What’s gone wrong with democracy?

http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was-most-successful-political-idea-20th-century-why-has-it-run-trouble-and-what-can-be-do

by rajbala • 12 years ago

69 70 12 years ago

economist.com

nirnira5• 12 years ago

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

Kurtz792• 12 years ago

"Great article. Really good use of infographics. Also great responsive designs"

I liked the design of the page and the infographics, but the full-page advertisement in the middle is kind of obnoxious.

But seriously, Bitcoin would help how exactly ??? At least in Europe the problem is the complete opposite of inflation, prices do not rise because consumer do not spend and banks do not concede loans... devaluation was a measure that government could take before the introduction of the Euro, now it's not really an option.

saraid21610• 12 years ago

Um. Where does it bring up Bitcoin?

nirnira5• 12 years ago

Sorry as you can see I axed that part of my comment because it was a bit tenuous.

Bitcoin would help because it is a fixed-supply currency. If the world switches to it, no government anywhere will be able to practise inflation anymore.

Inflation is still practised by many governments throughout the world - many in a limited way, but many also with gusto.

jeffbr132• 12 years ago

the full-page advertisement in the middle is kind of obnoxious.

I actually came to say that I found the advertising UX surprisingly tasteful, and similar to how a full-page ad in a magazine feels!

The big (relevant-to-the-piece) ad is there if you're interested, but you can keep on scrolling right past it if not. The small "Sponsored By" box on the side is a nice WWW touch, allowing you to go straight to the advertiser, if you decide that you're interested later, but cba to scroll back up the page.

At the end of the day, if I'm going to do the equivalent of picking up their magazine, reading an article, and putting it back on the shelf, then someone has to pay The Economist if they're gonna stay in business.

methodover• 12 years ago

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.

ekianjo6• 12 years ago

The article mentioned it only once, but democracy has an interesting side effect: Peace.

No, not really. There's a clear lack of evidence for that theory. Politicians can convince people to go to war even if they are naturally opposed to it. There's ample evidence that FDR specifically did that (cut the oil resources of Japan during WW2, among other things, to force them to attack, and support the allies against the principles of Neutrality that he was bound to respect from the US constitution, all in secret and away from the public eyes) to coerce the Americans into War. I won't go in the debate whether it was the right thing or the wrong thing to do, but it was a clear example where the public did NOT want to go into war (after the experience of WW1 and the American intervention in Europe) yet Democracy was failed by its elected leaders.

aetherson• 12 years ago

That's not the theory of Democratic Peace. The theory of Democratic Peace is that democracies don't go to war with other democracies -- not that they can't be manipulated into war with autocracies.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

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.

nvader2• 12 years ago

The concept you describe in 1) is called Leapfrogging, and it's really cool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging

anonymousDan• 12 years ago

With regard to 2, it would be cool if something like votecoin could be used to build a viable online voting system.

marcosdumay• 12 years ago

Creating a secure voting system based on pseudonyms (for granting anonymity) looks like a relatively easy task. In fact, for me it looks like the only way to make a secure and anonymous voting system (even paper ballots aren't completely so).

The problem is what will make the government follow the people's decisions?

saraid21610• 12 years ago

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

You're almost certainly correct, but I've had more than one Internet argument about the viability of democracy in which "China/Singapore is doing really well!" was brought in as a trump card.

The article's point is less that China is any kind of proof and more than it is perceived to constitute proof.

nvader2• 12 years ago

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.

mikeash• 12 years ago

The word confuses me. I looked it up and it seems to basically mean a politician who actually knows about things outside of politics. Yet the word is almost exclusively used in a pejorative sense.

hrkristian• 12 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy

A technocrat can technically (heh) be a full-time politician, but the idea -in a nutshell- is to limit a position of power to people with relevant education.

Example, you'd require a medical degree to be a Minister of Health and Care Services.

BWStearns• 12 years ago

It's a term of art reserved for those who are domain experts on a given policy matter or subject who are granted control over that area. Chairman of the fed would be a good example. It doesn't have to do with technology so much as technique.

Generally the more blatantly a role requires domain knowledge, the more likely it is to be given to a technocrat as opposed to left for political debate.

pekk• 12 years ago

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!

LordHumungous• 12 years ago

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.

jseliger• 12 years ago

Great comment.

I would add that to some extent the current crop of strongmen have figured out some ways of suppressing democracy more quietly than strongmen of old; Putin, for example, cloaks repression in bureaucracy.

gooble_flop• 12 years ago

democratic system is better than any of the utopian non-democratic schemes

Those aren't the only two choices though.

ekianjo6• 12 years ago

Exactly. Instead of giving a binary choice, there are other ways a country could be run. Churchill was from another era.

EDIT: Besides, Churchill was only a proponent of democracy when it was going HIS way. We have now seen communication cables between FDR and Churchill during WWII, where Churchill implored FDR to go to war against the will of the US Congress. You can't have it both ways.

Sniffnoy• 12 years ago

That have been tried. That it's better than anything else that's been devised is far from clear.

saraid21610• 12 years ago

I actually disagree. (And I disagree with Churchill.)

