[glup]

'Functioning democracies' are probably better thought of as being a gradient rather than a binary property. There are a number of indices of varying regional and temporal scope, e.g. you could look at the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index for 2006 onward [1].

There's a lot of latent causes that move these indices (e.g., the collapse of the Soviet Union) so theoretical frameworks are useful for understanding the raw data, e.g. Samuel Huntington's 'waves' characterization of democracy [2]. Not saying that this is right, but sometimes it helps to think about the underlying currents.

Finally, democracy and liberal institutions are not concomitant... in fact it's sort of a bug in democracy that you can totally democratically dismantle institutions like court systems, press freedoms, and even voting [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Wave_Democracy [3] http://media.library.ku.edu.tr/reserve/resfall15_16/Sosc116_...

[js8]

> Finally, democracy and liberal institutions are not concomitant... in fact it's sort of a bug in democracy that you can totally democratically dismantle institutions like court systems, press freedoms, and even voting [3].

Actually, I believe that to avoid those Russell-style paradoxes, it should be a rule that the vote must be potentially reversible in the future with the same process. So the decisions like

- strip democratic rights to a minority

- kill a specific person

cannot be democratic. On the other hand, creating a democracy then cannot be democratic decision either.

Dismantling press freedoms and courts would still be democratic (in fact, many democratic countries do not have full freedom of speech), as long as people could vote again on the issue (I don't see why they would vote to dismantle it, so it's not a big deal).