Some are parliamentary constitutional monarchies, such as the United Kingdom or the Netherlands, while others are representative republics like Germany or the United States. Even countries that are de facto dictatorships maintain mechanisms of representative democracy. Russia comes to mind. And a representative democracy can either be liberal — where laws protect not only our human rights and other values, but also limit the power of our representatives — or illiberal, in which elected representatives, once in power, can more or less rule as they please.
We have jobs to go to, kids to care for, the latest Apple products to salivate over. Representatives can also aggregate the various interests of their constituents to shape laws and policy in a way that gives the greatest benefit to the most people. Help us fight for your rights! Donate For representative democracy to work properly, it is complemented by participatory democracy.
This means that citizens, through civil society groups and other non-governmental organizations NGOs , are still able to communicate with and influence their government between elections. NGOs fulfill a number of important functions, including informing people about matters of public interest, providing them with channels through which they can speak to their political representatives between elections, and holding the government to account when it breaks the law.
The freedom of NGOs to carry out these functions and the freedom of people to associate with NGOs are vital components of liberal representative democracy. That said, representative democracy is not without its drawbacks. It necessarily concentrates power in the hands of a few people, thereby giving them ultimate control over the form and substance of our laws.
Could legislation be crafted in a way that gives special benefits to representatives, their family or friends? Elected representatives are also difficult to reign in between elections, meaning they could pass laws that make us unhappy, or unfairly favor themselves or others, and we could have to wait years to hold them to account for it. Most of us would agree that democracy, while not perfect, is the fairest system of government. It tends to do the best job of protecting the values most of us hold, like equality, human rights, and equal application of the law.
And representative democracy is probably the best form of democracy to achieve this. Citizens still maintain ultimate control over their government through elections, during which they can choose the people and parties that represent them. Representative democracy gives people the advantages of democracy — having a say in the way they are governed, and choosing the people who govern them — without the onus of needing to study each law or policy initiative themselves.
Over the last few years, the health of American democracy has come under great scrutiny. Inevitably, this brings up the question of whether we can mend our problems or if the system of representative democracy itself is fundamentally broken. I served as a representative for a good bit of my life, watched the system from the inside with all its faults and all its glories, and believe firmly in it. Our strengths as a nation—our wealth and culture, our opportunities and human resources—developed in an environment that was built from our founding documents, giving an ever-greater swath of Americans the opportunity to reach their potential, solve the problems that face their communities, and work together to move their neighborhoods and their country as a whole forward.
In fact, I would argue that some of our key characteristics as a people spring from the demands of self-governance and electing representatives. A representative democracy, in which every few years we choose the people who will be making the decisions that shape how we spend our money and regulate our activities, encourages this. Those attracted to strong-man leadership see value in a president who can make policy with little or no consultation with the Congress or other elected bodies.
This type of regime is particularly popular in several nations where executives have extended or consolidated their power in recent years, such as the Philippines, Russia and Turkey.
While military rule is the least popular political system tested on the survey, even this finds some support across the globe. Notable minorities in many nations consider it a good way to govern, and half or more express this view in Vietnam, Indonesia, India and South Africa.
The index does not include the question about direct democracy. Commitment to representative democracy is strongest in North America and Europe. Australia is the only country outside of North America and Europe where at least four-in-ten are categorized as committed democrats. In general, public commitment to representative democracy is highest in countries that have a well-functioning democracy.
The EIU index ranks countries from 0 to 10, where 0 indicates an authoritarian regime and 10 represents a full democracy. The index is closely correlated with our classification of committed democrats. For example, the Netherlands is ranked higher on the EIU index with a score of 8. Meanwhile, Nigeria has a democracy index score of 4. The above scatterplot also reveals another pattern: Countries that are classified as more fully democratic and that have a higher percentage of the public committed to representative democracy also tend to be wealthier.
In the scatterplot, the countries are color-coded by their economic ranking from the World Bank, which classifies countries into four income categories based on their per-capita gross national income: high, upper-middle, lower-middle and low income. The group of countries in the upper-right-hand corner of the scatterplot — where the Democracy Index ranking and the percentage of committed democrats are highest — are all upper-income countries. Although commitment to representative democracy is relatively high in wealthy, strong democracies, notable minorities in these types of countries are open to nondemocratic alternatives.
Rule by experts has considerable appeal in many of these nations, with roughly half or more in Hungary, South Korea, Poland, Spain Japan, Israel and Chile suggesting this could be a good way of running their country. There is less support for a strong leader who can make decisions without interference from a parliament or courts.
At the individual level, education has a large impact on attitudes about governance. In 22 of the countries surveyed, people with higher levels of education are more likely than those with less education to be classified as committed to representative democracy. People with less education are more likely than those with more education to say a military government would be a good thing in 23 countries. In 18 of these countries, the gap is at least 10 percentage points.
For example, in the U.
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