Windship
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Full Definition of democracy
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democracies
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democracies
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Why Are We A Democracy?
- Thread starter Windship
- Start date
Windship
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- May 27, 2014
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16 Significant Advantages and Disadvantages of Democracy
Democracy is a type of political system that requires a popular vote (representative election) to take place to elect the leader of the country and other officials. Simply put, the leaders are chosen by the people.
Many of the most successful countries in the world, including the US, operate under a democratic form of government. While democracy is noted as one of the most efficient government systems ever, it is, however, not without any downsides. Let us take a look at its advantages and disadvantages.
List of Advantages of Democracy
1. It protects the interest of citizens.
As previously stated, the citizens in a democratic country are given the right to vote on political, social and economical issues, particularly the representatives they want to be in charge of making major decisions, such as the president. This can greatly protect the people from anything they would disagree to occur.
2. It prevents monopoly of authority.
Due to the fact that the government is bound by an election term where parties compete to regain authority, democracy prevents monopoly of the ruling authority. And, the elected ruling party would make sure their policies will work for the people, as they will not be able to remain in power after their term with bad records—they will not be re-elected.
3. It promotes equality.
Generally, democracy is based on the rule of equality, which means that all people are equal as far as the law is concerned. Every person has the right to experience and enjoy equal political, social and economic rights, and the state is not allowed to discriminate him on the standard of sex, class, religion and property.
4. It makes for a responsible and stable administration.
When there are elected and fixed representatives, a more responsible government is formed. Thus, democracy can be efficient, firm and stable. Its administration is ruled and conducted with a sense of dedication, and people under this system discuss matters and problems thoroughly to come up with sensible decisions.
5. It brings a feeling of obligation towards the citizens.
The ruling authorities owe their success to elections by the citizens, so they would feel grateful to and socially responsible for them. This can serve as their motivating factor to work for the citizens, for they have the right of choosing their government.
6. It imparts political education to the people.
One argument in favor of democracy is that it can serve as a training school for citizens—they are driven to take part in state affairs. During elections, political parties propose their programs and policies in support of their candidates through public meetings, demonstrations, television, radio, posters and speeches by their leaders to win public favor. All of these can impart political consciousness among the people.
7. It helps make good citizens.
Democracy aims to create the ideal environment that is conducive to personality improvement, character cultivation and good habits. As per the experts, this political system seems to function as the first school for good citizenship, where individuals can learn about their rights and duties from birth to the time of death.
8. It allows a little chance of revolution.
Since this system is based upon public will, there will be little to no chance of public revolt. Elected representatives conduct state affairs with public support, and if they do not work efficiently or do not meet the public’s expectations, they will probably not do well during the next elections. Democracy or other popular governments often function with consensus, thus the question of revolution would not arise.
9. It promotes change.
This political system can promote changes in the government without having to resort to any form of violence. It tries to make citizens feel great and even provides them with a good sense of participation and involvement.
List of Disadvantages of Democracy
1. It might allow misuse of public funds and time.
Democratic governments can lead to wasted time and resources, considering that it takes a huge amount of time on formulating laws and requires a lot of money to be spent during elections. It is also highly possible that the country will be ruled by incompetent and irresponsible leaders who will just spend public funds for their own tours and recreation.
2. It instigates corruption.
Those who are elected to power might resort to unethical means for personal interests and engage in corrupt practices. During their tenure in office, they might take advantage of authority for personal gains, putting the interests of the masses at the backseat.
3. It risks the wrong choice of public servants.
Truth be told, not all individuals under a democratic government are aware of the political and social circumstances in their country. In a voting system, majority wins, and there is no distinction between the votes cast by the literate and the illiterate. People may favor a candidate based on other factors other than pure and required capability. Taking these things into consideration, the elected official may not always be the perfect person for the seat, leading to erroneous decisions.
4. It allows not exercising the right to vote.
Sadly, in some democratic countries, people fail to exercise their right to vote. Perhaps, they are reluctant to do it or are just less aware about the impact of their votes. Or, perhaps they do not see it as a privilege and take the process less seriously.
5. It may put more emphasis on quantity, rather than quality.
Another disadvantage of democracy is in terms of providing services—it tends to put more emphasis on quantity, rather than quality. Also, considering that the system might be governed by irresponsible and incompetent leaders, equality might be in question for only the rich and famous might be prioritized more than the poor.
6. It can take long to make decisions.
Because it takes long to make decisions, it will also take long to implement them. Unlike in a monarchy where one person is making decisions that are implemented quickly, democracy requires majority voting in implementation, thus it is relatively less prompt in taking actions.
7. It may involve immoral practices during elections.
To lure the masses, election campaigns might involve immoral practices, where candidates would use muscle power to draw the majority of votes, even trying to tarnish their opponents’ reputation. Money and power may be abused to influence the people to disregard opposing parties.
