A Flawed Democracy
- John Rennie Short
- Nov 22, 2022
- 21 min read
Updated: Mar 12
Each year, The Economist publishes a Democracy Index. The 2022 edition listed 167 countries ranked on metrics of five dimensions: electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture, and civil liberties. The US ranked 26th in the world. At the top of the list were Norway, New Zealand, Finland, and Sweden. At the bottom were North Korea, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. No real surprises there, but Taiwan (8), Uruguay (13), South Korea (16), UK (18), and Costa Rica (21) all outranked the US. The US had slipped over the past six years from a full democracy to a flawed democracy.[1]
All democracies have flaws. They are human creations after all. But the US has more flaws than many of its democratic peers. The insurrection of 6 January 2021 revealed a disturbing refusal by some to accept the results of democratic elections. On that day, protestors gathered at the Capital to overturn the result of the 2020 Presidential election. The insurrectionists sought to stop the ceremonial congressional confirmation of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the US. In this essay, I want to explore some of the reasons behind this democratic slippage. I focus on electoral issues, rather than the deep-seated socio-economic context of the insurrection. I will draw on some of my previous work.[2]
It is important to begin with the realization that the US was founded as a republic, not as a democracy. The founders were distrustful of the raw political energy of the people. In 1787, James Madison, the 4th US President, described democracies as spectacles of turbulence and contention; incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.[3] Thus, the government in the US was structured to insulate political elites from popular opinion. The Congress, the executive, and the judicial–a nine-member oligarchy of lifetime political appointees whose guiding ideology always seems half a century behind the general public–limit and blunt the expression of the popular will. The hallmarks of a healthy democracy are that each vote should be counted and each one should count equally. This is not the case in the USA, where the difference between popular will and political representation is growing. Let’s look at four sources for the growing deficits of US democracy.