- cross-posted to:
- endlesswar@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- endlesswar@lemmy.ca
A new report has found serious concerns about the state of global democracy as more countries slip in democratic performance.
Global patterns show that democracy around the world continued to weaken last year, according to a new report.
The Global State of Democracy 2025, published by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), analyzed democratic performance in 173 countries in 2024.
In the report, 94 countries — or just over half of those surveyed — showed a decline in at least one of the key democracy indicators between 2019 and 2024, the report said. In comparison, only a third made progress.
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I can’t believe Obama did this, WHAT A JERK
Okay Alexa now tell me who tampered with the democracies in Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Congo and Honduras?
it was… ooh, Big Pink! It’s the only gum with the breath-freshening power of ham.
I think the Iranese protests have been cracked down by their government, so if they’ve gone down in the ranking then this time it’s probably their government’s fault
Iranese? It’s Iranian.
I had a brain fart
The death of capitalism is going to be very ugly.
It’s looking more and more like feudalism is going to be what comes next.
Yes, and the lords and kings will be the billionaires, we need a lot of Luigis.
There are only a bit more than 3000 billionaires globally. We had WAY more kings and lords. The ruling class has concentrated power like never before. If we go back to something like feudalism, it’ll be a MUCH worse version of it.
Agreed, as they say, we are living in “interesting” times.
Yeah and that’s the worst thing to wish upon someone ain’t it 😭
Yes it is!
You never can tell what a man with nothing to lose might do, and America is about to be the #1 producer of them.
Right cuz unchecked capitalism had nothing to do with it and no CEOs or right wing gun nuts have suddenly died for imposing any form of cruelty on the masses. Yup yup flawless studies.
Just in time for WW3.
Fails*
See? I knew Harris shouldn’t have supported genocide. This is all the Democrats’ fault.
Better put a /s on that friend.
Yeah, sad innit.
/s
Listen. It’s not sad, it’s prudent. Sarcasm and irony is how 4chan brought the nazis back. Sarcasm tag is about denying horrible people space.
Yeah but I don’t give a shit about 4chan and anyone who can’t ride the fine edge of sarcasm and knowing will be outed after a few posts and then bosh they get the block. Besides, it’s like explaining the joke. It’s less fun.
That’s not what I mean. I mean if you’re sarcastically an asshole, assholes use your comment to recruit kids into thinking this is a normal way to act. The /s isn’t so you don’t attract nazis or attract them to the platform. It’s so they can’t use your lame joke to make the world an actively worse place to be.
Sarcasm really only works in juxtaposition to who you are as a person. This is the internet, I don’t know who the fuck you are. Kinda ruins the humour if you think about it for more than two seconds.
Whatever you sent isn’t working on my end
Stupid idiots.
Time to re-introduce it in full force throughout the world, isn’t it, America?
Meanwhile Canada, Australia, uk vote in libs during the same shitty reporting threatening that the conservatives were going to win in all countries just this last year.
Take it with a pinch of salt.
It’s a politically biased study, not a neutral scientific study (Unscientific in its parameters for what constitutes a democracy). It’s another case of a burger-eagle institute study.
That is not to say that democracy is on a global decline. The study captures that but still it’s baseline is flawed.
How does one scientifically define a democracy?
A first step would be to make a basis for your study an ideological interpretation of democracy.
You can quickly see if such studies are burger-eagle institute studies by looking at a few key examples. Compare Switzerland and Cuba. Some of the most democratic nations to have ever existed. Yet Cuba is always rated far worse because it’s in opposition to the cultural hegemony of the west. I.e. then a study uses a western definition of democracy that skews heavily in favour of some statistics while completely ignoring others. For example how democratic an economy is run is almost never any observed factor for democracy indexes. Then other things are weighted out of ideological bias, for example more parties = more democracy. Completely ignoring that party democracies are not the only form of democracy.
I agree that cultural hegemony plays a huge role in how studies consider concepts like democracy, and that this can lead to problems in the analysis — it sounds like we’re on the same page about that. What I’m struggling with is what you would consider to be a neutral, scientific study? Because even if we agree that this study sets out its baseline poorly enough that we should take it’s findings with plenty of salt, I am unclear on how one could set a baseline in a manner that’s objective.
Your point comparing Switzerland and Cuba is a good example here. You highlight that ideological values reveal themselves in which statistics are chosen to include, and which are ignored. My question is whether it’s possible to do objective research in these areas at all; if one were to take into account the pressure of cultural hegemony in defining democracy, and instead included commonly ignored statistics in one’s analyses as part of an effort to produce counter hegemonic research, isn’t that just as politically biased as the study in the OP?
