CHALLENGE
Special Democracy
$1 MILLION (Prize amount to be confirmed. Announcement expected for next year)
Democracy is a form of government in which the people have the authority to choose their governing legislators.
The decisions on who is considered part of the people and how authority is shared among or delegated by the people have changed over time and at different speeds in different countries, but they have included more and more of the inhabitants of all countries. Cornerstones include freedom of assembly and speech, inclusiveness and equality, membership, consent, voting, right to life and minority rights.
Because democracy is an overarching concept that includes the functioning of diverse institutions which are not easy to measure, strong limitations exist in quantifying and econometrically measuring the potential effects of democracy or its relationship with other phenomena – whether inequality, poverty, education etc.
Today only about 58% of the wold population lives in countries that can be considered democratic. Several variants of democracy exist, but there are two basic forms, both of which concern how the whole body of all eligible citizens executes its will. One form of democracy is direct democracy, in which all eligible citizens have active participation in the political decision making, for example voting on policy initiatives directly. In most modern democracies, the whole body of eligible citizens remain the sovereign power but political power is exercised indirectly through elected representatives; this is called a representative democracy.
While we still need to increase trhe population share of democracy, at the same time we must work in amodelo f governance that, still applying democracy as general population pasrticipation to decisions could prove more eficiente , less subject toabuses , corruption, nepotismo and Other problems assocoiated with governance, considering also the new and advanced web connected instruments that are available by modern technology.