What’s gone wrong with democracy?

When haven't things been going wrong with democracy? Whether it's the 1800's France, 1910's Russia, 1930's Europe, 1960's South America, 1990's Russia, or 2014 Ukraine, Egypt, and Syria, creating and maintaining a functioning democracy has always been hard work that is prone to failure. I suspect it will always be that way. And yet, (paraphasing Churchill), the fragile and difficult democratic system is better than any of the utopian non-democratic schemes that have been devised.

Yeah, let's try "a representative republic with separation of powers and a federated system of control" instead of just "democracy" I'd add in something along the lines of a bicameral legislature with half of it representing the aristocracy.

Nothing went wrong with democracy. It was always broken. That's why it has to be qualified so much to work right.

Put differently, people are broken. But they are broken in predictable ways. Systems of governance and control need to accept the ways people are broken and make them work for the security of the system, instead of just trusting that whoever is elected is somehow going to run things. That's whacked. You need a system of government, not a democracy.

What the more complex systems of democratic representation are finding is that the more they move towards a "pure" democracy, the more dysfunctional their systems are becoming as well. Democracy is not an answer. Never was. Unless you like mobs.

Democracy isn't just a luxury, I think. It isn't just a vehicle for economic progress, or for the improvement of the quality of life.

Democracy is necessary for the long-term survival of the species.

Nuclear weapons mean that if two superpowers engage in war, we go extinct. It cannot be allowed to happen.

The article mentioned it only once, but democracy has an interesting side effect: Peace. Democratic nations are far less likely to wage war on each other than despotism in its various forms.

This reason, more than any other, means that we really ought to be concerned about the most recent backslides in Russia, the erosion of some of our liberties in the West, and other threats to liberty/democracy throughout the world.

It's all well and good to use the word 'democracy' in a casual way, but if you're going to write a long article about it, at least define what you mean. Democracy (strictly defined) between two wolves and a sheep is much different than democracy between 150,000,000 million wolves who are going to have to manage without murder and robbery.

A popular vote can only work where divisions are minimal. That is, where it isn't "wolf vs. sheep" or "lord vs. peasant" or "taxpayer vs. tax-eater", etc, etc. There are lots of ways to divide people, and it was only for a brief period, in a few countries, in the past few centuries when such divisions didn't cause authoritarianism.

It's a huge mistake to distill the institutions and traditions which give rise to the kind of life we are able to live in "the west" as "democracy". Democracy can easily devolve into mob rule, and it often does. Moreover, democracy alone is often extremely unstable as it takes only one democratic vote to end democracy for the future. Rather, the foundation of the "free world" is a combination of strong individual liberty as well as representative/consensual governance. Especially in regards to limitations on the powers of the government and the powers of the collective.

It's that balance which keeps things functional. Without it, without limits to power, without strong protections of individual liberty, without strong protections for the mechanisms of democracy it's almost as unstable as unrestrained anarchy or unrestrained communism.

We should be spending more time and effort talking about liberty, because that's closer to the crux of the problem.

Here's a quote from the article: "More fundamentally, democracy lets people speak their minds and shape their own and their children’s futures." No, they don't, democracies just allow people to vote, but that doesn't mean that minorities can't be oppressed or that individual liberty can be almost completely absent.

Here's another map I use to gauge the quality of a country:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...

The problem with democracy is that without solid rules in place it can lead to mob rule. Furthermore, politicians don't always put the people first, often we just vote in temporary dictators...

And spontaneous 'revolutions' like in Egypt and Ukraine don't always fix the problem - often it just leads to the most violent and vocal opposition becoming the next mob to rule...

Democracy is impossible and dangerous without the rule of law...

To be quite honest, I am surprised by the thoughtfulness of the responses here. My theory is that power is like gravity; it tends to congregate (using this analogy there are plenty of object lessons that can be drawn). In the United States, at least, we have a central point where power has been gradually been pooled largely in contravention of supreme law of the land. Without getting into a long diatribe, I believe that self-government, i.e. Democracy, works best when power is decentralized. If power is centralized there cannot be self-government and self-government must be, by definition, federalized and decentralized. Democracy and centralization are polar opposites. Granted, both must give a little in the practice of economic and social stability, but we should do this only to a minimal extent. Once people learn that they force other people to give them what they want through the force of politics we have lost the ability to self-govern and Democracy becomes a Cronyocracy.

Representative democracy never worked. The reason is that politicians are not held accountable to their constituents once in office.

They run on a statistically validated marketing platform designed to win a strategic number of votes in each region, resulting in their election. However, once in office, there is no apparatus that keeps them accountable to their promises. This a feature, not a bug, of representative democracy. Time and time again, it is very clear that politicians run on a platform for the masses, but enact policies for the elite. Noam Chomsky has written extensively on this issue.

There is only one universal currency: power. This not only applies to individuals within a country, but also international relations. Weaker people will always be subject to the tyranny of the powerful, much like weaker countries constantly are at the whim of superpowers.

The rational counter-strategy to prevent this abuse is to limit individual power. While modern democracies succeed very well in limiting individual political power, they fail spectacularly in limiting financial power. As a result, financial power runs the local, national and international political arenas at the expense of its citizens. This is a natural consequence of capitalism.

It is accepted as gospel that capitalism is the "least worst" economic system. But this is a very shallow observation. What makes capitalism unique is that it completely unleashes the natural human tendencies of status competition by allowing mass accumulations of wealth. The result is exactly what we have today: the quest for wealth at any expense, without any guiding principles.

Is it really a testament to our transcendence that we produce millions of tons of consumer waste, because we can afford to? The problems with capitalism and democracy can both be solved simultaneously by understanding their limitations. Democracy and capitalism both need guiding principles to temper their inherently destabilizing tendencies. Accumulation of wealth or power for their own sake becomes fatally toxic to any nation.

