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Godfree Roberts's avatar

While measuring democracy is infeasible, examining dimensions of democracy – constitutional, elective, popular, procedural, operational and substantive – can be useful, especially when comparing disparate polities like the US and China.

Formally, the US Constitution never mentions ‘democracy’ (the Founders hated it) and China’s Constitution mentions it 32 times.

Electively, China has bigger, more transparent elections than the US, supervised and certified by The Carter Center, which runs China’s election website. By contrast, US presidential candidates are chosen by wealthy backers and appointed by an unelected Electoral College.

Popularly, voter turnout in China is 20% higher than in the US (62% to 52%), suggesting that more Chinese voters think their vote counts.

Procedurally, China uses a public, democratic process to appoint senior officials and approve legislation, who can and do delay legislation for decades until it earns 2/3 support of Congress.

Operationally, American presidents hire and fire 5000 senior officials, order citizens kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned and assassinated, secretly ban 50,000 people from flying on airlines. No

Chinese leader–including Mao–could do any of those things.

Substantively, China’s government policies produce democratic outcomes. Ninety-six percent of Chinese voters approve the government’s policies and eighty-three percent say China is being run for their benefit rather than for the benefit of a special group, whereas thirty-eight percent of Americans think this of their country.

If President Xi was right when he said, last week, "Whether a country is a democracy or not depends on whether its people are really the masters of the country," then the US is simply undemocratic

Princeton political scientists Gilens and Page discovered arithmetically what Americans have known for decades: "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/princeton-scholar-demise-of-democracy-america-tpm-interview

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vk's avatar

At the philosophical level, democracy can only be legitimated over all other possible and existing forms of government if we presuppose one thing: the infallibility and absolute universality of the people (which can be summed up by the Christian motto "vox populi, vox Dei". That would mean every decision the majority of the people takes must be always and automatically be executed and obeyed without question and immediately, no matter their consequences. If we don't take this as given, then we have that, logically, democracy is just an attenuated oligarchy (dictatorship is not antonym to democracy; indeed, the first form of dictatorship was invented to save, not destroy, democracy, in the Roman Republic, and was enforced many times).

In this sense, does true democracy exist today? That's up for anyone alive here today to decide.

As for the concepts of agency and democracy, by the reviewed author, well, at least from a historical point of view, his model doesn't hold in reality. Rome is considered nowadays as freer than Europe of the Middle Ages, but the Middle Ages (manorialism) solved Rome's food scarcity, even though it may have taken some time.

There's no empirical evidence humanity ever sought more freedom and democracy throughout History. The best theory of History we have is Marx's, which put the economy as the main force of historical motion. Humans like material prosperity, not democracy or freedom (which are moral-ethic concepts either way). This process is not linear because, in order for any kind of societal formation to produce said material prosperity, there has to be division of labor (classes)- people who do the "dirty jobs" and people who reap the benefits. In order for any kind of mode of production to give way to a new, superior mode of production, the lower class has to topple the dominant class. Therefore, there is a contradiction between the relations of production ("politics") and the mode of production ("economy"). This model explains everything, including why, many times, things get worse before they get better.

Prados' theory would only make some sense in Sociology, and only in the context where one sees liberal democracy as the definitive system, the best possible system, everything before and after being inherently inferior. In this sense, his is a form of End of History theory.

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