In my last blog about democracy in the news I discussed the issue of public funding for political parties. Apparently, in the “democracy barometer”, which assesses 30 countries from 1995 to 2005, “no party financing rules” is considered as hindering the level of democracy. This criteria, added to the lack of freedom of information are responsible for a relatively bad ranking position for Switzerland.
Furthermore even if Switzerland is a direct democracy with a lot of different means to participate, this study confirms the already existing idea that a serious bias causes a lack of political representation.
“The most interesting is the participation function because we have so many opportunities for participation but there is a bias – it’s rather educated people with high income, men rather than women, older people rather than younger people,” Bühlmann explained.
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/Swiss_not_as_democratic_as_they_think.html?cid=29353166
I found the article very interesting as it describes the result of this new index of democracy. Here is the link to the barometer :http://www.democracybarometer.org/baroapp/public/static/index?lang=en
It is very relevant for the discussion we were having this week about what a good definition is. In the methodology section of the barometer’s website, the authors explain that “the aim of the Democracy Barometer is not to define whether a country is a democracy or not but to compare the quality of different established democracies”. Therefore their measure is more about the quality of democracy than about the minimal conditions for democracy but it is still very interesting to see what makes a “good” democracy in their opinion. The main indicators are : Freedom, Control and Equality, each of them divided in components and subcomponents to reach a total of 100 indicators!
I invite you to go and check the website so that maybe we can later discuss about it! I think that the course in the following weeks will give us the tools to understand it better!