Zooming out a bit, my wider question is not just about whether we can analyse things like democracy in an objective, scientific manner, but also whether we should. Science is often rhetorically leveraged to “objectivity launder” issues, which is especially problematic because that involves ignoring how Western science itself is borne of imperialist and classist systems, and often perpetuates elements of these (especially when people buy into the idea that “objective science” is a thing that exists, which I don’t).
You’re a glass-half-full kind of person.
More of a “the bottom of the glass has cracks and is gonna leak any moment” person.
I think democracy works best at smaller scales. I think it works best when the population is relatively small, and where there is relatively high social cohesion or harmony. So, it’s not that democracy can’t work, it’s that it requires the right set of circumstances to work, and I think those circumstances have been challenged by globalization.
I think countries like the United States are just too darn big to be functional democracies. Too ethnically and culturally diverse and too large and geographically diverse to be a single, functioning democracy. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be democracy on the North American continent, it just means there can’t be only one democracy that spans from sea to sea. I think the US should be broken up into maybe a few dozen autonomous, independent democratic nations.
Worked ok for a few hundred years so I’m pretty sure the problem isn’t ethnic diversity it’s billionaire fucks undermining anything that could potentially challenge their power
Worked ok for a few hundred years
A few hundred years? You’re counting years in which large portions of the population could not vote and had essentially no rights. So, yeah, I guess ethnic diversity isn’t a problem when ethnic minority groups aren’t allowed to participate. Is that what you’re advocating for?
I said “ok” not perfect or even good. About as well as other governments in the world during the same time periods though.
Is that what you’re advocating for?
No, I’m advocating for a strong federal government that’s able to go into Arkansas and force their dipshit state government to desegregate their schools. What are you advocating for? Because to me it just sounds like a bunch of tiny and more easily manipulated ethnostates.
What are you advocating for?
I’m advocating for nations of people to have their autonomy and independence. I think that’s better than a strong, central state forcing integration.
For instance, I would advocate for the indigenous nations of North America to finally have their independence from settler colonialists. But, I suppose you wouldn’t support indigenous independence because that might mean the establishment of an indigenous “ethnostate.” No, it’s much better for a strong central government to force the indigenous people to allow non-indigenous people to move into their territory, become the majority and take over.
Civic nationalism, ok fine, ethnic nationalism fuck no, it’s insanity grounded in fiction that devolves into tail-eating fascist bullshit very easily.
Indigenous nations already are and should remain independent (admittedly our federal government has ignored that frequently throughout their history, but we’ve been wrong about a lot of stuff). I do have some cognitive dissonance around my beliefs that a) race and ethnicity are unscientific social constructs we really shouldn’t get too hung up on b) indigenous nations are sovereign and independent nations defined by a common genetic ancestry and there is a moral imperative to recognize them as such, but I think given the particular history and the fact that we have made treaties and other formal promises we are obligated to stand by it’s a special case.
Either way, I like and dislike some things about both, but if I’m choosing between DuBois’ racial integration and Garvey’s black separatism, I’ve gotta go with DuBois every day of the week. Ethnostates are bad for everyone, even historically marginalized people, and separatism is no treatment for authoritarianism or fascism because they will come for you eventually when they need fuel to keep their social bonfire going.
race and ethnicity are unscientific social constructs
Race and ethnicity are not the same thing. Ethnicity is very real and it’s defined by shared culture, shared history, shared beliefs, shared language, etc. Outward physical characteristics, like eye, hair, and skin color, can also be a part of ethnicity, but only a part and I think those things are less important than all of the other characteristics that define an ethnic group. It’s socially constructed, sure, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
Race, on the other hand, is the idea that you can take those outward physical characteristics, group together arbitrarily all the people who share some or all them, and define these groups as racial subspecies of human. It’s nonsense, with absolutely no basis in what we understand about human genetics and taxonomy today. Humans are a very genetically homogeneous species. Despite our different outward appearances, we are all relatively genetically similar.
But that doesn’t mean our ethnic differences don’t matter. They do, inspite of our general genetic similarities. They matter because humans are very tribal, by our nature. We evolved to live in tightly bonded communities of like people.
You say that civic nationalism is ok but ethnic nationalism is not, but you can’t separate them. No civic system can be entirely culturally or ethnically impartial, and where there is ethnic diversity, the civic sphere will always be controlled by the dominant ethnic group. That’s why I advocate so strongly for ethnic independence, I don’t think any ethnic group should be dominated by another. I believe that every ethnic group, every nation of people deserves their autonomy and their independence.
