Commentator's Choice - Democracy is a good system of government

I define a succesful government as one in which the governmnet is stable and the people are happy. "My economic argument in favor of democracy still stands. My opponent only points out that other systems of governments can employ capitalism, but made no attempts to refute that democracy's economic system is good." What I said earlier is that democratic societies are not strictly capitalistic. A democracy is simply a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives. This is not particularly capitalistic, a democracy can enforce any variety of economy it chooses. "D[e]mocratic societies provide greater opportunities for success. My opponent drops this point. (Five points for House Democracy!!)" Capitalist societies provide the ability for individuals to seek greater success, a communist democracy could do otherwise. Also, individual success is not necessarilly superior to societal success in general, which though being possible to occur in a capitalist society is much less likely than within a communist or socialist society. I could not find hard statistics on the success/failure rate of democracies, nor could I find any statistics on the success/failure rate of other forms of government. The public is ignorant about politics and lacks even the basic facts that it would need to make sound judgments about political issues. A poll by Ipsos-MORI[1] shows just how deep this ignorance is. Among other things, the poll found that: 29% of people think we spend more on JSA than pensions, when in fact we spend 15 times more on pensions (£4.9bn vs £74.2bn) 26% of people think foreign aid is one of the top 2-3 items government spends most money on, when it actually made up 1.1% of expenditure (£7.9bn) in the 2011/12 financial year. More people select this as a top item of expenditure than pensions (which cost nearly ten times as much, £74bn) and education in the UK (£51.5bn) the public think that 31% of the population are immigrants, when the official figures are 13%. we greatly overestimate the proportion of the population who are Muslims: on average we say 24%, compared with 5% in England and Wales. people are most likely to think that capping benefits at £26,000 per household will save most money from a list provided (33% pick this option), over twice the level that select raising the pension age to 66 for both men and women or stopping child benefit when someone in the household earns £50k+. In fact, capping household benefits is estimated to save £290m, compared with £5bn for raising the pension age and £1.7bn for stopping child benefit for wealthier households. These are not just little mistakes, they’re absolute howlers. This ignorance is perfectly rational and understandable. The problem is that these are the people who decide who runs the country. How can you choose the best set of welfare policies – ‘the best’ being what you would choose if you had all the information available – when you know absolutely nothing about welfare? How can you choose which of the two main parties is offering the best immigration policy if you haven’t got a clue about immigration? [1]http://www.ipsos-mori.com...