‘Define’ is too tough a task, since there are no real settled definitions. Institutions can refer to the ‘rules of the game’, but I’m using it to refer to the distinct systems and organisations that make up the society/government. I did give examples in a later post. The British parliament is an example of an institution that existed pre democracy - a form of participative decision making. The British also had a legal/court system established in the 13th century which survives to this day, albeit with evolution along the way. That’s another example of an institution of governance that doesn’t have to related to democracy.
What I’m trying to say is, it isn’t enough to just point to rich countries and say they’re all democracies. Can you point me to a country that is rich because it is democratic?
I’m not sure where to go from here, then. All governments are made up of systems and organizations, but without some idea of what criteria make one set of them good and another set bad, there’s no basis for comparison between democratic ones and non-democratic ones. The Parliament of 17th century Britain, for instance - it was certainly a system for governing, but was it a good one? What makes it good or bad? Relative to its peers of the time, or relative to modern states?
I can think of a few criteria: GDP per capita, human rights, life expectancy, and so on, but of course they are all subject to factors other than the form of government.
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What I’m trying to say is, it isn’t enough to just point to rich countries and say they’re all democracies. Can you point me to a country that is rich because it is democratic?
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Japan? It’s far wealthier under democratic rule than it was under autocratic rule, by virtue of openness to commerce and repudiation of a war-based economic plan.
It’s like the link between cigarettes and lung cancer. The correlation between democracy and a high quality of life is too high to dismiss as just a coincidence. And I’ve already offered an explanation why democracy causes a high quality of life. So if you want to dispute the point, I think you need to start offering evidence for your viewpoint.
You’re perfectly correct in your attributions of Japanese wealth. But I would link those to Japan having lost the war and the conditions placed on it as a result, not to being democratic.
I can give you an example where democracy has proved to be worse than an autocracy - compare India and China. Similar countries, one a democracy, one not, both poor for similar reasons, i.e adoption of socialism as government policy. China has managed the move away from those disastrous policies faster and with far greater success than India has, and the primary reason for that is widely recognised as democracy.
You’re incorrect. A high correlation is good reason to go looking, not to conclude anything. And since you’re the one claiming democracy is the best form of government, I suggest you offer up the causal link. I have cited two examples - China and India - that I think demonstrate how democracy can be worse, and also brought up a fairly sound argument for why your correlation can be spurious (Countries with a high quality of life today were already rich and had good institutions for government before they were democracies). This raises the bar even higher for the evidence that you need to come up with.
Not to mention that Japan too was fairly rich and powerful before the gap that was the second world war, and that it received very substantial US aid after the WW to help it on its way back up.
It was due to the actions of a democratic government, many of which were reversals of the policies of the military govenment, that led to the recovery and wealth. It’s possible that a non-democratic government would have steered the same course, but who knows?
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I can give you an example where democracy has proved to be worse than an autocracy - compare India and China. Similar countries, one a democracy, one not, both poor for similar reasons, i.e adoption of socialism as government policy. China has managed the move away from those disastrous policies faster and with far greater success than India has, and the primary reason for that is widely recognised as democracy.
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Then again, India didn’t have to endure anything like the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, the sort of atrocities that go hand-in-hand with autocracy, but not democracy.
Further, if the people of India want socialist policies, even if in the aggregate they are arguably worse off for it, does that make it a failure of democracy, or democracy working as intended? People are entitled to the government they want, even if it’s a bad one.
Their GNP per worker was a third of the U.S.'s before the war, due in part to inept economic management by the autocratic government. They weren’t among the poorest nations of the world by any means, but it’d be a real stretch to call them “rich”. Their power came from spending 30-47% of their budget on the military, even in the pre-war era (the spending increased substantially during the war, of course). They weren’t rich and powerful, just powerful, and then only in their region.
Japan did receive American aid, though it was mostly in the form of food aid to keep their citizens alive.
