So I asked an open question last week because I was legitimately curious as to whether people considered elections to be the litmus test for democracy. Admittedly I did set of something of an extreme example, but I found the answers instructive, even if the sample size was small. No one thought my example (essentially an elected dictator) was a democracy. I suppose the obvious question is at what point it becomes a democracy. How much power does the legislature, (since most people seemed to believe it to be a better gauge of the will of the people than the head of government), need to have? What is they can override the prime minister’s veto, but need a 99% majority to do so? 80? 70? 60? At what point do they have enough power to be considered powerful enough? Or perhaps it’s the military – would people consider it a democracy if the military was left under the control of the legislature, or at least an alternate legislatively appointed person?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 10:41 pm by Ari and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.