Comments on: It’s all in a name: "Kingdom of Norway" vs. "Democratic People’s Republic of Korea"

By: Animal rightists foster image of animal cruelty in Texas and other states

Animal rightists foster image of animal cruelty in Texas and other states — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 05:17:00 +0000

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By: Pen Gaines

Pen Gaines — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:59:31 +0000

The word “democracy” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution because the founders/framers desired for real democracy to be utilized within the free society—not the government. The 1787 Convention in Philadelphia—after deciding not to amend the Articles of Confederation, a Union of State Legislature—selected the Virginia Plan of a three-branch, republican form of government. They went one step further and had the U.S. Constitution guarantee this form of government in all States. Yet, the Party System claims that the U.S. Government is a “democracy form of government” and allows this as an answer on the Citizenship Test, along with three or more other falsehoods. What is worse is that most Americans, and partcularly members of the political process, are not aware and do not fully understand what and how the founders/framers defined a republican form of government. The prerequiste, the elements and factors are defined in two key documents. If those interested and cannot locate these documents, these will soon be a part of a series of E-bookettes and E-books which reveal three dozen lies now being taught in schools and universities and used by the media to mis-inform the American people.

By: Oisín

Oisín — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 12:29:42 +0000

So the main takeaway from this is that the use of the word “Democratic” in a country name is always ironic.

By: Brendan

Brendan — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:30:00 +0000

Oh yes, the statistical rigor here leaves a lot to be desired. I meant it tongue-in-cheek, especially the last bit with the regression fit.

By: Fredrik

Fredrik — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 08:57:00 +0000

While your hypothesis is reasonable and interesting, your statistics leaves a lot to be desired, which leads to the wrong conclusions. I do not mean to point finger, but political bloggers with high impact have picked up on this.

In the first figure, the bar plot, you only report the mean for these labels, and not the variance. Thus, we have no idea if the differences are significant or not. Since the labels with many samples (e.g. "republic") are close to the average, and those with few (e.g. "arab") are deviating, it is reasonable to conclude that these labels have nothing to do with the "democratiness" of a country.

In the second figure, I can quickly estimate that the line you plot has correlation coefficient about 0.02 and significance (p-value) about 0.14 (see wikipedia for these standard terms in statistics. The p-value I cannot say for sure, since I don't know the exact number of data points). This means that you have a very weak correlation which is not significantly determined. This hardly change if you remove the two unjustified outliers. The conclusion is that there is no relation with number of words and democratiness.

You need to condition your data otherwise to get significant results. It could be interesting to show if there is a significant difference between the distributions "democratic" and everything else, or something of the like, and preferably use several measures of democracy and freedom.

By: Mike Love

Mike Love — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 21:19:00 +0000

Nice. and I thought I had too much time on my hands.Mik

By: menshevik

menshevik — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 12:38:00 +0000

*cough*Spain*cough

By: undeadgoat

undeadgoat — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:57:00 +0000

I remember reading somewhere that the legitimate thing for a head of state to call himself used to be king, but then after WWI especially kingship was not necessarily “good PR” for a newly-established government. So people called themselves “presidents” instead. Same deal with republic versus kingdom — the last kings to install themselves were directly after the fall of the Ottoman empire, and any newer government is a “republic”.

By: Glenda

Glenda — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 22:35:00 +0000

Ads frequently mention one word prominently that is in fact the exact opposite of the item being offered for sale. Trailer park have billboards calling themselves luxurious; luxury cars have billboards explaining how economical they are. It’s interesting to see that countries do the same thing. Shame we can’t come up with some handy data for examining job postings, resumes, profiles on dating sites, real estate listing, etc.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 02:06:00 +0000

Ran: Countries are indeed aware of the symbolism attached to some of these words. Thus, when countries such as Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia became democratic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they all dropped words such as “People’s” or “Socialist” from their names.

Relatively few democratic countries are likely to keep words with nondemocratic tendencies (including, ironically, “Democratic”) in their names for a long time.