A blog to give a voice to our concern about the continued erosion of our democratic processes not only within the House of Commons and within our electoral system but also throughout our society. Here you will find articles about the current problems within our parliamentary democracy, about actions both good and bad by our elected representatives, about possible solutions, opinions and debate about the state of democracy in Canada, and about our roles/responsibilities as democratic citizens. We invite your thoughtful and polite comments upon our posts and ask those who wish to post longer articles or share ideas on this subject to submit them for inclusion as a guest post.
Contact us at democracyunderfire@gmail.com

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Democracy 'Satisfaction' dropped 20%

Its been a while since I gave Samara the democracy measurement folks a plug but a recent visit to their web site encouraged me to have another look around and you should too.

Their most recent report titled 'Who's the Boss?' once again reinforces what many of us firmly believe in that the ,satisfaction' with our democracy has dropped from 75% in 2004 to 55% now. The only surprise to me is that its that high but then there are still a lot of citizens not taking notice. Their various surveys also reveal that Canadians “feel that their MPs’ work representing constituents is falling short when compared to MPs’ representation of their parties.” and that “Canadians indicated feeling that their elected representatives often are not accountable for their actions nor do they pay attention to what Canadians think.”

Non of this is news to those of us who have been following the goings on in the HoC and the Harper Regimes latest moves, or for that matter the Ontario governments suspension of parliament. Certainly Harper is one of the most talked about politicians on twitter at #cdnpoli as revealed in their previous research 'The Neighbourhoods of #cdnpoli' even though he “doesn’t really engage in conversations with other Twitter users.” There is one MP that does engage with citizens across the country in the top ten however and that is Parliamentarian of the Year Elizabeth May who is #6 on the list right up there with LeadNow. Here are the top ten Mentioned Users in #cdnpoli (September to November 2011)


Rank User # of Mentions
1 min_reyes 2250
2 cbcpolitics 1860
3 pmharper 1749
4 leadnowca 1709
5 natnewswatch 1645
6 elizabethmay 1575
7 globeandmail 1523
8 beari8it 1431
9 wicary 1012
10 nspector4 954

There is lots more information over at Samara, do take a look and support their work on trying to get a definitive measure of where our democracy is now so that we can actually measure its decline!



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