Let's assume that we agree that liberalism is a good thing. We can hash out what "liberalism" actually means, if you like. I'm willing to be flexible on the definition. Given that assumption, let's sketch out a governmental form and argue about feasibility.

I suspect that, unless we go very far afield from mainstream concepts of liberalism, we'll arrive at something approximating democracy very closely, differing mostly in that it'll be overly idealistic.

Anyone up for playing this game?

fiatmoney• 12 years ago

Wait, all of your examples are examples of mass violence being unleashed as a result of a conversion from an already existing non-democratic, non-utopian government to a democratic form of government (which incidentally often has has explicitly utopian goals). Your proper decision point isn't "Do I choose liberal democracy or fascism"; it's "given I live in Wilhelmine Germany, do I start a revolution to elect some Nazis".

ck2• 12 years ago

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

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

immad• 12 years ago

India and Nigeria seem to be winning in terms of high populace countries with low incarceration rates.

TrainedMonkey3• 12 years ago

"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...

jeffbr132• 12 years ago

Isn't that scheme similar to the one Aaron Swartz proposed, and Lawrence Lessig is campaigning for?

EDIT: I think it was called [Change Congress](http://change-congress.org/), but that URL now redirects to [Rootstrikers](http://www.rootstrikers.org/).

TrainedMonkey3• 12 years ago

I shamefully admit that I did not do any research, this is just an idea that popped in my head after listening to the radio show linked in [0]. If somebody already doing this, it would be pretty awesome.

csense• 12 years ago

HN discussion of video of Lessig / Swartz analysis of the problem with government: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7314740

shrughes2• 12 years ago

Yeah, I think there's a better way to alter democracy than outlawing political speech for everybody except approved major parties.

Require candidates to provide clear answers

And the enforcement mechanism is...?

dkuntz2• 12 years ago

Is it really outlawing all political speech, or limiting the amount of influence the wealthy have over the body politic?

Political speech would still be permitted, politics would just cease to be the playground of who can wield money better to who has the better ideas.

argumentum• 12 years ago

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

Who is to decide what counts as "political" content (and is thereby banned) and what is acceptable?

Who is to decide what counts as "advertising" and what constitutes art or journalism?

Who is to decide what constitutes "clear answers", what questions (and therefore opinions) are "acceptable"?

What you propose is not merely "very hard to get right", it's impossible. It's not just "easy to get wrong", it's inevitable that we will get it wrong.

It's inevitable that with such a system, unpopular opinions will be suppressed. Even worse, the more unpopular an opinion, the more likely it will be suppressed. Not only will we lose the freedom of speech (if that matters to you at all), we will lose freedom of inquiry which depends more than anything else on no idea being off the table, and everything be subjected to debate.

What you describe is a scary, scary world, and one in which I would prefer to never live in.

TrainedMonkey3• 12 years ago

"What you describe is a scary, scary world, and one in which I would prefer to never live in."

You have very good points that I do not have answer to (possibly because there is none in general). I am not trying to argue that idea I proposed is correct or right. I just listened to the talk linked in [0] and think that money raising should go. How it goes is another question entirely.

InclinedPlane2• 12 years ago

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.

saraid21610• 12 years ago

From the article,

One reason why so many democratic experiments have failed recently is that they put too much emphasis on elections and too little on the other essential features of democracy. The power of the state needs to be checked, for instance, and individual rights such as freedom of speech and freedom to organise must be guaranteed. The most successful new democracies have all worked in large part because they avoided the temptation of majoritarianism—the notion that winning an election entitles the majority to do whatever it pleases. India has survived as a democracy since 1947 (apart from a couple of years of emergency rule) and Brazil since the mid-1980s for much the same reason: both put limits on the power of the government and provided guarantees for individual rights.

InclinedPlane2• 12 years ago

The problem is such things are NOT features of democracy, they are features of the "democracy" term we use as short-hand for all of the institutions and traditions which protect individual liberty and give rise to long-lived consensual governance. But short-hand isn't enough.

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

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.

saraid21610• 12 years ago

Right. Because you wouldn't have to qualify any other word we use for governments to gain a functional understanding.

tunesmith• 12 years ago

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.

mynameishere• 12 years ago

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.

Mikeb85• 12 years ago

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...

turbojerry2• 12 years ago

This is already happening in Ukraine with the far-right having a lot of power now-

http://www.channel4.com/news/svoboda-ministers-ukraine-new-g...

vfclists• 12 years ago

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.

FD3SA• 12 years ago

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.

j2kun• 12 years ago

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 the world.

This. This is what politicians don't understand. This is what the world needs.

saraid21610• 12 years ago

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 the world.

I don't know if I agree that we should have national challenges, but that sentence is easily the best political statement I've ever seen on HN.

I'm curious if anyone else is interested in actually pursuing this?

turbojerry2• 12 years ago

In many of these cases politicians are engaging in unlawful activities that a non-politician would be prosecuted for. If we had a way to challenge these unlawful activities in court that might help. Also if convictions result then all the costs would be paid by the convicted and the state, that way a lawyer could make a good living by putting politicians who are guilty in the dock and at the same time cleaning up the government.

sebastianhaeni• 12 years ago

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.

kschroeder• 12 years ago

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.

What’s gone wrong with democracy?

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