Talk:Democracy

Ok guys, I stop posting because Mavercick the Fascist is going to bann my IP address. I know that wiki rubish is not democracy, but wikipedia is not wiki also, as long as Maverick the Fascist exist and banns IP addreses.

I am waiting for an excuse and an argument of why do you believe that in a real democracy, altering people's votes (killing) is allowed, and why "daimonocracy" that alters people's votes (killing) can still be named Democracy.

First and foremost we are an encyclopedia. We are also very serious about our NPOV policy. You were violating that policy and insisting on filling this article with your own POV. That is not acceptable. It is also disruptive to others trying to get good work done - thus it slows down the progress of the project. Wiki is a means to an end here, it ain't the main show. There are plenty of pure wiki communities out there - but even they ban persisant trolls. --mav

So you name your fascism, neutral point of view? who are you to decide whats the neutral point of view? You are intentionally killing the name of Democracy here, I dont know for what reason. I invite you to an open and fair discussion, in www.ingenuitas.org. Maverick, I am warning you, you are not going anywhere with this attitude. Come to yourself now!

If you think NPOV is fascism then you need to play somewhere else. --mav

If you think that lies, like calling Athenian Democracy a representative Democracy is a neutral point of view, then you do not deserve to be an operator that ban IP addreses.

Then why is everybody reverting your changes then? --mav

Not everybody! YOU are reverting my changes! Lets put my changes into a vote if you dare!

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Lir, Athens isn't generaly considered a representative democracy. It's normaly considered a direct democracy with limited sufferage and the only elected official was the strategos. If you have information that disagrees with this can you please supply it.

If articles on political systems are this controversial it may be a good idea to start attributing various opinions on just what they are to different people.

-- V 03:05 Nov 19, 2002 (UTC)

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The original distinguished between a republic and a democracy, but I question whether mainstream politicial science distinguishes between them. (On which I might add, I am no real expert.) This distinction seems to be mainly one made in the US, especially by certain political groups (Libertarians for instance.) To an Australian like me, and I guess to a lot of other people, the distinction makes no sense at all. In short, the definitions the original article was based on are minority definitions; I have tried to make them fit better with what the majority of people mean.

See http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=democracy which defines democracy as "Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives" (American Heritage Dictionary)

-- Simon J Kissane

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> My friend!!!! DEMOCRACY IT IS NOT WHAT YOUR STUPID DICTIONARY IS SAYING!! .

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146.124.102.84 made several edits which are extremely POV, essentially saying that democracy = pure democracy and indirect democracy = republic. Example:

Ancien Athenians will consider "representative dmocracy" as a time limited oligarchy. The main difference here is that the loss of vote can be voted, as Hitler did and kill all his oponents. The Republic is a regime that, in the worst case, can lead society to Fascism and Rasism.

Therefore I'm reverting to version before 146's edits.

146, why don't you take a look at NPOV before editing? Arvindn 09:57 Jan 23, 2003 (UTC)

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Restoring deletion. If you wish to change the article, Simon, do so acknowledging what you allege--from an admitted position of ignorance--is a minority position. And in any case, please do not remove useful content--which you did. --LMS

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Well, the point of view of the article doesn't fit one major dictionary's (the American Heritage Dictionary's) defintion at least:

• democracy: "Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives."
• republic: "A political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president."

Maybe I was being a bit accusatory and hasty in my original statement, and if so I do apologise. But my point remains that a lot of people (me and the American Heritage Dictionary) included do not take democracy to mean "direct democracy" and republic to mean "indirect democracy"; they take democracy to mean "democracy, either direct or indirect", and republic to mean "not a monarchy, be it democratic or un-democratic".

So maybe I am wrong to think it is solely some particular minorities view on the meaning of the word democracy, but I still maintain that the meaning I give it is the more common one. And I think articles should reflect words as they are most commonly used. -- Simon J Kissane

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I think it s not true that "The right to vote is normally denied to prisoners". It maybe true for the USA but not true in continental Europe.