Windship
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Decline of the Empire
03/08/2012
Democracies Always Fail
Many Americans believe they live in a democracy. They don't. Yes, there are names on the ballot, campaigns are waged, votes are cast, and the winners serve their terms in Washington. But some votes count more than others. Way more. Those who vote with their checkbooks have far more sway than those who do nothing but push buttons or pull levers in a voting booth. The further you move away from the "one person, one vote" principle, the less of a democracy you have. Here in America we've moved a vast distance away from this ideal principle. That is especially evident this year now that we live in the Age of the Superpacs after the Citizens United decision.
Unfortunately, there is no good word to describe what we've got in the United States. We could call it an oligarchy, but that implies a concentration of power that doesn't exist. The elites who make the rules in America are a relatively large, diverse group. Power is widely and loosely distributed, although most of the power broking goes on in Washington, D.C.
But suppose we did live in a democracy in which all votes were equal. It would fail anyway scientists say, for People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish.
The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.
The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.
As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, "very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is," Dunning toldLife's Little Mysteries.
He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own intellectual skills. Whether the researchers are testing people's ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess, the duo has found that people always assess their own performance as "above average" — even people who, when tested, actually perform at the very bottom of the pile. [Incompetent People Too Ignorant to Know It]
There is a lot more to say about people's competence to evaluate their own competence or the ideas of others, but let's stick with how their "lack of mental tools" affects democracy.
In an ideal democracy where "one person, one vote" actually holds, people's inability to judge ideas and issues would be a big problem. But we live in the Real World, not an ideal world. And the further away you move from an ideal democracy, the less rational the voting process becomes. Here in the United States, party allegiance and voting have become primarily emotionalprocesses. And of course for candidates or those working directly for the political parties or those buying their allegiance, there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
The issues are unimportant, being merely emotional touchstones for uninformed voters. There's hardly anything rational about it for most of these dupes. The advent of Mass Media in the 20th century changed the game in a profound way. Emotional messages can now be disseminated far and wide in 30-second or 60-second spots on TV or radio. Certainly it is not possible to intelligently address a real issue (e.g. tax policy or government deficits) in such a short period of time. Soundbites, not rational thinking, govern the election process from beginning to end.
Thus the scientists quoted above have committed the fallacy I called the Imputation of Rationality in my post Humans Are Not Rational Problem Solvers. If "lack of expertise" (incompetence) was the real problem, we might conclude that democracies always fail because voters can not distinguish between good ideas and bad ideas.
The most incompetent among us serve as canaries in the coal mine signifying a larger quandary in the concept of democracy; truly ignorant people may be the worst judges of candidates and ideas, Dunning said, but we all suffer from a degree of blindness stemming from our own personal lack of expertise.
Mato Nagel, a sociologist in Germany, recently implemented Dunning and Kruger's theories by computer-simulating a democratic election. In his mathematical model of the election, he assumed that voters' own leadership skills were distributed on a bell curve — some were really good leaders, some, really bad, but most were mediocre — and that each voter was incapable of recognizing the leadership skills of a political candidate as being better than his or her own. When such an election was simulated, candidates whose leadership skills were only slightly better than average always won.
Nagel concluded that democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they "effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders."
As I pointed out above, the real problem is that ideal democracies (one person, one equally-weighted vote) do not exist. Clueless voters are a secondary issue.
And I would go much further. I would say that ideal or close-to-ideal democracies are inherently unstable and therefore mustfail. They are unsustainable. The reason for this is simple: ideal democracies are incompatible with Human Nature, i.e.power corrupts, governing inherently requires humans to wield power, and thus the democratic process must become subverted at some point or other.
American democracy failed decades ago—we could argue about exactly when that occurred—but we are seeing that process at work in Europe today. Greece and Italy are now run by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels who, along with the ECB and big private banks, will increasingly call the shots in other countries on Europe's southern rim. Great power is being wielded and corruption is part & parcel of that. The governing process in EU member states is becoming more and more undemocratic every day. If you doubt this, just ask a Greek or an Italian. Next year you can ask the Portuguese or the Spanish.
So my view is that democracies always fail sooner or later. Although the United States never had a pure democracy, it is remarkable how long the old Republic was sustained. But when America became a great global power after World War II, the jig was up. It was only a matter of time until the U.S. became as undemocratic as it is today. What's ironic about this is that the less we live in a democracy, the more those looking to maintain the status quo trumpet the idea of America-as-a-democracy and the importance of voting. Frankly, that's ridiculous, and provides us with yet another example of how crazy life in the United States has become.
