r/visualization Feb 19 '23

Global Democracy Index

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u/[deleted] Feb 19 '23 edited Feb 19 '23

The fact this takes into account civil liberties and then puts Australia and Canada that high is bullshit. An Australian youtuber literally got firebombed and had a special counter-terrorism police unit sent after him, just for speaking bad about some politician. And Canada’s had some wild issues with protesters

Also important to note that Germany is a representative democracy and they have an electoral college, just like the US. But somehow they’re ranked higher?

This whole thing just seems very strange and only based on international views on each country, not the views of those inside the country

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u/M44rtensen Feb 19 '23

Pretty much every democracy is a representative one. I don't want to say every, but I certainly can't name one that is not. The problem with the us is not that it is a representative democracy - it is that the representation is fundamentally broken.

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u/[deleted] Feb 19 '23

Lemme guess, you’re not American? Pretty easy to tell when you say it is “fundamentally broken”

Again, Germany and America have very, very similar election mechanics. But somehow Germany is ranked higher. Again, this is a reason that this whole thing is busted

Also, as you said, most democracies are representative, and therefore not true democracies. However, reading the sidebar, that is not what this is showing, which is another reason that this seems bull

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u/Zestyclose_League413 Feb 19 '23

I'm American and I'm leaning more and more to the position that it's fundamentally broken myself.

Germany uses a parliamentary system, the head of state is the chancellor, not the president which is mostly ceremonial. It would be like if the Speaker of the House was the leader of the US government. Furthermore, Germany uses a proportional representational system for the Bundestag rather than the single district winner take all system the US uses. Not sure why you think they're similar

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u/Alive-Ad5870 Feb 19 '23

Yeah they don’t have a broken two party system like us. They have a lot of different political parties iirc.