
What’s gone wrong with democracy? - rajbala
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
======
LordHumungous
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.

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

Those aren't the only two choices though.

~~~
ekianjo
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.

~~~
saraid216
That doesn't surprise me. Churchill is not someone I'd look to for guidance on
political governance. He's internationally recognized and respected because he
was a _war leader_. That's the beginning and end of his qualifications.

~~~
ekianjo
I recommend the book _Pearl Harbor: the Seeds and Fruits of Infamy_ for anyone
who wants to know more (the book is quite neutral despite its title). Free PDF
here:
[http://library.mises.org/books/Percy%20L%20Greaves,%20Jr/Pea...](http://library.mises.org/books/Percy%20L%20Greaves,%20Jr/Pearl%20Harbor%20The%20Seeds%20and%20Fruits%20of%20Infamy.pdf)

------
DanielBMarkham
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.

~~~
saraid216
Right. Because you wouldn't have to qualify any other word we use for
governments to gain a functional understanding.

------
methodover
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.

~~~
ekianjo
> 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
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The theory of Democratic Peace is that democracies don't go to war with
> other democracies

The Democratic Peace conjecture doesn't really deserve to be called a
"theory"; if you define democracies narrowly enough that you can get anywhere
close to having a reasonable argument that there aren't plenty of examples of
wars between democracies, then you've also defined them so narrowly that,
given the total incidence of war and the number of democracies existing at any
given point in history, you'd expect very close to zero total wars between
democracies if two democracies were just as likely to go to war with each
other as any other pair of nations.

Its like using the historical record to argue that nations with manned space
programs don't go to war with each other.

~~~
ekianjo
> if you define democracies narrowly enough that you can get anywhere close to
> having a reasonable argument that there aren't plenty of examples of wars
> between democracies

Exactly. The time period where _democracies_ actually exist is incredibly
narrow then, therefore this theory suffers from a sample bias.

Besides, there are many examples of systems very close to actual democracies
(i.e. Republics or Monarchical Republics with some form of representation)
going to war against each other in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe,
where actual democracies would probably have followed the same path.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Besides, there are many examples of systems very close to actual democracies
> (i.e. Republics or Monarchical Republics with some form of representation)
> going to war against each other in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe,
> where actual democracies would probably have followed the same path.

Plus, once you have a notable number of things most people would call
democracies in the 20th and early 21st centuries, you've got several wars
between them, that necessitate narrowing the definition of democracy to
salvage the Democratic Peace interpretation.

------
mynameishere
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.

------
InclinedPlane
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.

~~~
saraid216
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.

~~~
InclinedPlane
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.

~~~
saraid216
By this measure, we should never use any term to describe any government or
country. They all fall short.

------
ck2
Here's another map I use to gauge the quality of a country:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate)

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

------
Mikeb85
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...

~~~
turbojerry
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...](http://www.channel4.com/news/svoboda-ministers-ukraine-new-
government-far-right)

------
kschroeder
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.

------
FD3SA
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.

~~~
turbojerry
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.

------
tunesmith
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.

------
sebastianhaeni
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.

------
vfclists
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.

------
higherpurpose
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.

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

~~~
marcosdumay
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?

~~~
dragonwriter
Pseudonymity is not anonymity. In fact, blockchain-style pseudonymity means
you can prove that a pseudonym is yours, which means it fails spectacularly to
serve the purpose for which anonymity is sought in ballots (particularly, it
can be used for "prove you voted this way and I will reward you, else I will
punish you", the avoidance of which is a key purpose of anonymous ballots.)

> 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).

Nothing is completely secure, nor completely anonymous.

------
nvader
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
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
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy](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.

------
pekk
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!

------
TrainedMonkey
"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...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/461/take-the-money-and-run-for-office) .

1 - or here is a shorter text version:
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/03/26/149390968/take-
the...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/03/26/149390968/take-the-money-
and-run-for-office)

~~~
shrughes
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
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.

~~~
shrughes
So... political speech is permitted for Rupert Murdoch and G.E., or whoever
owns NBC now, but not... who?

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

~~~
Kurtz79
"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.

~~~
jeffbr13
> 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.

~~~
Kurtz79
Uh, I found the ad integrated with the article a bit TOO well, to the point
that kind of sneaks on you.

In a magazine I can usually tell where an ad is, and it does not take me away
from the article.

In this case I had actually read the ad before realizing it wasn't part of the
article, even the color scheme matches the rest of the page.

BTW, it's a minor complaint and it might be just me, again, great article.

