{"id":5159,"date":"2011-03-23T13:47:51","date_gmt":"2011-03-23T12:47:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=5159"},"modified":"2011-03-23T14:55:01","modified_gmt":"2011-03-23T13:55:01","slug":"how-democratic-is-the-uk-and-the-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=5159","title":{"rendered":"How democratic is the UK and the USA?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just had an e-mail thanking me for my web site <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/USvsUK.html\">examination of the differences between the British and American political systems<\/a>. The writer, from Norway, asks my opinion on whether one is more democratic than the other.<\/p>\n<p>This is such a difficult question to answer. It depends on how one measures the notion of &#8216;democratic&#8217;. I might write an essay for my web site on this theme one day but, in the  meanwhile, the sort of questions one would have to pose are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What proportion of the population is eligible to vote? &#8211; that is, has the legal right to vote and is on the electoral register<\/li>\n<li>What proportion of the population actually votes? &#8211; one could look at both national and local elections<\/li>\n<li>How often does the citizen have the right to vote? &#8211; again one could distinguish national and local elections<\/li>\n<li>Does the citizen have a credible choice between a variety of political parties? &#8211; do one or two parties dominate elections?<\/li>\n<li>How easy is it to be a credible candidate in elections? &#8211; particularly does it take a lot of money to run a credible campaign?<\/li>\n<li>How free are elections of financial influence? &#8211; can powerful corporations or lobby groups influence outcomes?<\/li>\n<li>How free are elections of media influence? &#8211; is there a diversity  of political opinion in the press, radio, television and other media?<\/li>\n<li>How transparent and accountable is the exercise of power in the three arms of government?<\/li>\n<li>What is the dispersal of power between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary?<\/li>\n<li>How easy is it to challenge and correct abuse of power?<\/li>\n<li>How strong and vital is civil society? &#8211; that is, trade unions, pressure groups, campaign organisations, think tanks<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, what do you think? Is the UK or the USA the more democratic nation?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just had an e-mail thanking me for my web site examination of the differences between the British and American political systems. The writer, from Norway, asks my opinion on whether one is more democratic than the other. This is such a difficult question to answer. It depends on how one measures the notion of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-current-affairs","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5159"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5167,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5159\/revisions\/5167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}