You just described the United States as intended there at the end. The whole thing was designed to be something more like the EU than what it is today.
The articles of confederation were stupid and worked terribly
Fair. The same style of organization was the intention under the constitution still. Just a little bit tighter wound.
The idea always was that people should be free to live in a place where they agree with the laws, so each state would have broad powers to organize itself and make its own laws and then every person could decide to live in a place that was organized in the way they wanted. The Federal Government was only to handle military (which is still constitutionally not supposed to be a standing army, but congress votes to maintain it every two years), international relations, regulate relations between the states themselves and tariffs. This has always been the traditional republican position, and time has proven the wisdom behind it. But now it’s too late to turn back I think.
That’s an accurate summary of history, but I gotta disagree with
time has proven the wisdom behind it
Even after we scrapped the articles of confederation and moved halfway towards an actual union of states we had a civil war a few decades later because we were too afraid to confront slave state governments and tell them that shit was unacceptable. And then we did a half-ass job of Reconstruction.
This country’s best moments imo has been the rare instances we get decent and capable people in the federal government who are able to push progress all the way out into rural backwaters, e.g. New Deal public works programs in the Tennessee valley and west Texas, Brown v the Board and Obergefell v. Hodges setting an enforceable standard for basic human rights even though it made places like Mississippi and Alabama big mad, Great Society programs bringing huge improvements to education and childcare through things like Head Start and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, etc.
It’s hard to remember because we haven’t had a good one in about five to six decades, but when the US federal government gets it shit together and stops turning brown kids into skeletons for two seconds it is actually capable of great things.
For me the wisdom is that for all the good a strong federal government could do, it inevitably was going to be used for ill and we are seeing that play out in real time. Which is what traditional republicans always said.
But to a point I do think the founding sin was writing in the constitution that all men are created equal and still allowing slavery. Many (if not most? I’m not sure here I know they all owned slaves as that was the thing to do at the time) who signed that paper knew that this sin would destroy the union and it’s obvious they were right because all of American history has been the shockwaves of allowing slavery instead of making it illegal from the very beginning, and to this day it is still playing out. Thats what happens when you weave in contradictions into the foundation of your country, event those contradictions cannot coexist.
But it’s not like ills that are just as bad and worse haven’t and won’t continue to happen without a strong federal government. A weak federal government leads to Shay’s rebellion, rise of the KKK, gilded age, great depression, etc. Someone needs to be in charge and if they don’t step into the vacuum bigots and business will.
For me the wisdom is that for all the good a strong federal government could do, it inevitably was going to be used for ill
Absolutely.
But to a point I do think the founding sin was writing in the constitution that all men are created equal and still allowing slavery…all of American history has been the shockwaves of allowing slavery instead of making it illegal from the very beginning, and to this day it is still playing out.
Definitely. So much so that many people today directly associate greater state autonomy with the institution of slavery, as though if states were granted even slightly more autonomy, slavery would inevitably return and that they two things cannot exist without one another.
This country’s best moments imo has been the rare instances we get decent and capable people in the federal government who are able to push progress all the way out into rural backwaters
Listen to yourself, you sound like the European colonizers who justified their takeover of territory that was not theirs by claiming that they were “bringing civilization and enlightenment to backward savages.” “Progress” through force and violence is a concept that needs to be left in the past.
Except these are states that explicitly signed on to this constitution, not some innocent sovereign country. It’s not problematic at all to collectively enforce what they’re constantly trying to weasel out of.
It hasn’t even been oppression or exploitation, the quality of life for those populations has always objectively improved. You won’t catch me shedding a tear for slave plantation owners getting their property broken up and redistributed. Good riddance to the Jim Crowe business owners. Let’s absolutely have armed poll watchers ensuring the voting rights of minorities.
Don’t fall for the conservative crocodile tears that pour out when we infringe on their right to keep citizens uneducated, sick and poor.
Except these are states that explicitly signed on to this constitution
When most of the states “signed on,” women couldn’t vote and black slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person.
It’s not problematic at all to collectively enforce what they’re constantly trying to weasel out of.
Until the people you consider “weasels” decide they’re tired of a government forcing them to comply with policies they don’t agree with and so they take over said government and start using it to enforce their ideas on the populace.
Let’s absolutely have armed poll watchers ensuring the voting rights of minorities.
A strong central government that can be used to enforce the voting rights of minorities can also be used to oppress said minorities. A strong state is only as good as the people who control it.
