The important principle is that everyone can participate if they want to, without any qualifications or other hindrances.
... y'all are better about that over in europe, then? Well. Keep it up, haha.
A bit I'd say. At least you are auto-registered, as opposed to the States where you have to make quite an effort to vote. On the other hand this requires everyone to carry government issued id and register their place of residence, both things that probably would not fly well in the US.
I got a notification last week for the elections in September, all I gotta do then to vote is carry my ass for a ten minute walk to the next polling place, bring id and that notification, vote and done. That's as easy as it gets.
the requirements should be pretty lax, like, go to any political event and get a stamp in your voter's card, get five stamps and you're ok to vote that year. political events should also be more frequent in a political system that demands aspiring voters to participate in them, and i can already easily find an event like this every week in the small city i live in
Like 10ebbor10 said, that would achieve nothing. If you force somebody to listen to something does not mean they actually pay attention.
i mainly think it is a façade not because it inevitably devolves into a two identical party system or because of the iron law of oligarchy, but mainly because elected governments rarely have real power and even if they represented the will of the electorate they still have to bend for the market and international politics.
That's not necessarily true. Governments have influence on the market and on international politics. Sure, influence varies a lot between countries, but that is what we try to balance out by things like the EU.
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
how nice, you know that quote! i love how this quote is used to excuse all the failings of "democracy". as if "democracy" was a sufficiently descriptive word to define a political system that is better than all the others that have been tried since the beginning of time, in every situation
Well, I think it is better. Sure, autocratic systems may be faster making decisions during a crisis, but it's a question of values. If you want your voice to be heard as an individual, there is no better system.
I went to a Christian public school and my bio teacher basically told the class there was once was a thing called Intelligent Design but it's dead now and people who don't think so aren't the brightest of God's creatures.
Yeah, the thing is that ID comes out of biblical literalism, which no major church in Europe subscribes to. The population in Europe tends to be a lot more secular than in the US and even the more religious people don't have much of a problem with evolution.
The other thing is that schools in Europe are much more state regulated than in the US, so there are no local school boards where the more weird types can influence the curriculum.