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It's not even true throughout the U.S. Many states allow their prisoners to vote.

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Well, the UK denies the right to prisoners to vote. Maybe it should be qualified as "many countries".

Also someone changed citizen-initiated referenda[?] to read referenda on popular demand[?]. Why? -- SJK

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Many societies in the past have denied people the right to vote on the basis of race or ethnicity. Examples of this include the exclusion of people of African descent from voting, in the pre-Civil Rights Era American South, and in apartheid-era South Africa.

Most societies today no longer maintain such provisions, but a few still do. For example, Fiji reserves a certain number of seats in its Parliament for each of its main ethnic groups; these provisions were adopted in order to discriminate against Indians in favour of ethnic Fijians.

Many countries have laws that give national minorities representation in Parliament (for example national minorities parties don't need to pass 5% limit to get into Sejm). --Taw

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In the US, conviction of a felony tolls the right to vote. F. Lee Horn

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That's not necessarily true. Voter registration is controlled by the states, and at least in California, one is stripped of that right only while actually serving time for a felony. A state may also choose to grant its felons the vote if it chooses. Finally, if the felony happens to be tax evasion, the consitution prohibits a state from stripping voting rights in that particular case. --LDC

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Ah! I stand (sit?) corrected: "Four states (Maine, Massachusetts, Utah, Vermont) do not disenfranchise convicted felons.8 Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have disenfranchisement laws that deprive convicted offenders of the right to vote while they are in prison.9 In thirty-two states, convicted offenders may not vote while they are on parole, and twenty-nine of these states disenfranchise offenders on probation."

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Advocates of communism generally insist that countries like the "People's Democratic Republic" of this or that nation is really "democratic" on the grounds that the government is authorizied by or _is" the people (see dictatorship of the proletariat). I figure this quibble is better understood if it comes near the end of the article. --Ed Poor

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Where would ParticipatoryDemocracy fit in? DirectDemocracy?

I think that fits in with the point I was going to make: The definitions here, as probably in political science books, assume that a democracy has a government. That is not necessarily what I call a democracy; to me, at least, democracy is a system where each member has equal control. I don't think I'm by any means alone on this point; "democracy" stretches far beyond the realms of government. (Also, I consider libertarian socialism to be politically democratic and economically democratic, as opposed to "democratic" government, which has an element of political democracy, but a non-democratic economy.)

I'd like to make the case for Representative democracy as a better place for a lot of this. This page could be a discussion of the origin and various meanings of the term, and how they relate.

Also, I was surprised no one appears to have mentioned Bush's "democratic" election. -- Sam

Why has Direct democracy been made a redirect to this? Anarcho-capitalism isn't a redirect to anarchism because they're not the same. A lot more could be said about direct democracy in its own article; a discussion should appear here (as it does) contrasting it with representative democracy, but that's not all there should be. -- Sam

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Direct democracy becomes more and more difficult, and necessarily more closely approximates representative democracy, as the number of citizens grows. Historically, the most direct democracies would include the New England town meeting (within the United States), and the political system of ancient Athens. Neither system would scale well to a larger population.

This claims direct democracy doesn't scale because every citizen couldn't vote on every issue in a large state. This isn't necessarily a requirement of direct democracy. In the alternative, citizens in a large state would be presented with an overwhelmingly large number of issues which they could vote upon, but only the most politically active of citizens would vote upon. The rest would hopefully vote only on those issues which they knew about, cared about, and were informed about. Isn't this who should be voting? -- Eric Hanson

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To the poster above I would point that there are clear and practical examples of participative (aka participatory) democracy (see [1] (http://mondediplo.com/1998/10/08brazil) and [2] (http://www.comune.bologna.it/comune/istituti/democrazia_elettronica.htm)), and there are organizations in the UK that sponsor forms of more active democracy (meaning more direct, more participatory -- see [3] (http://www.neweconomics.org/default.asp?strRequest=areasofwork&pageid=19).

