Taking 60 questions across a handful of arbitrary categories and weighting them all equally is not a very useful methodology for this type of thing. It can help you differentiate Canada from Azerbaijan, but isn't going to be useful for comparing similarly-situated countries.
It is pretty authoritarian, heavy-handed and undemocratic, I just think people generally have trouble with that because Western countries are supposed to not be like that.
I mean were it a non-western country with this level of surveillance, in the open corruption, expectation to conform, number of unelected PMs, orchestrated suppression of political opposition, regulation of the press etc. we would have no trouble calling it worse things.
All PMs are "unelected", or at least not elected via a general election, beyond their election as an MP. There's a reason they're called a Prime Minister, not a president or similar. The UK doesn't directly elect the head of the UK government, and it never has. The PM is elected is the leader of the party that gains enough seats in parliament to form a government. Enough seats is determined by the simple question of "would the formed government have a reasonable ability to pass legislation in parliament, as is needed to conduct the business of government", nothing else.
This is the UK chosen form of democracy, the US may prefer a more direct form of democracy, but that's not without its issues either.
Yeah, I know. That's nitpicking. What I meant was the number of PMs who didn't have to campaign in a general election, at the very least not for a good while after taking office, I assumed that was clear.
I’m not really sure you can separate the two. The UK parliamentary system doesn’t require the PM to campaign, and never has. I don’t think you can call PM “unelected” when the system doesn’t, and has never, required them to get a direct mandate from the people.
Many would argue that the recent trend of PMs trying to appear presidential, and running general election campaigns based on their personal brand, as problematic. As the PM isn’t meant to be an important part of a persons vote. They’re voting for their local MP not the national PM.
Also every PM had to campaign in a general election. They need to be an MP to become PM, that requires them to run in a general election and win their seat.
These days I have a hard time telling the difference between either, because no one in a democracy will ever vote for crazy policies like having surveillance cameras pointing at themselves or having increasing harsher laws on freedoms both online and offline.
If so many important things are not up for the vote, is it really a democracy?
>>If so many important things are not up for the vote, is it really a democracy?
Exactly. For me, this is the myth of democracy. A party campaigns on a manifesto containing a few cherry-picked policies, aimed at appealing to enough of the electorate, to get them elected [quite often with less than 50% of the vote]
And, assuming they have an overall majority in parliament, this then means that every decision they subsequently make over the next 4 years is legitimised in advance because "you voted for this".
The only true democracy would involve regular referenda, whenever major new policies were proposed. This should be technically feasible with current technology. But, given the last time we had a referendum in UK the people didn't vote for the option they were meant to, I'm doubtful we'd ever see such a thing implemented.
I'd rather have that flavour of democracy than the one that voted someone like Trump into power. Hell, he's still managing to wreak havoc over there even post-potus.
That just seems like a joke to me. They literally have a House of Lords with hereditary positions which can alter the laws passed by the democratically elected House of Commons.
The House of Lords is becoming a joke (it's just a place an exiting Prime Minister sends their mates now), but hereditary peers were abolished in 1999. Also, the HOL often pushes back on the more extreme legislation the MPs try to get through the House of Commons.
But i agree the unelected nature of it is undemocratic. It should be replaced with a second elected house that can perform the same role of putting a check on the HOC.
Full HOL reform would be a good way to start the move towards a proportional representation electoral system in the UK. Make the reformed second chamber a PR elected house and give them a slightly longer/fixed period between elections to shield them from the chaos of a general election and party politics.
>Full HOL reform would be a good way to start the move towards a proportional representation electoral system in the UK. Make the reformed second chamber a PR elected house and give them a slightly longer/fixed period between elections to shield them from the chaos of a general election and party politics.
This is the best suggestion I've seen on HoL reform, ever. I mean, it'll never happen, but that really is a great idea, and would mean that the chamber would be clearly different from the Commons, which I've not seen another proposal making sense on this area.
No they haven't. They decided they don't want ranked choice voting (known in the UK as the 'alternative vote'). Proportional representation is a different system, which the minority Liberal Democrat party and others had long argued for and quite a lot of people regarded the substitution as a form of bait-and-switch. Additionally some had reservations about the scheduling of the referendum to overlap with local elections in parts of the UK.
