Do you believe Canada and the United States are real democracies?

Answer 1

in theory, yes.

in practice, no.

Answer 2

Though it posses under the structure and guise of a "representative" democracy, the United States government is just barely an actual democracy. The citizenry have surrendered their capacity to control their society to "authorities" who, supposedly, work for the citizenry. The nature of the problem relating to this system lies within corporate involvement with a vast majority of these elected representatives.

First, we have people foregoing their own ability to directly contribute or control the nature of their government. Next, we have corporations spending billions of dollars in campaign donations and lobbying. These donations are, in essence, bribes. These contributions then allow the donor corporation a certain level of access or control over the agenda of the elected representative. Hence, money becomes the reason for a large portion of all legislation and executive action.

We loose our true spirit as a nation to this process.
We believe, via corporate news reporting, that our voting and local political action may actually effect the outcome of certain controversial political debates. We may still have some sway over our government, but it is nothing near the scope of that which it was intended to be.

I don't have the experience to make any comment about the Canadian methodology of politics, however I will say this about the United States government: "You won't believe what our government does when they think you're not paying attention."

In a more definitive sense, a REAL democracy is commonly reffering to a "Direct Democracy" - which is when EVERYONE votes on EVERY issue and has and EQUAL say in matters. Though it is a strenuous and involved process, at least its honest. In the U.S. we are no longer "involved" in politics, infact, some people will refuse to discuss anything political with friends or family to avoid confrontation. We choose and political party and vote like sheep =)

So, in summary, no - the United States, at least, is not a real democracy. How many other patriots love their country enough to tell you the truth?

Answer 3

There is no true or real democracy, but I'll take the Unites States version of it over any other form of government in the world.

Answer 4

Of course they aren't, they just provide an illusion of democracy for those who don't have the time, inclination, or intelligence to find out. A couple of links below, give just one example of the non-democratic ways of the US. Bush was not elected by the people and if the voting machines, manipulated by the likes of Diebold, become used nationwide there will be no point in going to vote, because the machine will just provide the requisite result, no paper trail, no checks! So many in the US take their belief on reality from the likes of CNN and FOX, which just manipulate and lie, so not hard to see why so many people don't realise that their rights to vote have been stolen.
The bugbear of Bush and his oil buddies, Hugo Chavez actually was elected democratically by some 80% of the country and the elections were monitored ... so of course he has to be villified ... can't have a real democracy so close to home :-)


... just found this research paper, backing up the above ... and I wasn't even looking for anything to do with Diebold!


Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine
Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten
Abstract   This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

Answer 5

Canada and the U.S. are two of the greatest democracies in the free world.The people of these two countries enjoy the greatest freedom on this planet.

Answer 6

There are no true democracies? Yes there are. They just change in form. I will take the Canadian system any day of the week. AND it is changing again.

Answer 7

properly, different than for the U.S. being too susceptible to try this different than in some banana republics (so called by using fact the banana companies - Dole, and so on. - wanting to run issues their way, no longer contained in the U.S. way) and leaving aside that Britain, Spain, and Portugal would have been aggravated, you could desire to take a extreme look the rebellions in those international locations which you're concentrated on - the voters fought for his or her independence from others and would have from us. and you will desire to notice that we did a noticeably undesirable job contained in the international locations we did invade - Woodrow Wilson had a noticeably racist recommendations-set as he appeared down his nostril and chosen invasion places.

Answer 8

The US is a republic, not a democracy.