Research Paper 4: What's Wrong With Democracy Today? (Term Paper Sample)

Paper 4
Name
Institution
Paper 4
According to Rousseau, a democracy exists in a state when all or most of its citizens are magistrates (Cunningham, 2002). Events which have characterized the world over the recent past certainly show that people are changing their opinions towards the benefits of democracy. Statistics from Freedom House, an organization operating as a watchdog for democracy and freedom, indicates that the number of nations considered to be free increased steadily from the mid-1970s to early 2000s. The period after the cold war saw many Latin American nations transit from military dictatorship to democratic regimes. Similarly, many countries in Eastern Europe quit military rule to embrace democracy within the same period. Moreover, states that were already using democratic leadership in this era grew much stronger and secure. However, from the year 2005 onwards, the appreciation of democracy in these nations started to plummet, according to Freedom House. Certainly therefore, the world is seeing a dissatisfaction with the functionality of democracy (Taub, 2016).
According to Mounk and Foa (2016), this decline in satisfaction index as reported by Freedom House can be owed to three factors. Firstly, it can be attributed to the extent to which the citizens of these countries view democracy as of importance to them. The second factor is the degree of public openness to nondemocratic government domains such as the military. Thirdly, it can be owed to the amount of support given to antisystem individuals and groups. Antisystem parties are those that view the prevailing regime as illegitimate hence worth of replacement. According to these scholars, Venezuela is a nation which recorded very high levels of support for democracy in the 1980s. However, in the year 1992, a faction of this country’s military loyal to President Hugo Chavez staged a coup, a clear indication that levels of democracy in this country had sharply declined. Military coups do not happen in truly democratic nations and an attempt of the same usually serves as an indication that democracy is plummeting. Hugo Chavez was elected as the President of Venezuela in the year 1998 and took the decision of cracking down dissent as his first priority. Silencing dissenting voices is certainly not allowed in a democracy, and therefore, this move indicated that democracy in Venezuela was declining (Taub, 2016).
Poland was hailed as a post-communist democracy when it joined the European Union in the year 2004. In the year 2005, about 16% of the country’s citizens believed that democracy was a bad type of leadership. In the year 2012, approximately 22% of Poles reported favoring military rule. Clearly, this shows that the degree of dissatisfaction with democracy in this country has been on the rise over the years. Moreover, support for antisystem parties in this country has been on the increase over the years. People here were for instance reported to express high levels of support for self-defense and the League of Polish Families in the mid-2000s. Other countries such as Netherlands, Sweden, United States and New Zealand have been registering a decline in the number of citizens who support democracy. This dissatisfaction with democracy is especially high among young people. In the United States, only 1 in 16 people were reportedly viewing a military rule as a good thing in the year 1995. In the year 2014, the number of Americans supporting army rule had risen to 1 in every 6 people. These statistics certainly show that the functionality of democracy is in doubt and it is for this reason that the citizens of theoretically democratic countries are getting increasingly dissatisfied with this form of leadership. It is actually for this reason that Donald Trump won the presidential elections of 2016. Trump had presented himself as an antisystem candidate during the campaigns (Taub, 2016).
Looking at Rousseau, these reasons are convincing. He is very skeptical about the viability of a democracy and asserts that, in reality, a true democracy has actually never existed. Moreover, Rousseau argues that, in many states, the affairs of the government are controlled by only a few individuals, thereby, making the possibility of having a successful and true democracy an impractical phenomenon. For true democracy to exist successfully, a state must be characterized by the presence only a small number of citizens. Additionally, these citizens must be honest and have little ambition as well as negligible greed. Certainly, the present purported democratic states do not meet these criteria; hence, they are only democratic on paper (Cunningham, 2002).
Democracies can be fixed only if governments strive to deliver as opposed to just claiming that they are democratic. Certainly, democracy is not the default. On the contrary, democratic regimes can only deliver their mandate to the public if the leaders are determined to do so. In many countries where putative democratic regimes are tumbling, people make the mistake of voting politicians into power just because they claim to stand for democracy. Athens for instance gave democracy a chance about 250 years ago. The regime that was elected on the strength of democracy ruled effectively until recently when the country entered into a state of bankruptcy. When honest democracy was given a chance, Athens regi...