At the end of the day, far too often when you read the phrase: “functioning democracy”, the meaning is: “one that functions the way the writer would like it to function”.
Whether or not there’s sugar in the porridge.
Moreso than an anarchic state engulfed in civil war.
My description was more targeted on “functional.” Pure democracy isn’t functional at all.
Only “nearest thing”; at any rate a nearer thing to participatory democracy than what they had under the Shah. By “more-or-less popular” I meant that from what I’ve read, there is a very substantial minority in Iran, more than 25% of the general population, which is still passionately supportive of the Islamic Republic in its present form in the ready-to-die-for-it sense. They’re in coalition, as it were, with the go-along-to-get-along majority/plurality who don’t want their society disrupted. If the Green Revolutionaries could appeal to the latter, they would have won – or set off a full-on civil war. If it comes to the latter, that 25% is not giving up immediately.
Lots of Black South Africans would strongly object to your logic.
For that matter I’m sure many Iranians who lived under the Shah would object to your logic.
I prefer Churchill: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”
Democracy does have a major advantage that makes it work better than non-democratic systems: it unites power and self-interest on a mass scale.
I would prefer some evidence to back up this often made assertion. By what metric are they the best? For sheer improvement in the life of the largest number of governed in the shortest possible time, the Chinese version of one party rule has to be the winner. In terms of stability or popularity, democracies are a very young form of government and they’ve been stable almost exclusively in a small subset of countries that were rich/powerful before they were democratic.
As a system, democracies tend to work better than non-democracies. Sure, you might be able to find an example of a non-demographic government working but for every example of it working, you’re going to find dozens of examples of the same system not working. With democracy, working government is the usual result not the rare exception.
And the key factor is what I alluded to. Governments generally serve the interests of those who control the government. So while a dictatorship or a hereditary monarchy or an aristocracy or a theocracy might serve the good of the people, it’s a lot more likely the government will end up serving the interests of the dictator or the hereditary monarch or the aristocracy or the religious leadership.
Democracy avoids this by giving control of the government to the majority of the people. So when the government serves the interests of its controllers, it ends up serving the interests of the majority of the people. The majority is not going to allow the government that they control to harm them.
It’s not a perfect system. Sometimes that majority will screw over a minority. Sometimes the majority fails to see what its best interests are. But any flaw that a democracy can make can equally be made by a non-democracy.
As for a metric, here’s a list of countries with the highest quality of life. You’ll see the overwhelming majority of them have democratic governments.
There is no evidence(that I know of) to suggest that democracy has caused the better quality of life that you point to. I can also note that most of the countries on the top of that list have a history of invading/conquering/looting/colonising others, and that is far more exclusive to the top of the list than democracy. The institutions of good government can come from just being rich, not necessarily being democratic.
And this gets back to the heart of this thread I think. If you define a democracy as the ones that work, then sure they work more than others.
You of course ignored the fact that after this paragraph he linked to a list of countries with the highest standards of living, most of which are democracies.
Actually, no, you ignored the post in which I address that.
Didn’t you define what can simply be stated as a democracy? Success at democracy is the degree to which a form of government aspires to these three goals. If we were to partition nations into functioning and non-functioning democracies, then there would be no nations on the functioning side because these three goals have yet to be fully or reasonably met by anything but small groups of people.
I think you are the second person I have come across who seemed to be using liberal and functioning democracy as interchangeable terms. Are they the same thing and can you point me to the academic definition?
I think the term is meaningless and I started the thread to either confirm my opinion or have somebody come along and use their knowledge to give me the appropriate context to understand how this term is used. I was planning to obstinately argue with such a person in the beginning but slowly give in by degrees, and thus be the first person to change their opinion in a single thread in great debates but all my plans are ruined now.
Thank-you for putting it better than I did.
Other way around: a republic is a sub-set of democracy. Democracy is rule by the people, a republic is specifically rule by the people through their elected representatives.
Any examples of that?
Since democracy is just rule by the people, to my mind a functional democracy at the national level (where direct democracy is impractical) is one in which the people are able to select their rulers, and periodically have the opportunity to freely re-elect them, or to elect anyone else of their choice. A non-functional democracy would be characterized by a minority invalidating the choice of the people (such as a coup), the suspension of elections, an election process so flawed or corrupt that the people’s favored candidates aren’t able to win, or the political process being restricted so that all adult citizens don’t have an equal say in choosing their leaders.
Under this definition, Iran isn’t a democracy (as people aren’t able to vote for candidates of their choice), the U.S. is, and Egypt briefly was until the coup.
I have heard - and know enough supporting examples to believe it may be true - that the US is the only constitutionally unlimited democracy on earth. That is, many other nations are nominally democracies and their constitution or governing documents contain many of the same elements as the US version, but somewhere in each is a gotcha - an option that allows the head of state or legislative body to seize power and suspend the rights that make it a democracy.
In utter emergencies, of course.
The entire western world? I’m trying to point out that there has been no demonstration of causation where democracy and high quality of life are concerned, and enough examples point in the other direction too. Countries that swing in and out of democracy, countries that have been democracies for reasonably long periods of time with little to show for it except terribly bad governance.
The countries that are rich and enjoy a high quality of life today and that Nemo pointed to as some sort of evidence for the ‘goodness’ of democracy were generally well along the path to being rich by the time they also became democracies. Given that places like China and Singapore have demonstrated that you can become rich and raise standards of living in MUCH shorter periods of time without democracy, I demand better evidence than mere correlation with high quality of life for the too often unchallenged statement that democracy is the best form of government we have.
How does this stuff fit in with your worldview?
Here’s a specific example - the parliament of England
It had nothing to do with democracy, yet was part of a governing institution that eventually morphed into the democracy that people see today and go “Ha! Great governance!”, whereas really it could just be coming from being rich/powerful/isolated enough to have largely uninterrupted institutional evolution. British courts are a similar institution.
Let me clarify - can you define what the “institutions of good government” are, and point to a rich nation that has them but isn’t a democracy?
I’m not sure how important this is but for what it’s worth you are both wrong. A republic may or may not be a democracy and vice versa. Read the definitions you linked again. A democracy is governed by the people either directly or by electing representatives. A republic in its broadest form is any government not headed by a king or other hereditary monarch but more specifically means a government of elected representatives. But it doesn’t mean those officials are elected by, and responsible to, the people at large. If the franchise were limited to individuals who payed at least $25K a year in taxes then that is a republic but not a democracy. Oligarchies are traditionally republics. But our republic does have a wide enough base (even though there are plenty of people who are not enfranchised) that I would say that the United States of America does qualify as a democracy.
For me the question of “functioning” then is, does the system work in service of and in response to popular pressures. I think America does qualify but I fully understand those who disagree on the grounds that our corrupt system serves the elite first and sometimes only.
The Republic/Democracy thing in the U.S. always struck me as odd. In most of the world, a Republic is a nation without a monarch (definition 3 on that list). You can have democracies that aren’t republics (UK), republics that aren’t democracies (China), nations that are republics and democracies (Mexico), and nations that are neither (Saudi Arabia).
In the U.S., some people, especially on the right it seems, seem to have some sort of mythical view of a Republic as a representative democracy with a limited government and whatever other qualities they see as positive. But that’s just not how most of the world uses the term.
As for what constitutes a functional democracy, I would pretty much echo Little Nemo. Most people need to be able to reasonably vote (without intimidation, etc.), most people need to be able to reasonably run for office or otherwise be involved in the political process, and elections need to genuinely affect the political course of the nation