3

Is there a rigorous way to compare how democratic organizations are?

Can we say with any authority, for example, whether the parliamentary democracy of the UK, at some arbitrary point before european political union, was more (or less) democratic for UK citizens than it is today?

52d6c6af
  • 10,391
  • 2
  • 32
  • 75
  • 2
    There are a couple problems with this question. One, the measure you use to determine how democratic a society is highly debatable. But even if you came up with such a thing, it wouldn't necessarily be helpful. Society has different technology and social structures and situations now, so you'd have to take into account all those changes. Even if you could do that, you can't treat the UK as isolated from the EU. We have less say in EU policies than our own, but the EU is a much larger organisation, so we can affect policy in other countries as well as our own, to our own benefit. – PointlessSpike Aug 24 '15 at 13:10
  • There isn't an objective way to measure democracy with that level of precision, because as PointlessSpike as said it would be impossibile to avoid arbitrariness. There is a project called Polity that measure states on a scale from autocracy to democracy, but it records only typical measure of political restraint and recruitment. – gabriele Aug 24 '15 at 21:36
  • If going for the technical definition of democracy, you could always try to measure the quota of decisions based on public referendums versus inner parlamentaric decisions. And add some framework of evaluation of the significance of the decisions in question (probably inherently subjective). – Alex Sep 06 '15 at 15:56

0 Answers0