (both political and economic):

http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=15

2) The Transparency International rankings of perceived public corruption:

http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/...

(Both these websites use more of Flash Player than I would if I were running a website; sorry about that.)

While the report doesn't provide much detail on the methodology, I'd suggest taking small variations with a grain of salt. There are quite a few criteria they use which have nothing to do with democracy. Some if their criteria actually go against democratic principles. For instance:

Do ethnic, religious and other minorities have a reasonable degree of autonomy and voice in the political process?

In a democracy, the majority may freely impose their will on minorities. That's what a democracy is all about.

Women in parliament % of members of parliament who are women

It doesn't make you less of a democracy if your voters hate women.

Is there an effective system of checks and balances on the exercise of government authority?

I.e., is there a non-democratic means of making sure 2 wolves and 1 sheep don't vote on dinner? Seems non-democratic to me.

Many of the criteria are just people's preferences, e.g. what percentage of the population cares enough about politics to read about it every day or join a political party.

http://graphics.eiu.com/PDF/Democracy_Index_2010_web.pdf

You don’t use the definition of “democracy” most people use. That’s ok, an acknowledgment that more than your definition of democracy exists would be nice, though.

My perception is that “democracy” is most often used to refer to democracy (following your definition), rule of law and human rights. Those three things contradict each other sometimes, all “democracies” have compromises to deal with those contradictions. (Protection of minorities and separation of powers are seen by pretty much everyone as essential features of democracies.)

(Your point about checks and balances seems non-sensical, though. Checks and balances are not essential democratic features following your definition – they are more in the rule of law camp – but it strikes me as wrong to claim that they contradict democratic principles. You point about wolves concerns protection of minorities and checks and balances certainly don’t do that. The president and the legislative are both elected, judges are sometimes, too [checks and balances certainly don’t demand that judges not be elected, so you can’t blame it on checks and balances when judges are not elected], so I don’t really see how checks and balances are undemocratic.)

> My perception is that “democracy” is most often used to refer to democracy (following your definition), rule of law and human rights.

I would refer to that as a "liberal democracy". Democracy means majority rule, by definition ("people power" or "mob rule" from the Greek). Liberal democracy is democracy plus human rights.

> Those three things contradict each other sometimes, all “democracies” have compromises to deal with those contradictions.

Indeed; if the majority of the population are illiberal, then a country must choose between being liberal or beinbg democratic; it can't be both.

> I would refer to that as a "liberal democracy".

It would be nice if everyone adhered to the rule you are describing but that simply isn't what happens in the real world.

In acutal usage the unadorned term 'democracy' almost always should be interpreted to mean 'representative government with constitutional protections for individual rights'. Obviously the 'representative' part comes in all sorts of flavors as well as the 'individual rights' part. Rarely does anyone using the naked term 'democracy' really mean 'direct majority rule with no minority rights'.

I do not see democracy as a binary property. If the majority of the population are illiberal and that country has constitutional protections for minorities or free speech then said country is undemocratic about the protection of minorities or freedom of speech but it can still be very democratic when it comes to, say, the tax rate.

(But I'm happy to use your definition, it's just that with your definition, no country in the world would be a democracy. Not even a little bit.)

I wonder if a Political Science forum's discussion on web apps would have the same quality as politics threads on HN.

Check out that tiny little green island in the middle east.

Well, democracy is not everything. If the majority of the electorate wants to fight wars, or repress a certain minority, then you've still got a problem there.

The same countries near the top of this index are the same as those at the top of the Corruption Perceptions Index, i.e Scandinavia, Canada/Australia/NZ, Switzerland.

See http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/... Any coincidence?

Sad that there are about twice as many authoritarian regimes as there are full democracies.

Maybe, but compare that to how the world looked one hundred or even twenty-five years ago and the progress has been remarkable.

I'd be interested to see a map that shows the countries by their current trends to or from democracy (would better replace that with "personal liberty") rather than the current state.

Unfortunately I suspect the error bars are so large and the rate of change so (usually) small that you'd either wind up just getting

(a) noise or

(b) whatever result you want to get.

Sobering that the U.S. only barely qualifies as a "full democracy".

Also, how the hell did North Korea score 1.08? What do you have to do to score a zero?

Near the bottom, there's a link to the Economist's report

http://graphics.eiu.com/PDF/Democracy%20Index%202008.pdf

North Korea got 2.5 points on "Functioning Government". They aren't controlled by foreign powers, and they exert full control of their territory. That gives them a 2. Maybe they got a half point for the civil service.

Also, a fair number of the points you get is the perception of the populace of their government. Depending on how Orwellian the country is, they can rank quite highly on those.

"Constitutional" monarchies should loose points just on the simple merit of being a theocracy by definition. Yet, they are the most "democratic" on this list. Meh.

Theocracy?

A theocracy "by definition" involves God (or, more broadly, a religion). Constitutional monarchies do not, necessarily. Furthermore, at one end of the constitutional monarchy spectrum you have the monarch who is purely figurehead with only ceremonial and/or social responsibilities, and the monarchies with high scores in that list are fairly close to that end of the spectrum. (There are also some monarchies right down in the authoritarian end....)

First off, nitpick: I think you meant "lose" rather than "loose".

Secondly, would you mind expanding on your point? I wasn't aware that a country being governed by a monarch implied a theocracy. Sure, you have countries like the UK where the monarch is both the head of state and the head of the established church but that link doesn't have to exist and the existence of that link doesn't necessarily imply any reduction in religious freedoms.

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