which is the most democratic country?

(i assume all possible candidates have sides to them which advance their case and sides which retard it: discuss these)

It's got to be pretty small, I would think.

ok but say why a bit

Czechoslovakia. I'm not kidding.

ok but say why a bit!

this thread is NOT a democracy you will do as i ask or else

yessir markssir.

I was mistaken, first of all it's the Czech Republic (DUUH) and secondly I thought it had a unicameral legislature when it doesn't actually, so nix that. I'm working on it though.

From the Magnet (mgmt. & governance network) of the UN Development Programme:

One-chamber or unicameral legislatures have most often been established in countries with a centralized, or unitary structure and in small, more homogenous countries. Countries with unicameral systems include Costa Rica, Portugal, Hungary, Iceland, Sweden, Slovenia, Uganda and New Zealand. While constitutional structures have varied a great deal in countries that have transitioned to democratic systems over the past decade, one trend that seems fairly consistent is that smaller countries chose unicameral legislatures.
...

what is a unicameral legislature?

A legislature with a single house, the size of which is usually determined by population, e.g. each member represents the same number of people, like the US House of Representatives.

A bicameral or Federalist legislature means having an 'upper' house which is not elected in a truly democratic fashion. The Senate and the House of Lords are good examples, as are Canada's upper house, India's, the list goes on and on.

It's where you have one collection of representatives rather than, say, two, which would be bicameral. The US has a bicameral system with the House of Representatives and the Senate; the UK has the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

(Or what Millar said. Damn you for cutting in! ;-))

We have a unicameral system but we have an odd voting system where you get two votes, one for a candidate and one for a party and each party gets as many candidate seats as it gets voted in by electorates and the balance (to make up it's percentage of the party votes) are filled up with list members of parliment.

Problems: The party decides who goes on the list and in what order, so people who lost miserably in their electorates get in on the list, although no one voted specifically for them (richard prebble I think).

A party needs to get either 5% party votes or one electorate to get any seats in the house. So a party with 4.9% support can have no seats while one with 2% can have several, if one charismatic candidate wins an electorate (united christians or whatever they're called).

Where do you live?

Plus:
As implied in the UN article, problems arise as a country becomes bigger and absorbs more ethnicities/cultures into its population. This is always my beef with people pointing out the wonderfulness of some European and/or Asian governments.

that is the system in new zealand.

isadora lives in nz

what are the arguments for bicamerals?

The teeming masses are held off by the stately patricians, who in turn are checked by the teeming masses. Allegedly.

If the interest is "pure" democracy I imagine it'd be hard to come up with advantages for a bicameral system: the best one I can think of is that it allows for a better mix of voting-for-individuals and voting-for-parties, the latter of which strikes me as sort of key in that it adds a proper proportional/representational slant to the legislature. (If you did the latter exclusively the parties themselves would become an anti-democratic elite.) (Also run-off voting = key in the case of the former.) The big obvious problem with a bicameral system is that whatever system of negotiation is put in place between the two creates some not-exactly-democratic rule-based heirarchy that's not immediately responsive to what people want.

Lani Guinier to thread!

back from the Magnet again:

Following are some advantages cited of the bicameral system:

* It has the capacity to formally represent diverse constituencies (regional, class, ethnic, etc.)
* It hinders the passage of flawed legislation (one chamber can act as a check upon the other)
* With two legislative bodies, there is enhanced oversight of the executive branch.

Wait are we still talking "most democratic" or just "most sensible?" (Ned's point is a defense of "most sensible" but the idea itself is explicitly anti-democratic, i.e. "well we're not going to let you go nuts now are we." Tom's points are less so but apart from the first are still about sense and not maximum-democracy.)

(Also GOOD GOD Tom for a second I forgot and thought you were consulting Myron Magnet on this issue which made me go EWWGHRMPH)

Well I'm still talking about 'most democratic'. I only posted the official 'good bits about bicameralism' because mark asked for it.

All of the examples given so far, whether unicameral or bicameral, have all been examples of representative democracy, i.e. the people elect the people who vote on the issues of the day. Wouldn't a more democratic system be one in which the people voted directly on the issues of the day? As far as I know there isn't any country in the world that does this exclusively, although there may be places that have implemented it to some degree. For example, the state of California (yes, I know it's not a country) has a ballot initiative system in which voters can vote directly for or against a proposed law. Regardless of whether or not this has led to good laws (and I know for a fact that it has spawned some real stinkers), it is more purely democratic than a system in which decisions are mediated through elected representatives, isn't it?

I can't imagine a worse system than the pure democracy o. nate describes. I'd take dictatorship over that, no question. Few enough people vote anyway, without making it something that goes on every day. And I wouldn't trust my future to the kind of person who would vote every day.

well, is it? how wd "direct democracy" work in respect of, say, foreign policy? do you have to have a pointman somewhere who actually does the day-to-day work? would it make sense to run the economy via a mechanism like ile?

