Support is lowest in France, Spain and Poland, while 21% back authoritarian rule under certain circumstances
Only half of young people in France and Spain believe that democracy is the best form of government, with support even lower among their Polish counterparts, a study has found.
A majority from Europe’s generation Z – 57% – prefer democracy to any other form of government. Rates of support varied significantly, however, reaching just 48% in Poland and only about 51-52% in Spain and France, with Germany highest at 71%.
More than one in five – 21% – would favour authoritarian rule under certain, unspecified circumstances. This was highest in Italy at 24% and lowest in Germany with 15%. In France, Spain and Poland the figure was 23%.
Nearly one in 10 across the nations said they did not care whether their government was democratic or not, while another 14% did not know or did not answer.
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The problem is more how money is unevenly allocated and swings outcomes. A democracy that can be bought isn’t really a democracy at all.
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Your suggestion would have us choose an arbitrary measure of achievement to say who is allowed full participation in a society. That seems extremely fraught, to say the least. Why is education any better than amount of land owned? Or tax paid? Or holiness? Or age/experience?
From a certain perspective, each of those groups has a more vested interest in successful governance than other groups. And each has an agenda to promote their own interests.
You think education is important because presumably you are educated. I’m not, in the traditional sense. Everything I know is self-taught through reading and hard work. And I work in a field where almost every single person I encounter is better educated than me, down to the interns. And I am more capable than 90% of them.
Education alone doesn’t make one more capable of clear reasoning or logical thinking and its lack is no preclusion. It’s just another arbitrary distinction. You are suggesting a meritocracy based on education rather than wealth or status, but it’s still a meritocracy with all the flaws that entails.
Sometimes, I feel like you do. It’s hard to see so many stupid people harming society for stupid reasons. But then I remind myself they need representation, too. They are part of society. And importantly they think they are the smart ones and I’m the stupid one, and judging based on intelligence depends greatly on who is doing the judging. You and I might not both make the cut depending on what knowledge is valued, how it’s measured, and where the line is drawn.
Democracy doesnt have to, and usually doesn’t, involve giving everyone a say in literally everything. For example, in the US people did not have the ability to vote for their senators until we had an established public education system in the early 20th century. So our original senate was much closer to something like the house of lords in the UK.
While allowing people to directly elect all their congressional representatives didnt go bad right away, 100 years later its pretty clear that the average person is far too incompetent to be voting for their senate representation. Public education, good as it might be compared to having none at all, is compromised as hell and does not inspire quality civic engagement.
Honestly our country would be far better off if only people who’ve earned some degree of higher education could vote for their state’s senators, but of course that would be billed as undemocratic and elitist quite easily by anyone who opposed it. There are plenty of morons with a college education, but it would be better simply by virtue of not having both houses of congress able to be captured by the exact same stupidity
The problem is that the people at the top don’t want informed citizens. There should be a citizenry(?) class through 3 years of high school, and there should be a sort of public access channel (including online) that disseminates all relevant political information (local and general).
That would make the situation even worse by reducing the pool the rich have to buy to get the majority to contribute to their wealth even more. The problems we face with democracy aren’t driven by poor education. Poor education is a component but it’s a consequence of the main driver which is accumulation of wealth in few hands. Those use that wealth to keep it and accumulate more by buying elected officials, buying campaigns, running their own people, buying the media, defunding the education system that educates the majority, etc. Reducing the voting power of the majority would make this cheaper to do for the owner class, which would lead to increased exploitation and decrease in the living standards of the majority. Eventually leading to social unrest of some sort. Instead you want to introduce more democratic power for the majority, especially where the generated wealth is separated from them - in the workplace. If you get democracy in the work place, the workers would likely vote to keep more of the value they produce, leaving less to accumulate as wealth in the owner class. Leaving less money to buy elected representatives with the owners and more money with workers to buy political representation of their own.
The right would immediately use that to disenfranchise blacks, queers, and women. “You need a degree from an accredited college to vote, and coincidentally women only schools don’t count, nor do historically black ones”
We can’t just kill all the conservatives but if you could somehow prevent them from accessing power, we’d be better off.