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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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Most democratic country is Norway.
USA is at position 26.
https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/most-democratic-countries/
I’m always baffled by these charts. How is anything under North Korea? I seriously struggle to think of anything worse that isn’t a nationwide literal concentration camp.
As long as there's a system, I think they're useful. You can argue they weight things incorrectly but it's useful to have some way to see how a country does against the same evaluation for rest of the world. I don't know if this is the best data, but I don't see anything that pops out as particularly odd.
At the bottom, it's not much between NK and the two below. But the two below are Myanmar and Afghanistan, which I don't think is too crazy.
Oh that’s for sure, those charts are still useful, it’s very rare for them to be extremely inaccurate. I’m just in disbelief at most of them having something below NK since it’s basically a slave nation. Would like to see the exact criteria, but I didn’t find them.
USA is also anything but "the homeland of freedom itself"
The phrase only implies that modern democracy grew in popularity as a system of government after its start in the United States, not that the U.S. is a perfect democracy. I took a closer look at the list of "most democratic" countries in the comment to which you're replying. Have you? It's kind of shocking how new most of those governments are.
The list is interesting to be sure, but as with most linear rankings of large datasets it leaves lots of room for debate. But I think that's the point. It's not meant to be used as a rhetorical sledgehammer to silence discussion the way you have used it here.
It's kind of shocking how many of them have an actual monarchy still, with real actual powers over the government despite claims that they are mostly symbolic. Top of the list, Norway, still has a King. New Zealand, still a colony with a King. Finland and Iceland actually have elected presidents. Sweden, curators of the democracy ranking list, still have a monarchy. Each monarch claims they are only symbolic, but if that's true and these countries are truly the more perfect democracies they claim to be, one has to wonder why the people have kept such oligarchs in a position of power over them. In some cases the power seems to have only passed from the monarch to the parliament out of custom, not actual legislation or constitution.
Agreed, we need some more guillotine based fashion.
I certainly never intended to silence discussion. I'd have said I was opening up the discussion, if anything, by poi ting out that there's some data available that suggests the USA is far from the most democratic nation. Which, as I read it, was a tongue in cheek statement in the comment I replied to.
But, now it is being discussed, I'm interested in the view that monarchy should have a paeticylarly large negative weight on the ranking. I'm not a royalist and think any monarchy with even a hint of power means less than absolute democracy. But I don't think many of the monarchies in those high ranking countries have as much of a negative impact as other factors that can reduce the input of a population to the democratic process. The big one for me would be how individual voting gets weighted.