Lots of states have ballot initiatives and referenda. In theory this is purest democracy. However, in practice, problems arise in dealing with things like 'who has time to vote on all this crap?' and 'who writes these fucking things?'

An elected legislature is the most pragmatic compromise. I still think unicameral is the way to go.

is democracy in a "pure" sense — without representative middlemen — more actually democratic in a realistic or useable way?

(oh sorry tom, crossposting)

You could imagine with sufficiently advanced technology a government in which all top-level decisions (what we could call policy decisions) are made by the group-mind, but in which they would be carried out by professional public servants. This would require a sufficiently fast feedback response from the group-mind to developing situations and an ability to quickly disseminate the information that the group needed to reach a decision. Perhaps some kind of fuzzy logic algorithm could be used to determine when the group-mind had reached consensus.

Huge cross-post!

O. Nate every U.S. state has initiative/proposal systems like that; to do it on a massive scale would certainly be "most democratic" in theory but in practice might actually stifle democracy -- for several reasons, the first to mind being the creation of a money-and-media-control elite who would basically decide all issues by framing complex issues for a public incredibly taxed by constant referendums on complex issues and not given enough time between them to judge by anything but the immediate flow of information. (Granted, though, this could be considered the purest democracy.)

You'll actually see that framing issue in effect in e.g. California initiatives; they're always backloaded with the real legislative issues in the proverbial fine print, but debate on them comes down to the media-friendly and politician-friendly hooks at the front. In a theoretical nation stocked with a massively responsible and massively effective media filled with people who can make clear, well-informed, and unbiased analyses of such propositions on the spot, I suppose constant referendums could be effective, but there still comes a point at which no reasonable person could be expected to have enough time to actually examine the details of what he/she is deciding on, and in that case it's definitely more democratic to sort of outsource that work to a representative who's basically given legislative power of attorney.

Would it be ideal to have a constitution in which certain powers -- e.g. declarations of war and such -- had to be achieved by public referendum? (Okay war would be a dangerous one, obviously: maybe something more like "any issue can be brought to a public referendum by a vote of X percent of the legislative body?") (Would X better = like 40 or like 80?)

I thought we decided this referendum democracy thing already. It sucks. I'm moving on:

Now we have to work on fixing the big problem with unicameral legislatures- how to dole out the votes to people. Do people from specific geographic regions get to vote on a candidate, or should representatives be elected 'at large' by the whole populace? Or should a lottery system be instituted so that citizens' votes become 'at large' and candidates are confined to more specific races (eliminating the 'party vote' problem of the NZians)?

I think your analysis of the drawbacks of existing initiative systems raises many valid points, Nabisco. It's true that the initiatives are often complex and involve finer points and side-effects that the public may not be sufficiently apprised of. Perhaps that is partly a result of how initiatives get on the ballot in the first place. IIRC, it requires some minimum number of signatures on a petition to get on the ballot. Inevitably, the organizations that have the time, resources, money, and determination to see a proposal through the petition phase and onto the ballot are organizations that have a vested interest in the outcome of the proposal, and naturally, they try to present the proposal in the most innocuous, poll-friendly terms. Perhaps if it was easier to get proposals on the ballot (and the ballot had a lot more options on it) then this would be less of a problem.

I don't think figuring out how to dole out the votes to the people is the biggest problem with representative democracy, Tom. I think the biggest problem is how do you ensure that the elected representatives keep the best interests of their constituency uppermost in their minds? At least that's a big problem here in the U.S.

The Federalist format of the legislature reduces accountability right off the bat by making it possible to blame others for any shit that happens. By making it easy to figure out who your asshole is, it makes it harder for said asshole to get away with his/her party-line bullshit that nobody agrees with.

I think I'll go with geographical district assignments for now.

Oh yes and can we say CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM.

Freedonia

Interesting how focus is on VOTING when the question is about DEMOCRACY -- isn't a free and fair voting system only one aspect of demcracy (rule by the people)? Can a country be truly democratic even if suffrage is universal, but access to the information required to make rational decisions is held by a privileged and powerful class, or if economic injustice forces an entire class of voters to bow to the will of more powerful class?

(I have been considering getting my Doctor of Laws in Legal Philosophy in the near future, and want my thesis to be on approaches to this question from a legal perspective. You are uncanny, Mark.)

*appears suddenly at colin's shoulder and moves his coffee cup w/o touching it*

You have spoiled the illusion of omnipotence by forgetting the heartworm medicine story, Mark.

The Vatican CIty. It's one man, one vote at its purest.

*waves arms in a menacing yet somehow downcast way*

*smirking, yet ill at ease*

Switzerland, but only if you are swiss and share their fetish for rules. Its a self imposed democratic fascism.

Advancing tech needn't mean more voting for citizens - it could also be used to spread the voting period out, to make democracy perpetual rather than having it undergo the policy-distorting effects of set election times.