What is Gone Wrong With Democracy

                     This post is a summary of an essay with the title above.  And was published  at  http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was-most-successful-political-idea-20th-century-why-has-it-run-trouble-and-what-can-be-do

                  The protesters who have overturned the politics of Ukraine have many aspirations for the country. Their fundamental demand is one that has motivated people over many decades to take a stand against corrupt, abusive and autocratic governments. They want a rules-based democracy. It is easy to understand why. Democracies are on average richer than non-democracies, are less likely to go to war and have a better record of fighting corruption. More fundamentally, democracies lets people speak their minds and shape their own and their children's futures. That so many people in so many parts of the world are prepared to risk so much for this idea. In the seconf half of the 20th century, democracies had taken root in the most difficult circumstances possible, in Germany, which had been traumatised by Nazism, in South Africa, which had been disfigured by apartheid. Decolonialisation created a host of new democracies in Africa and Asia, and autocratic regimes gave away to democracy in Spain and most Latin America countries. The Chinese Comunist Party has broken the democratic world's monopoly on economic progress. China's critics rightly condemn the government for controlling public opinion in all sort of ways, from imprisoning dissidents to censoring internet discussions. Building institutions needed to sustain democracy is slow work and has dispelled the once-popular notion that democracy will blossom rapidly and spontaneously once the seed is planted. Although democracy may be a universal aspirations, it is a culturally rooted practice. Western countries almost all extended the rights to vote long after the establishment of political systems, with powerful civil services and constitutional rights, in societies that cherished the notions of individual rights and independent judiciaries. In recent years the institutions that are meant to provide models for new democracies have come to seem dysfunctional in established ones. The U.S. has become a byword for gridlock, obsessed with partisan point-scoring that it has come to the verge of defaulting on its debts twice in the past two years. Its democracy is also corrupted by gerrymandering. This encourages extremism, because politicians have to appeal only to the party faithful, and in effect disenfranchises large numbers of voters. Nor is the E.U. a paragon of democracy. The E.U. has become a breeding ground for populist parties, which claim to defend ordinary people against arrogant elite. Greece's Golden Dawn is testing how far democracies can tolerate Nazi-style parties. A project designed to tame the beast of European populism is instead poking it back into life. From below come equally powerful challenges: from would-be breakaways nations, such as the Catalans and the Scots, from American city mayors. All are trying to reclaim power from national governments. there are also NGOs and lobbyists, which are disrupting traditional politics. The internet makes it easier to organize and agitate, the machinery and institutions of parliamentary democracy, where elections happen only every few years, look increasingly anachronistic. Adjusting to hard times will be made even more difficult by a growing cynism towards politics. Party membership is declining across the developed world: only 1% of Britons are now members of political parties compared with 20% in 1950. The result can be a toxic and unstable mixture: dependency on government on the one hand, and disdain for it on the other. The dependency forces government to overexpand and overburden itself, while the disdain robs its legitimacy. At the same time, democracies in the emerging world have encountered the same problems as those in the rich world. They too have overindulged in short-term spending rather than long-term investment. China's stunning advances conceal deeper problems. The political elite is becoming a self-perpetuating and self-serving clique. The 50 richest members of the China's National People's Congress are collective worth $94.7 billion, 60 times as much as the 50 richest members of the U.S. Congress. At the same time, as Alex de Tocqueville pointed out in the 19th century, democracies always look weaker than they really are: Being able to install alternative leaders offering alternative policies makes democracies better than autocracies at finding creative solutions to problems. The most striking thing about the founders of modern democracies such as: James Madison and John Stuart Mill is how hard-headed they were. They regard democracy as a powerful but imperfect mechanism: something that needed to be designed carefully, in order to harness human creativity but also to check human perversity, and then kept in good working order, constantly adjusted and worked upon. The need for hard-headedness is particularly pressing when establishing a nascent democracy. One reason why so many democratic experiments have failed recently is that they put too much emphasis on elections and too little on the other essential features of democracy. The power of the state needs to be checked, for instance, and individual rights such as freedom of speech. The most successful new democracies have all worked in large part because they avoided the temptations of majoritarianism, the notion that winning an election entitles  to do whatever it pleases. India and Brazil has survived as democracies for the same reason: both put limits on the power of the government and provided guarantees for individual rights. Robust constitutions not only promote long-term stability, but also bolster the struggle against corruption, the bane of developing nations. Conversely, the first sign that a fledgling democracy is heading for the rocks often comes when rulers try to erode constraints on their power. Foreign leaders should be more willing to speak out when rulers engage in such illiberal behaviour, even if a majority supports it. but the people who most need to learn this lesson are the architects of new democracies: they must recognise that robust checks and balances are just as vital to the establishment of a healthy democracy as the right to vote. Even those to live in mature democracies need to pay attention to the architecture of their political systems. The combination of globalisation and digital revolution has made some democracies look outdated. Established democracies need to updated their own political systems both to address the problems they face at home and to revitalise their image abroad. But reformers need to be more ambitious. The best way to constrain the power of special interests is to limit the number  of goodies that the state can hand out. And the best way to address popular disillusion towards politicians is to reduce the number of promises they can make. The notion of limited government was integral to the relaunch of democracy after the second world war. The U.N. and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights established rights that countries could not breach, even if majorities wanted to do so. These checks were motivated by fear of tyranny. But today, the dangers to democracy are harder to spot. One is the growing size of the state. The relentless expansion of government is reducing liberty and handing ever more power to special interest. The other comes from the government's habits of making promises that it can not fulfil. Modern tech can promote civic involvement and innovation. Tech and direct democracy can keep each other in check. Several places are making progress towards getting this mixture right. The most encouraging example is California. Its system of direct democracy allowed its citizens to vote for contradictory policies. But over the past five years California has introduced reforms. Similarly, the Finnish government has set up a non-partisan commission to produce proposals. At the same time it is trying to harness e-democracy: parliament is obliged to consider any initiative that gains 50,000 signatures. But many more such experiments are needed, combining tech with direct democracy its to zigzag its way back to health. Democracy was the great victor of the ideological clashes of the 20th century, But if democracy is to remain as sucessful in the 21st century, it must be both assiduously nurtured and carefully maintained.

Gerrymandering - alter the boundaries od a constituency  to favour one political party in an election.
Anachronistic - a thing belonging to a period other than the one in which it exist.
Hard-headed - tough and realistic.
Relentless - never stoping or weakning.
Zigzag - a line of course or path, or progression characterized by alternate turns to one side and then to the other.