One should not limit oneself to the existing models. The current republican model (I use the term to mean non-monarchic) of democracy or, indeed, even the monarchic model have reached stability 50 years ago with the end of WW II. Since then democracy has outlasted the Socialist Utopian regimes, but has not outlasted other systems of governance (tribal, tyrannic, etc.). Far from arguing in favor of those systems, I intend to demonstrate that the existing western-democratic system has not proven sufficiently appealing to some of nations representing the most people in the world (Pakistan, China (capitalist socialist state -- is the term correct?), Saudi Arabia, Irak, etc.). Especially at a moment when we are faced with the huge influence that Business has on power through free elections, by sponsoring 95% of the winning candidates (or maybe more?) in the USA in the 1998 election[4] (http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/RecoveringRights_RSChom) (effectively transforming USA into an aristocracy or oligarchy, depending from the point of view, of course); we should ask ourselves: is this the end of the evolution for "democracy", or can we find more just forms of "democracy"? -- Zingarello

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Goes back to Athens? Weren't the Akkadians using an indirect democracy? Lir 09:56 Oct 23, 2002 (UTC)

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Is there any documental proof that could be referred to to determine the origin of the democratic system? There is proof about the use of a democratic system in Athens. Zingarello

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Democracies can be divided into different types, based on a number of different distinctions. The most important distinction is between direct democracy and representative democracy. Limited democracy is far more common that direct democracy.

Direct democracy (sometimes also called "pure democracy") is a system in which all people are allowed to influence policy making by means of a direct vote on any particular issue. This regime, as defined in Athenian democracy, has the meaning of election for decisions, NOT election for persons that are about to decide.

Republic or Representative democracy (or indirect democracy, parliamentary democracy) , is a system in which the people (or citizens) democratically elect government officials who then make decisions on behalf of the citizens. Of course this political regime has nothing to do with Athenian democracy. Ancien Athenians will consider "representative dmocracy" as a time limited oligarchy.

Essentially, a representative democracy is a form of time-limited oligarchy in which the democratic process is followed to choose leaders, while the leaders may act with or against the majority opinion during their term of office. Representative democracies (also called republics in the 18th century) are usually organized so that the people elect a number of leaders, who then make decisions based on another democratic process. In the United States and the Roman Republic, for example, laws are made by a majority vote of Senators who were in turn chosen by a majority vote of the electorate.

There is no such a thing as "tyranny of the majority" in a pure (direct) democracy. for example no member can be punished to death because this will result the loss of his vote.

These paragraphs confuse and intermingle two distinct concepts: 1) whether decisions are taken directly or through elected representatives, and 2) whether "majority rules" or there exists a supreme law (such as a constitution) restricting what the majority may do to any minority by means of the government. These need to be kept distinct. I'm not going to rewrite it myself because this article seems to be controversial and I'm a newbie.

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Majority and Average rule defines a contitution. And this constitution may define if representatives are allowed. Constitution is not something stable, it may change from times to times. Only the voting rights of the citizens are respected, and this is the only thing that cannot change in a real democracy. Average rule is this: there is a force that wants to go norht, and another that wants to go west, so the result is north-west. Majority rule apples only in cases the average rule does not apply.

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What about include information about democracy and civilizations ( i.e. arabic culture and democracy).

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Added a Failures of democracy section. Needs feed-back and sistematization.

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Somehow, all the links were eliminated by this edit.[5] (/w/wiki.phtml?title=Democracy&diff=788808&oldid=782958)

I guess the edit was not mal-intended, but some passages seem to be deleted, too, which makes me concerned a bit (though not all the deletions look unreasonable). And anyway, the overall 'flow' improved quite a bit, I think. I'm hoping someone can work on this to include ome of the useful info. from the past versions. Thanks. (and sorry not volunteering for doing it!) Tomos 09:05 Apr 5, 2003 (UTC)