In fact had the AV referendum vote gone the other way it is likely that the composition of our Parliament after the following general election would have been less proportional to the overall share of the national vote won by each party.
AV has certain desirable characteristics if you want to elect a single representative fairly. It makes little sense as a way to elect a group of representatives fairly. It sure is a great strawman if you're trying to kill off interest in real and appropriate electoral reform and fixing the systemic democratic deficits clearly evident in the current system we use to elect our MPs though.
That wasn't about proportional representation: that was about instant run-off: it's a vote counting algorithm, not an algorithm for assigning seats. For that referendum, they picked the worst simple voting system that was better than first-past-the-post, so I'm not terribly surprised it didn't win. https://ncase.me/ballot/ discusses these voting systems in more detail.
It's quite odd to me how we "hand wave" individual rights using the term "democratic" as if there is something intrinsic and unquestionable about it. LIke, sure 60% voted "democratically" for a decision to go one way. But what about the other 40%?
Democracy is a very weird term, dictate of the majority can be a democratic. We should use very specific names, like independence of court system, accessibility of court/lawyer procedures, level of politically motivated crimes(those have a huge impact on people's willingness to act for all of this to improve), freedom of speech, freedom of movement, highly competitive democratic procedures, freedom of economic entrepreneurship, freedom of personal relationships, etc
Funny how the US score dropped in 2016. I don't put a ton of weight into these rankings, especially near the top because they are so subject to partisan politics. Depending on where you stand in politics, you could make an effective argument that the US democracy slipped in 2016. But you could also make an equal argument that Canada is far less democratic after the events of the pandemic, truckers protest, etc.
Personally I think that the US, Canada, UK, Germany, etc should all fall into a general "Western Democracy" category. Roughly speaking we all have the same rights, though details differ and depending on where you stand in politics you may place one above the other, but at that point it becomes completely subjective.
Bills like these erode our democracy and we have to be vigilant, we also need to realize that in any western democratic country, we are light years away from true authoritarianism.
You seem to be suggesting that authoritarian and democratic are exclusive attributes but this isn't the case. Authoritarianism (the degree of control vis a vis personal liberty) has absolutely nothing to do with democracy (the way decisions are made).
A dictatorship can be less authoritarian than a democracy.
> A dictatorship can be less authoritarian than a democracy.
While it is theoretically possible, I have a hard time coming up with an example where that is the case. What dictatorship is less authoritarian than democracies?
It's quite common, actually. An obvious and extreme example would be American slave states pre-civil war as viewed from the perspective of Black Americans.
There is a well known phrase, the "tyranny of the majority." It is in fact extremely common for a majority to oppress a minority within a democratic system -- often with severely authoritarian methods.
> An obvious and extreme example would be American slave states pre-civil war as viewed from the perspective of Black Americans
When you define a large mass of people as property and deny them the franchise, that's not oppression through democracy, because its not democracy at all.
The US government 1776-1865 is obviously democratic, and it's obviously possible (and again, not uncommon) for a democracy to engage in disenfranchisement. Your objection is a form of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy in that you are attempting to define democracy as a non-authoritarian system which is demonstrably false.
In any event it's not necessary to argue this point because there are no shortage of further examples which include authoritarianism exerted over non-disenfranchised demographics. Here are some further examples of authoritarianism within the USA:
* Japanese internment of 1940s
* Every historic invocation of martial law (more than a dozen)
* Every historic invocation of conscription
* Historic oppression of women, which continued well after the suffrage movement in a variety of ways
There are of course countless other examples throughout the history of democracies. Even a cursory reading can uncover countless examples, from contemporary democracies all the way back to its origins in ancient Greece. It is not uncommon for a majority rule system to impose authoritarian controls -- in fact, it is the norm. This is why we have concepts such as constitutional rights, which are specifically designed to balance against the authoritarian tendencies of majority rule.
> The US government 1776-1865 is obviously democratic
Its obviously aristocratic republican with a quite open hostility to democracy at the beginning of that period, evolving over time in a rather unequal way in different parts of the union toward democracy (in both ideals and substance, though not in lockstep between the two.)