The Economist Intelligence Unit
released on Wednesday its 2017 Democracy Index, which ranks 167
countries on a 0 to 10 scale. Only countries with scores above 8 are
categorised as "full" democracies.
The US was downgraded from a "full democracy" to a "flawed democracy" in the same study last year, which cited the "low esteem in which US voters hold their government, elected representatives, and political parties."
The study has five criteria: Whether elections are free and fair ("electoral process and pluralism"), governments have checks and balances ("functioning of government"), and whether citizens are included in politics ("political participation"), support their government ("political culture"), and enjoy freedom of expression ("civil liberties").
The US was downgraded from a "full democracy" to a "flawed democracy" in the same study last year, which cited the "low esteem in which US voters hold their government, elected representatives, and political parties."
The study has five criteria: Whether elections are free and fair ("electoral process and pluralism"), governments have checks and balances ("functioning of government"), and whether citizens are included in politics ("political participation"), support their government ("political culture"), and enjoy freedom of expression ("civil liberties").
Norway comes in at first with a score
of 9.87 out of a possible 10. Iceland comes in 2nd followed by
Sweden, New Zealand and Denmark. Canada comes in 6th (tied with
Ireland) with a score of 9.15. America is denied a podium finish,
coming in, tied with Italy, at 21st with 7.98.
If you ask me, someone was very
generous with the U.S. score. Meanwhile, an article today in
The Atlantic reminds us that America
was never intended to be a democracy. It's a
lengthy article I've attempted to excerpt below.
Gilens and Page tested those
theories by tracking how well the preferences of various groups
predicted the way that Congress and the executive branch would act on
1,779 policy issues over a span of two decades. The results were
shocking. Economic elites and narrow interest groups were
very influential: They succeeded in getting their favored policies
adopted about half of the time, and in stopping legislation to which
they were opposed nearly all of the time. Mass-based interest groups,
meanwhile, had little effect on public policy. As for the views of
ordinary citizens, they had virtually no independent effect at all.
...
It is true that to recover
its citizens’ loyalty, our democracy needs to curb the power of
unelected elites who seek only to pad their influence and line their
pockets. But it is also true that to protect its citizens’ lives
and promote their prosperity, our democracy needs institutions that
are, by their nature, deeply elitist. This, to my mind, is
the great dilemma that the United States—and other democracies
around the world—will have to resolve if they wish to survive in
the coming decades.
We don’t need to abolish all technocratic institutions or merely save the ones that exist. We need to build a new set of political institutions that are both more responsive to the views and interests of ordinary people, and better able to solve the immense problems that our society will face in the decades to come.
We don’t need to abolish all technocratic institutions or merely save the ones that exist. We need to build a new set of political institutions that are both more responsive to the views and interests of ordinary people, and better able to solve the immense problems that our society will face in the decades to come.
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