Which guiding principles can serve this purpose? Sadly, history shows that nationalism and war have been the most successful. These principles prey upon fear to generate a temporary sense of unity and drive. But what if there was another way to do the same thing, but with hope instead of fear?

Personally, I hope that the guiding principle of the 21st century will be the pursuit of knowledge in the form of scientific research. A society with research as its goal would have an eternal national challenge, which would inspire its citizens from birth to learn and contribute to society. This would also produce an extremely informed citizenry which would be very difficult to brainwash or intimidate.

Lastly, with automation destroying the notion of “jobs” by severely favoring capital over labor in factors of production, this new society will be poised to prosper by giving citizens an incentive to pursue education and training while living off a basic income.

...Or perhaps I should stop watching Star Trek.

A functional democracy is related to the respect for reason - the ability to reason why things should be a certain way, and have one's arguments be respected even if they are counterintuitive. If the media markets are advanced enough to trump reason, or if the culture is such that they are still driven too much by superstitions and religion, then functional democracy will have a really tough time taking hold.

In Switzerland the half-direct democracy works very well. I wonder why no other countries have tried this system. In direct democracy the people decide how the consitution gets changed. One guy can change it with a nationwide vote if he gets 100,000 signatures in a limited timeframe. And the populace will therefore carry the decisions made.

Good democracy depends on a well informed populace who are not wilfully or selectively misinformed by newspapers like the economist when the politicians the people have placed their trust in country bent on subverting and emasculating the democratic system.

I don't think China's growth has much to do with their 'iron fist governing', but more with the fact that:

1) things change ever more rapidly, and it's easier for one country to go from point A to point B than it was for another 50 years ago. For example, many African countries won't just have a repeat of setting up landline and cable infrastructure - they'll move straight to wireless. This allows their economy to move faster than it did for other countries long ago.

2) Due to it having many poor people willing to work for nothing, China became a paradise for manufacturing. We saw this happen in other countries, too, such as Eastern European countries. However, due to its size and sheer number of workers, China automatically won by default among all the other poor countries.

There are other factors like these that helped China grow fast, and neither of them have much to do with China not being a democracy.

That being said, it's true that democracy is starting to suffer worldwide, mainly because those at the top have learned how to "game it", and have formed a network of such people that know how to keep themselves in power without doing much of anything for the people while profiting as much as possible from their positions.

Personally, I said the current "representative democracy" as a failure. First off, there are different forms of representative democracies worldwide, and some are better than others. The ones that make the election process and the people's decision look most as a sham, are the ones that don't function very well.

US for example has one of the best Constitutions, but it has a piss poor election system, which leads it to elect such poor people, that lately aren't even paying much attention to that top-notch Constitution.

Right now, in most of these democracies, the people have very little say in how decisions are made. I'm not arguing for direct democracy necessarily, but I do think we need a lot more direct democracy influences injected into the representative democracies we have now. We need to let people create laws themselves, and then give them up for vote in the Parliament/Congress. We need to let people veto, or at least force the bill into another process, that perhaps needs to be approved by the judiciary, too.

We need more systems like these that give people a voice - a real voice in how decisions are made, instead of electing a few hundred people every few years, and then letting them do whatever they want. I don't think that's good enough for the 21st century. We need something that is a lot more "real-time", something that makes it so decisions are a lot more inline with what the people want. The problem is not many governments and Parliaments will be too eager to do this, or change their election systems to be more fair to 3rd parties, etc.

I found it interesting how often the word technocrat came up in that article (5). I'm not sure what to read into it, but it is interesting.

What's gone wrong is that the outcome of votes isn't determined by me. There are too many other people voting with whom I disagree. Me me me!

"Democracy is worst form of government except for all the others" - Churchill.

I think one of the issues with modern democracy is the fact that it is rooted in the American past. Founding fathers set up an amazing system for 18th century. After globalization and rise of political advertising in mass media... well not so much. As a matter of fact politicians spend close to majority of their time just raising money [0][1]. Is it really a wonder Congress can't get anything done? Is it really a surprise that people who end up staying in politics for a long time are people who 'worked out' an understanding with special interests. System is setup to attract people who have friends which stand to gain from access to political power.

I think current political system of United States is flawed and we are leading other democracies by example, while making suboptimal decisions.

Interestingly enough I believe founding fathers foreseen this and provided us with an out - amendments. However with current gridlock it would be almost impossible to do anything about it without overwhelming popular support. Said gridlock also greatly benefits anyone who has enough spending money to 'help' politicians out with their campaigns.

So here is potential solution (I thought it up myself in relatively short amount of time, so there are probably issues with it):

1. Ban all monetary donations to politicians. All of them, no more advertisements.

2. Set up crowd sourced infrastructure to keep track of what politicians claim they would do and what they actually do. Kind of like wikipedia of politics.

3. Set up a public TV channel for debates and require all the major carriers to have it, live stream said channel on internet. Goal of this is to basically kill all political advertising elsewhere. On that channel televise debates on most up voted questions on infrastructure set up. Require candidates to provide clear answers and keep track of the answers on said infrastructure, so that people can view key issues and see how candidates responded to them.

There are a range of technological, societal, and organizational issues to accomplish something like this. It is easy to get wrong, and very hard to get right, so I am not sure if it would be worth trying in the first place.

0 - listen to the first three minutes to realize just how bad it is: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/t... .

1 - or here is a shorter text version: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/03/26/149390968/take-the...

Great article. Really good use of infographics. Also great responsive designs - the inforgraphics change to be mobile-friendly on a smaller screen!