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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Okay. Now imagine an alternative USA where only a small selection of royal families are allowed to vote and electors are aristocrats chosen by birth and court intrigue. By your definition this hypothetical is also a democracy, even if it's an awful very very bad one. You have nuanced away the meaning of the word entirely.
Yes, great example. That would indeed be stretching the definition to breaking point. The fuzzy logic approach would be that you’ve described a 99% monarchy with 1% democracy.
Personally I’d put the US as a 60% democracy with a 40% oligopoly. The UK is similar since on the one hand we have more than 2 parties and are slightly better at avoiding gerrymandering and voter suppression, but on the other hand we have the silly rules for the House of Lords, and weaker freedom of speech (I don’t mind the theory of banning violent extremist speech, but I don’t like the application we’ve got at the moment, it prevents too much speech that isn’t unreasonable, free speech would be better).
Based on what you’ve said, I’m Sure you’d put it lower, but I don’t think you can justify putting 1% when it’s so easy to find worse countries even in the real world, that are still on the democracy spectrum.
Why are you applying this fuzzy logic to democracy when democracy, itself, does not? If one candidate gets 49% of the vote and the other gets 51% of the vote then the candidate with the most votes wins. Nothing fuzzy about it. If we apply liberal democracy's logic to itself then a country that isn't at least 50% democratic can not be called a democracy.
Because democracy is not the best way to solve every problem.
The messy job of squeezing entire countries into a handful of words is fraught enough without throwing away up to half of the information.
As a more amusing answer: Dictatorships throw away 99.9% of the opinions, so should we let one arsehole decide which countries are called a dictatorship?
I only said to apply the logic of liberal democracy to itself, not to apply it to all countries.
I think your insistence on using a fuzzy spectrum to define concrete terms results in words not meaning anything at all. The "99% monarchy 1% democracy" gets to call itself a democracy by your fuzzy logic because it has democratic elements. That's clearly not a good heuristic. There must be a point where the antidemocratic elements in a society disqualify it from being a democracy.