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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

According to the Democracy Index (article about it here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/democracy-index-dat...) there are about 25 "Full Democracies", 107 Non-authoritarian regimes, and 60 authoritarian regimes.

Fun fact: The US isn't counted as a "Full Democracy" by that index, so seems it's not as a great of an achievement as you seem to think. I'm looking forward to see how the ranking of the US changes in 2025, seems to be slipping downwards rather than upwards sadly.

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What’s the basis of that index. Are they alleging US elections are rigged?

There are a lot of indicators they look at, give it a read if you're curious: https://image.b.economist.com/lib/fe8d13727c61047f7c/m/1/609... (North America starts at page 44). One snippet:

> However, the political and structural problems that caused the US to be downgraded to a “flawed democracy” in 2016 (a downgrade that pre-dated the inauguration of Donald Trump as president in January 2017) persist. These include low levels of trust in political institutions and the media; institutional gridlock; excessive influence of lobbyists, interest groups and the mega-rich; sharp economic and social inequalities; and an absence of social consensus on core national values.

Why are you asking questions instead of easily reading about the index criteria?

It’s just a way to say: why do you think this index is meaningful based on what it measures.

In that case you should have actually made your case, voice what in the index you disagree with and why.

Playing six degrees of buttery emails.

He's just sealioning again.

I used to like reading his comments years ago. Now it's like an enlightened reddit user, in the worst way.

Or maybe these democracy index things are entirely arbitrary

Sorry, but why exactly should we care about what some random score that some people invented and named Democracy Index says? It’s not like there is some universal agreement that maximizing the score in these people’s quiz is good or proper.

At least they provide justification and reasoning behind the numbers they assign, they're not throwing darts to see what to score things. Read through the report yourself, then come back if there are specific things you disagree with. Or maybe even better, find some better research and link it here.

Just saying "USA is the most democratic country in the world" feels like worse than at least trying to look at things objectively.

I didn’t say the U.S. was the most democratic country in the world—I wasn’t comparing the U.S. to Norway or Denmark. But the U.S. achieved in the 18th century something that Germany, France, Spain, etc., didn’t achieve until the mid-20th century. That’s an achievement.

And the lack of universal suffrage back in the day doesn’t diminish America’s achievement. India and Bangladesh and Iraq and many places have universal suffrage but they’re not as democratic as the U.S. was in 1789. Getting to that point is the 0 to 1 of democracy. Expanding the franchise from there is incremental development.

This index unironically puts countries that practice government censorship in the category of full democracies. Sorry but this isn't a democracy index - it's just a progressive index.

To lots of people, “liberal democracy” just means “liberal.”

Don’t worry, the US not gonna have either soon.

And yes, some of the rights are essential for democracy. There is a reason bill of rights was approved at the sunrise of our democracy.

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