In psychological terms, this looks like the biggest case of overcompensation in human history. In the media it is totally unacceptable to call a spade a spade and admit we don't live in a democracy. It is taboo, verboten. When a subject is taboo, that's always a strong indicator that deep psychological forces (i.e. basic instincts or defense mechanisms) are in play.
There's lots more to say about this subject, but that's enough to chew on for today.
03/08/2012
Democracies Always Fail
Many Americans believe they live in a democracy. They don't. Yes, there are names on the ballot, campaigns are waged, votes are cast, and the winners serve their terms in Washington. But some votes count more than others. Way more. Those who vote with their checkbooks have far more sway than those who do nothing but push buttons or pull levers in a voting booth. The further you move away from the "one person, one vote" principle, the less of a democracy you have. Here in America we've moved a vast distance away from this ideal principle. That is especially evident this year now that we live in the Age of the Superpacs after the Citizens United decision.
Unfortunately, there is no good word to describe what we've got in the United States. We could call it an oligarchy, but that implies a concentration of power that doesn't exist. The elites who make the rules in America are a relatively large, diverse group. Power is widely and loosely distributed, although most of the power broking goes on in Washington, D.C.
But suppose we did live in a democracy in which all votes were equal. It would fail anyway scientists say, for People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish.
The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.
The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.
As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, "very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is," Dunning toldLife's Little Mysteries.
He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own intellectual skills. Whether the researchers are testing people's ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess, the duo has found that people always assess their own performance as "above average" — even people who, when tested, actually perform at the very bottom of the pile. [Incompetent People Too Ignorant to Know It]
There is a lot more to say about people's competence to evaluate their own competence or the ideas of others, but let's stick with how their "lack of mental tools" affects democracy.
In an ideal democracy where "one person, one vote" actually holds, people's inability to judge ideas and issues would be a big problem. But we live in the Real World, not an ideal world. And the further away you move from an ideal democracy, the less rational the voting process becomes. Here in the United States, party allegiance and voting have become primarily emotionalprocesses. And of course for candidates or those working directly for the political parties or those buying their allegiance, there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
The issues are unimportant, being merely emotional touchstones for uninformed voters. There's hardly anything rational about it for most of these dupes. The advent of Mass Media in the 20th century changed the game in a profound way. Emotional messages can now be disseminated far and wide in 30-second or 60-second spots on TV or radio. Certainly it is not possible to intelligently address a real issue (e.g. tax policy or government deficits) in such a short period of time. Soundbites, not rational thinking, govern the election process from beginning to end.
Thus the scientists quoted above have committed the fallacy I called the Imputation of Rationality in my post Humans Are Not Rational Problem Solvers. If "lack of expertise" (incompetence) was the real problem, we might conclude that democracies always fail because voters can not distinguish between good ideas and bad ideas.
The most incompetent among us serve as canaries in the coal mine signifying a larger quandary in the concept of democracy; truly ignorant people may be the worst judges of candidates and ideas, Dunning said, but we all suffer from a degree of blindness stemming from our own personal lack of expertise.
Mato Nagel, a sociologist in Germany, recently implemented Dunning and Kruger's theories by computer-simulating a democratic election. In his mathematical model of the election, he assumed that voters' own leadership skills were distributed on a bell curve — some were really good leaders, some, really bad, but most were mediocre — and that each voter was incapable of recognizing the leadership skills of a political candidate as being better than his or her own. When such an election was simulated, candidates whose leadership skills were only slightly better than average always won.
Nagel concluded that democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they "effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders."
As I pointed out above, the real problem is that ideal democracies (one person, one equally-weighted vote) do not exist. Clueless voters are a secondary issue.
And I would go much further. I would say that ideal or close-to-ideal democracies are inherently unstable and therefore mustfail. They are unsustainable. The reason for this is simple: ideal democracies are incompatible with Human Nature, i.e.power corrupts, governing inherently requires humans to wield power, and thus the democratic process must become subverted at some point or other.
American democracy failed decades ago—we could argue about exactly when that occurred—but we are seeing that process at work in Europe today. Greece and Italy are now run by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels who, along with the ECB and big private banks, will increasingly call the shots in other countries on Europe's southern rim. Great power is being wielded and corruption is part & parcel of that. The governing process in EU member states is becoming more and more undemocratic every day. If you doubt this, just ask a Greek or an Italian. Next year you can ask the Portuguese or the Spanish.
So my view is that democracies always fail sooner or later. Although the United States never had a pure democracy, it is remarkable how long the old Republic was sustained. But when America became a great global power after World War II, the jig was up. It was only a matter of time until the U.S. became as undemocratic as it is today. What's ironic about this is that the less we live in a democracy, the more those looking to maintain the status quo trumpet the idea of America-as-a-democracy and the importance of voting. Frankly, that's ridiculous, and provides us with yet another example of how crazy life in the United States has become.