But those reversals can hardly entirely be chalked up to the democratic government. A lot of what they had to do was dictated by the Allies, especially in the early period after the war.
And that’s a different argument altogether. I’m contesting ‘best’ form of government. If you define ‘best’ simply as being what the people want, then I find myself debating a tautology.
That’s an entirely fair point, and why this is largely an academic exercise. I’m with you; I agree that Japan is one of the better examples we’re going to find. I just find it frustrating that there’s no way to really get better evidence.
Why is it up to me to define best? Why not the one making the claim, who defined it as quality of life? I say this is an open question at this point in time.
If the best governments are those whose people have the highest quality of life, as ranked by the Economist Intelligence Unit, there is a definite trend at the top for democracies. But as you say, it could be that rich nations have a high quality of life, and something about rich nations makes them very likely to be democratic. Anything beyond that is too hard to prove at this time.
And that(too hard to know) is the correct position to take on the matter, one that I agree with, especially if we want to base things on evidence. It’s important too. Instead of blindly pushing for ‘democracy’ everywhere, we can try and be more circumspect. If causal direction is in fact that you first get rich and then move to being a democracy, we may be doing harm by advocating democracy as the best system of government.
Maybe…unless democracy makes it easier to get rich, then poor countries would benefit from switching from autocracy while still poor. For instance, autocracy generally requires large, standing, well-paid security forces to keep some elite or minority faction in power, by suppressing the political organization of everyone else. That costs money, money that could have gone to infrastructure or education.
Corruption would seem to be harder to control in an autocracy, with (typically) no free press to report wrongdoing, and no mechanism to select honest leaders.
Mass slaughter like the Great Leap Forward or the Holodomor has a negative effect on economic growth, as citizens that could have been productive workers are instead killed. These sort of events are almost entirely confined to autocracies.
Lastly, if the regime is pursuing an economic policy that isn’t working, democracy offers the ability to put in a new leader who will try a new policy, autocracy does not. This doesn’t quite work if the people still believe in the failing policy, though, as in the case of India.
It’s clear that democracy is no guarantee of wealth, but it might encourage the prospect of it better than the alternatives.
But it could very well be that a genetic susceptibility to lung cancer causes a more intense desire for nicotine. (I’m not saying that is actually the case.)
The point is that “correlation is not causation” isn’t a warning against assigning causation to coincidences, it is a warning against assigning causation to correlations.
You think democracy causes wealth and quality of life, but maybe wealth and quality of life cause democracy? Or maybe some third thing causes them both? Like an enlightened philosophy regarding human rights? Or maybe a history of decentralized, varied, competing societies (as compared to China’s 5000 year relatively monolithic culture and governance)?
I think you’ll find that just because many of the wealthier, more humane, Western countries are democracies, that doesn’t mean you can go instituting democracy in poor barbaric countries and expect it to magically make them wealthy and wise. Or maybe you can. Have we tried that yet?
A democracy is a country in which the population can freely elect its leaders.
A functioning democracy is a country in which the population can legitimately expect to be able to freely elect a different set of leaders in the future, should the ones just elected not turn out well.
The difference between the two lies in the strength of a country’s institutions and legitimacy - which includes a whole host of matters, such as respect for the rule of law, mutual buy-in to the system by majorities and minorities alike, a government that commands legitimacy and respect even from those who disagree with the democratic choice of leader, etc.
This is exactly why many countries which have held (more or less) free elections do not thereby end up as functioning democracies. The populace and leaders tend to look at elections as winner-takes-all, the losers end up disfavored and resentful (or even in jail), the loyalties are to the party and not to the system. In worst cases, this leads to voting being a singular event, like the Palestinians voting in Hamas.
The negative tendencies of people in democracies to place loyalty to party above the system (or even the country) have been noted since forever - functioning democracies are those in which these forces are kept within reason, and people, despite grumbling, really expect that in 4 or 5 years (or whenever) they can vote the bums out.
