Lets imagine you have, say, a 4 x 8 grid and if you fill in all the boxes in the grid you have genuine participatory democracy where every adult plays an active and continuous role in deciding what happens within their country on a local, regional and national level.
I would say that most ordinary democracies would be able to fill in a couple of those squares at best, with the rest empty. People generally vote perhaps once every four years. This is the extent of their participation in democracy.
The rest of the time they complain about the state of their country and their leader - a much vaunted benefit of not living in a country where the number of boxes filled is a fraction of a single one.
When looking at democracy in the world it is common to look at the amount of democracy in undemocratic countries as a proportion of the amount of democracy in democratic countries so that from that perspective it becomes impossible for the democratic country not to seem ideal!
If you however place the level of democracy that exists in a democratic country and that in an undemocratic country against a backdrop of genuine participatory democracy, you start to get a completely different picture: the numbers in the two types of country are far far closer to each other than they are to the total possible number. The emphasis shifts from the difference between them to the fact that both fall very short.
This reframing may seem simple but is important because had it been the standard way of seeing things, it could have denied the impetus for some of the horrors of the past decade.
Very imperfect democracies become almost ideal democracies in the absence of a 3rd scale - which is terrible for the evolution of democracy.
We all need to start thinking much more about that 3rd scale.
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