In psychological terms, this looks like the biggest case of overcompensation in human history. In the media it is totally unacceptable to call a spade a spade and admit we don't live in a democracy. It is taboo, verboten. When a subject is taboo, that's always a strong indicator that deep psychological forces (i.e. basic instincts or defense mechanisms) are in play.
There's lots more to say about this subject, but that's enough to chew on for today.
USNavyVet
VIP Member
We're a Constitutional Republic. Not a Democracy. Democracy is mob rule.
Carl in Michigan
Diamond Member
- Aug 15, 2016
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We are a CONSTITUTIONALLY LIMITED REPUBLIC.
Big difference. Its supposed to limit the power of Godvernment over the lives of the citizen.
Big difference. Its supposed to limit the power of Godvernment over the lives of the citizen.
BuckToothMoron
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- Apr 3, 2016
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Full Definition of democracy
plural
democracies
Your question poses a false premise by the very definition you employed. Ours is not a government of majority rule, and hence not a strict democracy. Its scary to think the people on USMB are likely more informed than the average voter yet we get OP's like this one.
Pumpkin Row
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This entire thread is apparently about you not understanding our government structure.. but judging from your other posts in other threads, there's little if anything that you do understand.
BuckToothMoron
Gold Member
- Apr 3, 2016
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We currently, have a Democracy...kinda. Saying we dont and never did, makes you look ignorant with an agenda.
Your hole is deep enough, put down the shovel already.
Fenton Lum
Gold Member
- May 7, 2016
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We currently, have a Democracy...kinda. Saying we dont and never did, makes you look ignorant with an agenda.
We have the illusion of a democracy, and having a different view doesn't make anyone anything. Your attempting to take anyone pushing back on the notion that we do have a functional democracy that meets the needs of the citizenry and chastizing the inquiry speaks of your own agenda. And that's pretty much how the power strucuture handles inquiry and push back as well.
I think most people know we're not a democracy.
occupied
Diamond Member
- Nov 8, 2011
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The correct answer is that most countries, free or not, were/are a constitutional republic so that is no guarantee of anything, the ideal of democracy is the crucial element for a country to be free. Too many people dismissing democracy as mere mob rule is the first step towards fascism.We're a Constitutional Republic. Not a Democracy. Democracy is mob rule.
- Feb 12, 2007
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Full Definition of democracy
plural
democracies
We're not supposed to be a Democracy. The U.S. was set up to be a Constitution Republic with limits on government power - one important purpose of which is to protect minority (not racial, but political) rights. Pure Democracies always descend into raging mobs which persecute the political minority (which is a moving target based on arbitrary abuses of power).
occupied
Diamond Member
- Nov 8, 2011
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There has never been a "pure democracy" on a national scale ever.Full Definition of democracy
plural
democracies
We're not supposed to be a Democracy. The U.S. was set up to be a Constitution Republic with limits on government power - one important purpose of which is to protect minority (not racial, but political) rights. Pure Democracies always descend into raging mobs which persecute the political minority (which is a moving target based on arbitrary abuses of power).
Rustic
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- Oct 3, 2015
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Mob rule cannot be organized that's why… LOLThere has never been a "pure democracy" on a national scale ever.Full Definition of democracy
plural
democracies
We're not supposed to be a Democracy. The U.S. was set up to be a Constitution Republic with limits on government power - one important purpose of which is to protect minority (not racial, but political) rights. Pure Democracies always descend into raging mobs which persecute the political minority (which is a moving target based on arbitrary abuses of power).
There has never been a "pure democracy" on a national scale ever.Full Definition of democracy
plural
democracies
We're not supposed to be a Democracy. The U.S. was set up to be a Constitution Republic with limits on government power - one important purpose of which is to protect minority (not racial, but political) rights. Pure Democracies always descend into raging mobs which persecute the political minority (which is a moving target based on arbitrary abuses of power).
Far left drones are always wrong!
Switzerland is a rare example of a country with instruments of direct democracy (at the level of the municipalities, cantons and federal state). Citizens have more power than in a representative democracy.
- Feb 12, 2007
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There has never been a "pure democracy" on a national scale ever.Full Definition of democracy
plural
democracies
We're not supposed to be a Democracy. The U.S. was set up to be a Constitution Republic with limits on government power - one important purpose of which is to protect minority (not racial, but political) rights. Pure Democracies always descend into raging mobs which persecute the political minority (which is a moving target based on arbitrary abuses of power).
And your point is?
The real issue is that we have Prog Elites manipulating their hordes of howling monkeys into thinking that "majority rule" means that they can shred The Constitution and turn political opponents into criminals.
In reality, nothing is perfectly pure. But that doesn't mean that it the concept is invalid.
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