‘Democracy’ can mean liberal freedoms such as those, or it can mean participatory decision-making.
My plot isn’t defining democracy as ‘free press’, it’s defining democracy structurally as distributed authority among many actors.
A system can restrict certain freedoms and still be structurally decentralized, just as a system can guarantee civil liberties while keeping power concentrated. The point was more to clearly identify where authority resides, not evaluating whether a system meets liberal-democratic standards.
The question of who is subject to authority is something obfuscated in the original meme template that I was aiming to correct.
‘Democracy’ can mean liberal freedoms such as those, or it can mean participatory decision-making.
My plot isn’t defining democracy as ‘free press’, it’s defining democracy structurally as distributed authority among many actors.
A system can restrict certain freedoms and still be structurally decentralized, just as a system can guarantee civil liberties while keeping power concentrated. The point was more to clearly identify where authority resides, not evaluating whether a system meets liberal-democratic standards.
The question of who is subject to authority is something obfuscated in the original meme template that I was aiming to correct.