United States of America: The flawed democracy | INFJ Forum

United States of America: The flawed democracy

brightmoon

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Oct 2, 2015
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Each year The Economist Business Intelligence Unit (part of the Economist magazine tasked with providing business leaders with information to make informed decisions) publishes a Democracy Index. This year for the first time the United States is rated as "flawed democracy" rating a 7.89 out of 10.

“The decline in the US democracy score reflects an erosion of confidence in government and public institutions over many years,” the report states. “[Trump’s] candidacy was not the cause of the deterioration in trust but rather a consequence of it.”

The rankings are determined by quantitative measures of five different parts of democracy: “electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture.”

The US scores particularly poorly on “the functioning of government” (7.14) and “political participation” (7.22). This, according to the EIU, reflects a steep decline in American citizens’ faith in their government.

So the report isn’t saying the US is becoming anti-democratic, in the sense that it’s suspending civil liberties, failing to hold free elections, or anything dramatic like that. Rather, it’s that the democratic system is weakening, because its citizens have come to believe that its key institutions are not working for them.

The United States has some impressive company in the “flawed democracy” category: Japan and France, for example, have scores roughly identical to America’s (Japan is at 7.99, France is at 7.92). But those countries, too, have their problems. On one respected metric of press freedom, Japan ranks lower than quasi-authoritarian Tanzania. France has been running a civil liberties-restricting state of emergency, permitting (among other things) searches of homes without warrants, since the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

The point here, then, is that democracy is not just a question of whether you hold elections or you don't. Rather, it’s that there are a lot of factors that go into a democracy working the way that it’s supposed to, including respect for civil liberties and citizens’ faith in their country’s democratic system. As those things erode, democracies become weaker.

The real takeaway from America’s downgrading is not “American democracy is over.” It’s that democracy in America, and an alarming number of other advanced democracies, is not functioning as well as it should — and that should worry us.

http://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/25/14385728/economist-intelligence-unit-american-democracy-2016

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Why is an arrow pointing at Israel in the map?
 
No Crete is much further north and west

Figured it out.

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It's Cyprus.


Anyway, I guess the most helpful question to ask right now is "If large numbers of people don't feel represented by anyone in office, what particular areas do they disagree about?"

If the complaint is less about that, per se, than whether politicians have the best interests of the people at heart, perhaps that's more just a cultural thing--the result of media and lack of education. Or simply what it was leading up to the Civil War--people's wants becoming so totally polarized.