61–70 of 87 posts
How can a country be democratic with only two parties?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been obvious to anyone who pays attention to all the details and thinks hard about their meaning, but that is a small fraction of people.
I think that deep down many people often believe that they could have a say in policy if only they tried hard enough, so their lack of influence is a kind of personal failing. In reality these systems are designed to absorb your effort and direct it into time sinks that either serve those in power Want to change things? First "we" need to take back the house by phone-banking for this blue dog Chip in $5 today to help…
Really? I don't know anyone that thinks that. Everyone I know think, "I'm not a billionaire, so of course there is nothing I can do."
"It's similar to how people are led to believe anyone could have a billion dollars if only they were smarter and/or worked harder."
Ha ha, well there you are. I also know no one that believes that either. But of course if someone believes the latter, the former follows. ;-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not 4 and 1 respectively?
Hah! Reading about the way democracy was done in Athens, both are at 0. In Athens, they had some 5000 people gathering together to vote every week on various matters out of the total population of around 20000 (the others were women, slaves and immigrants). The judicial system was organized into 10 courts of 500 randomly assigned people from the above 5000. They regularly forced the most prominent politicians to emig…
Sounds like Athens was also a 0.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is why, instead of "democracy", it's more useful to quantify democratic . One traditional measure of such is the degree to which political power can be gained through free elections. But the research in TFA instead uses a novel measure: the weight a population has in its country's policymaking. Which yields fascinating results. Because, per the linked research, in present-time USA that weight is ~zero. Which is…
I don't think it is obvious that measure is meaningful though. The US has always been explicit that it doesn't trust the majority of the population to make decisions and has built intentional systems to keep them out. That is still democratic, the people could change those systems if they really put their mind to it, because the power does technically flow from the people if they really put their foot down. It is pre…
This statement applies to absolute monarchies as well; we have many examples from history where the people have "really put their foot down" and won concessions from that form of government. I don't see how this is enough to call the system democratic.
https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy... The US has slid below Hungary in democracy, Hungary was also straight sliding towards dictatorship. Hungary did a 180 though by electing Peter Maygar. Hopefully the US can do a 180 in the midterms. Otherwise it will probably slide in to being a full Oligarchy like Russia. To me this crazy thing is the complete lack of alarm or sense of urgency from Ameri…
> "[...] the fiftieth income percentile—that is, [...] the preferences of the average citizen"
> "[...] “affluent” Americans at the ninetieth income percentile can usefully be taken as proxies for the opinions of wealthy or very-high-income Americans [...] about $146,000 in annual household income"
Their conclusion:
> "This evidence indicates [...] policy is consistent with majority preferences roughly two-thirds of the time; that public policy changes in the same direction as collective preferences a similar two-thirds of the time [...]"
> "Furthermore, the preferences of economic elites [...] have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do."
They forgot to mention that income is a strong indicator of voter turn out[0]; "economic elites" vote in higher numbers with a gap of around 20-30% depending on source and year. Also, voter turnout is pretty low to start with at around 50-60%.
So, now we have a better understanding of who actually votes instead of surveying the "average" citizen if they agree with policies as this study does compared to the policies favored by the "elite".
The conclusion read with the added voter facts is: The higher the income the more likely to actually vote; Elected government officials work to create policies that favors the people who voted for them; People who turn out to vote in greater numbers have all the actual policy influence (they also currently have increasingly higher incomes than those who don't vote). Well no shit, they said it themselves "Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections [...]" sound like democracy is working. Therefore, if the "average" citizen surveyed here doesn't like the policy they are well within their rights to hold their representative responsible by getting themselves and 3 vote-eligible friends/family members to go vote. This especially includes the primaries. The "elite" do.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231251338441
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah! Reading about the way democracy was done in Athens, both are at 0. In Athens, they had some 5000 people gathering together to vote every week on various matters out of the total population of around 20000 (the others were women, slaves and immigrants). The judicial system was organized into 10 courts of 500 randomly assigned people from the above 5000. They regularly forced the most prominent politicians to emig…
> (the others were women, slaves and immigrants) Sounds like Athens was also a 0.
P.S. Ok, Ok. Belgium is unique in that it gives immigrants more rights than citizens in at least one case. Non-citizens can apply for family reunion with ascendants while citizens can't.
Their average vs elite: > "[...] the fiftieth income percentile—that is, [...] the preferences of the average citizen" > "[...] “affluent” Americans at the ninetieth income percentile can usefully be taken as proxies for the opinions of wealthy or very-high-income Americans [...] about $146,000 in annual household income" Their conclusion: > "This evidence indicates [...] policy is consistent with majority preference…
Vote for whom?
Political campaigns are self-funded. Financially, it's difficult for nonwealthy persons to run for office and to raise campaign contributions from other nonwealthy persons.
And if a candidate happens to gain prominence who runs against the interests of the wealthy, the wealthy are especially eager to throw tons of money at an opponent of the candidate in order to crush them.
So of course the wealthy are more enthusiastic about voting for candidates who represent their interests.
And starting to smell like a kleptocracy given the rampant insider trading and leveraging military to influence market outcomes